Hey Big Brother, we are watching you

Turnabout is fair play.

Just a little inspirational image for the day.

Lost in the Metaforest

“Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.” – William Irwin Thompson

I thought I’d be posting more regularly when I began this blog, but life gets in the way. I have read some fine books since last I posted, and I will mention them upfront. From now on I will be leaving out all those books I read which do not really fire my mind and further my thinking about issues pertinent to this nebulous, amorphous beast, PanLudicon.

Everything is Miscellaneous – The Power of the New Digital Disorder                                  by David Weinberger (book, 2007)

The Art of Game Design – A Deck of Lenses by Jesse Schell (card deck, 2008)

Information – A Very Short Introduction by Luciano Floridi (book, 2010)

Reality is Broken – Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World      by Jane McGonigal (book, 2011)

The Bed of Procrustes – Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Taleb         (book, 2011)

Convergence Culture – Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins (book, 2008)

I am now beginning to read what I hope will be a useful book: The Wealth of Networks – How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler (book, 2006). I may have already covered most of this material in other books. However, I have placed a hold at my library for his new book, The Penguin and the Leviathan – How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest (August 2011), which promises to be more important to my studies at this point.

So, you see, my mind has not been idle these many weeks.

All of this reading about games has presented some images to my mind. I am not a gamer, except for board games and card games, mostly played with my young son who is on the way to being a gamer now he’s got a Nintendo DSi. Yet I am learning about gaming culture, and when I think about a virtual world where PanLudicon could be played it invariably looks like a dark and mysterious forest. Think of the fairy tale forests in films such as LoTR, Harry Potter, The Brothers Grimm, The Company of Wolves.

 

 

I remember reading William Irwin Thompson’s little book, Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science (1989), from which the opening quote is taken. I was intrigued by his exploration of the deep layers of information and meaning in what we think of as trivial children’s stories. But of course this is the way with oral folk culture – through the countless retellings, the interplay of the explicit and the implicit, of information and exformation, the chain of telling and hearing and telling again, these stories become deep pools in dense forests, wherein all manner of fabulous things might lurk. It is the same with our contemporary arts, more or less. Complex worlds of blended metaphor fairly bursting from our words and images.

J.Koehnline, collage, 1991

We are now plugged-into a dataverse with unimaginable quantities of information, and even knowledge, sometimes even wisdom at our fingertips. The coders are doing an admirable job of creating powerful navigational tools to help us find our way, surfing and skimming, leaping and bounding, zipping and clicking all the way. We tend to get spread pretty thin. Now and then we should probably slow down, dive deep beneath the surface, take slow walks, sit and ponder… wander into the deep metaforest behind the words and pictures. That’s what I want my game to facilitate.

J. Koehnline, collage 1987

Research Proceeds Apace

It has been quite some time since I have posted here, but I assure you that my interest has not slackened. Research continues – mostly reading – and I will list some of that here along with where I see this going.

Recently read:

I finished Damasio’s Self Comes to Mind, and found it excellent and thought-provoking, then on to McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy, an exhilarating read and a revelation regarding just how profoundly a communication medium and the technology that supports it can shape culture, politics, economics and our way of seeing (or reading) the world. Brilliant! I have added McLuhan’s Understanding Media to my list. Next I read two books by Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness and Under Pressure. Next came Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why we Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other – very well written and a bit scary. Next, simply because it fell into my hands, I read Leander Kahney’s Inside Steve’s Brain, mostly a paean to the genius of Jobs, but with some interesting history along the way. I have just finished Neal Stephenson’s 1999 critique of operating systems and the inept metaphors they foist on us, In the Beginning Was the Command Line. 

I consider all of these books to be relevant and worthwhile in developing PanLudicon (with the exception of the Jobs book). I will mention one book only tangentially related. I am looking forward to reading my first novel in a year, the late, great David Foster Wallace’s unfinished posthumous monster, The Pale King, because I love his writing and I have no doubt it will be full of wonderful food for thought.

As for where my studies are going, I first have a confession to make. My goal is to create an incredibly compelling and useful tool in the form of a game, and yet other than a small selection of card and board games I have stubbornly avoided the wide world of gaming all my life. I have decided that I must take the plunge into the world of 21st century game design. I have no intention (as yet) of falling down the gaming rabbit hole, but near the top of my current reading list are Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses (I have also ordered the deck of cards that Schell created to go with the book) and Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, (even though I was repulsed by a talk I heard her give). I figure I have no excuse to remain stubbornly ignorant of the subject. The closest brush I have had with MMPOG culture is a few talks by, and two techno-thrillers, by Daniel Suarez (Daemon and Freedom – Daemon was the better of the two), along with a few Long Now Seminars with Will Wright, Brian Eno and others.

McLuhan Revisited

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.

- Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962

I finished Distracted, and it was indeed full of fascinating research regarding our plague of distraction that been has been building to a crescendo for the last two centuries, and how a renaissance of attention might counter this ongoing disaster.

From there I moved on to read Douglas Coupland‘s recent biography of McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan: You know Nothing of My Work! Now I tried to read a bunch of Mcluhan from my father’s library in my youth, but I confess I got very little out of it. And no wonder I was confused. This hero of the counterculture, of Madison Avenue, and of the nascent computer liberation movement, despised all these groups and their enthusiasms, but did love the spotlight. A devout Catholic, a conservative, and an English literature professor who hated technology and pop culture and yet later became the patron saint of WIRED Magazine, McLuhan did indeed have much of interest to say about communications media, and I am probably ready now to go back and read his most important works (Gutenberg Galaxy seems to be considered his best work. I was surprised to find that the large metropolitan library system I work for doesn’t own a copy). Certainly his crazy deck of playing cards (see my first post), full of snappy epigrams and bad puns, sparked my brain in an interesting way, back in the 1960s, that still reverberates today (evidence: this blog).

What is the relevance of these studies to my project (outlined below)? I look at the ways that IT is developing at a dizzying pace. With the help of books like Glut and Distracted I begin to see that this is not an abrupt disconnect with the past, but a continuum. Add McLuhan to the mix and the continuum takes on something of the appearance of a rising spiral as we come round, unprepared to deal with the tribal consequences of unity, at the Dawn of Entanglement.  I have been looking for a global village navigation and cognitive orientation device for some time now. This blog is about building one (with your help).

Now I’m on to Antonio Damasio‘s Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. Seems like I’ve read an awful lot on this subject in the last three years, and I’m still nearly as baffled as when I began (but then so is everybody else who isn’t a true believer in skyhooks). Still, there’s plenty of food for thought in the best of them — and lots of useful metaphors (shorthand abstractions, chunks with handles).

Attention, Conceptual Blends and Narratives

…The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!…

Ezra Pound – Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (Part I, Verse 2)

I’ve begun reading Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. So far Jackson makes a good case for our digital culture not being a disconnect with the past, but very much a part of an ongoing, if accellerating, process which got underway, in its current form, in the waning years of the medieval world. After what promises to be an engaging tour of the history of attention, into a possible new dark age of morbid distraction, she will, I gather, raise a beacon on the possibility of a renaissance of attention. Seems to be well worth the read for the exposure to a fascinating array of source material. I put that old image of mine at the head of this entry because of Jackson’s interesting discussion of the obsession  with communicating with unseen worlds which followed on the spread of telegraphy in the Victorian Era (I thought I was on to something when I equated the computer mouse and the Ouija planchette!).

I wrote to Ryan Somma to let him know that I included his demo in my Day 4 post, and he replied with interest in PanLudicon and a tip regarding the existence of a Science Tarot. This was new to me, so I took a look. It looks kind of interesting, but not $25 interesting. I found myself wondering if there would ever be a twenty-first century Aleister Crowley to incorporate current scientific knowledge into a new Book of Thoth. I am not an expert on Tarot decks (not like alchemist Adam McLean, who has an extensive Tarot weblog , among his many public interests), but from the decks I’ve had experience with, Crowley’s deck interests me most, as it attempts to blend diverse esoteric, divinatory, magickal and scientific schools of thought and distill it all (with the help of artist, Lady Frieda Harris) into one set of 78 cards.

It is this attempt to distill all experience into a set of 78 “chunks with handles” that makes the Tarot fascinating to me. The traditional deck is a great psychohistorical artifact, archaic, archetypal and worthy of study. It is also a fine aid to the development of creative personal narratives. However, its catagories do not satisfy me. Many simpler decks have been devised that are intended to help people tell themselves more interesting stories about who they are and how they might deal with their circumstances in life, without making any claims to occult knowledge, astrological certainty, supernatural forces or any other such nonsense. I used to play with some of these, and yet I’m still not satisfied. Just about anything can be used for such a purpose, and without any tools at all we can daydream. I’m more interested in a tool that helps us think in depth about, and combine, important ideas of all sorts.

Day Four: Chunks with Handles

On page 17 of the 2011 Question at edge.org’s World Question Center, V.S. Ramachandran has an interesting entry. I just quote the final paragraph here:

…Indeed, words themselves are paradigms or stable “species” of sorts that evolve gradually with progressively accumulating penumbras of meaning, or sometimes mutate into new words to denote new concepts. These can then consolidate into chunks with “handles” (names) for juggling ideas around, generating novel combinations. As a behavioral neurologist I am tempted to suggest that such crystallization of words and juggling them is unique to humans and it occurs in brain areas in and near the left TPO (temporal-parietal-occipital junction). But that’s pure speculation.

There is good evidence that the working memory of the human brain is only able to juggle around half a dozen chunks at a time (give or take), so when those chunks are rich in exformation, when they embody whole schemas that light up huge networks of neurons in the brain, and when those chunks have not just one handle (a name) but two (a name and an illuminating image), well then you’ve got chunks well worth juggling. That’s what PanLudicon cards should be.

I came across Ryan Somma‘s project, MemexPlex (memex + memeplex), yesterday, the latest in a long line tools to augment intellect, from Leibniz to Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson and the much-touted “semantic Web,” with a great many in between (Wright’s Glut provides a great overview of this history).

I suppose PanLudicon fits into this lineage, although it is decidedly low-tech and “artsy” in comparison to these others.

I also came across a book that fits into my studies well. Don’t know how I missed it until now. It is Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists, An Illustrated Essay. I quote from the jacket blurb.

…Eco is a modern-day Diderot, and here he examines the Western mind’s predilection for list-making and the encyclopedic. His central thesis is that in Western culture a passion for accumulation is recurring: lists of saints, catalogues of plants, collections of art. This impulse has recurred through the ages from music to literature to art. Eco refers to this obsession itself as a “giddiness of lists” but shows how in the right hands it can be a “poetics of catalogues.” From medieval reliquaries to Andy Warhol’s compulsive collecting, Umberto Eco reflects in his inimitably inspiring way on how such catalogues mirror the spirit of their times.

It is now on my reading list.

Speaking of my lists, here is today’s addition to my list of evidence that the world as I knew it is gone: Passing the newspaper boxes while walking to work this morning, I was struck by the contents of the USA Today box. Staring at me through the window was the top half of the front page, as usual, but the front page was a full-page ad for a hotel chain. In spite of all the money that has always gone into deciding what is news, this is the first time I’m aware of that a major (if lousy) newspaper has blatantly sold its front page to the highest bidder. Has this been going on for a while? I see no mention of it in today’s news. If this is the first time, it is indeed a sad day in the ongoing decline of the American newspaper tradition.

Day Three: Some Current Inspirations

Card mock-up featuring the image Literature l, by J. Koehnline

What do you know. I have one subscriber already. Welcome, Gavin. While I try to find my voice for speaking to the world, or, at least to Gavin, I will speak of some of my inspirations for finally offering my ideas and, I hope, starting a conversation that will lead to some version of PanLudicon actually manifesting in the world of flesh and blood.

Yesterday I mentioned John Brockman‘s Edge.com, and its World Question Center. This is no secret, but if you are not already a fan, I highly recommend it. I bring it up here because this year’s question, suggested by Steven Pinker, seems tailor-made to my purposes. The question is: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? The question might as well be: What card would you like to add to the PanLudicon deck? Yet I do not feel trumped by these 164 answers. It is, after all an infinite deck and the Question Center is sorely lacking in images. Instead it inspires me and shows how much work there is to be done. I hope to have some cards to show by the time it is published in book form next January. I like the lead-in to this year’s question, so I quote it here: “James Flynn has defined “shorthand abstractions” (or “SHA’s”) as concepts drawn from science that have become part of the language and make people smarter by providing widely applicable templates (“market”, “placebo”, “random sample,” “naturalistic fallacy,” are a few of his examples). His idea is that the abstraction is available as a single cognitive chunk which can be used as an element in thinking and debate.” I hereby add SHAs to the list of the kind of things that make good IGPC cards.

Another source of inspiration is the continuing series of talks at the Long Now Foundation, which are available for download. These Seminars About Long-term Thinking, hosted by Stewart Brand, are nearly all worth a listen. As the middle-aged father of a young son, I also love the little essay, The Omega Glory, by Michael Chabon, about the Clock of the Long Now. In a nod to the Long Now, I have begun using the five-digit year on the covers of my wall calendar.

19th annual edition, by James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective

A digression: One of the founders of the Long Now Foundation is Brian Eno, whose work I have been interested in for nearly 40 years. In my art I often played with his idea of  vertical complexity, in which a small number of inputs are used to create a very large number of outputs. I built a crude digital demo ten years ago, and always meant to refine it, but here it is in all its crudeness, a sort of collage clock, the Chaos Chronometer, still going through its million-plus variations ten years later.

James Koehnline, 2001

As long as I’m digressing, I have to mention my favorite example of long-term thinking by an artist. It is a kinetic sculpture by Arthur Ganson, entitled Machine with Concrete:

Machine with Concrete. The gear reductions mean the final gear will make one revolution in roughly 2.3 trillion years. The machine runs uninterrupted even though the final gear is embedded in concrete. Photo from ARS Electronica