Haus der Luege : Noli Evocare Quod Reprimere Non Potes

Neuroskeptic writes:

Talking about something in a neurobiological way sends the message that this is a neurobiological issue. In this way, many fMRI papers serve to spread the idea that this is an issue that only neuroscience can solve and, therefore, create a demand for more fMRI studies. The authors of this paper are victims of this mentality, a widespread confusion about what neuroscience is for.

fMRI is a great way to approach neuroscientific questions. It’s a bad (and terribly expensive) way to do psychology. This study is about psychology, and should not have involved an MRI scanner.

Full Story: Neuroskeptic: Looking Askance At Cognitive Neuroscience

See also: Think brain scans can reveal our innermost thoughts? Think again

I’m speaking about “Big Data in the Age of Knowledge Work” at the BDigital Global Congress next week in Barcelona. I’ll be pretty busy, but I’ll be there all week. If there are any readers in the area who want to get together, let me know.

Too Much To Dream author Peter Bebergal interviews Alan Moore for The Believer:

BLVR: So in writing, whether you’re trying to inhabit a metaphysical being or trying to inhabit someone living in a poor neighborhood, unless you can inhabit them with compassion, and inhabit them with understanding, they’ll never be a believable character otherwise.

AM: Right, the character will be limited, and so will you. When I was doing V for Vendetta years ago, and I started to introduce the Nazi heads of this totalitarian state in the far-flung future of 1997, I’d been marching against the National Front and taking part in the Rock Against Racism marches, and I realized that I can’t just portray Nazis as bad guys, because everybody knows that, and you’re not saying anything. You’re contributing to the myth that they were somehow separate from the rest of humanity, which they weren’t. The Nazis were just ordinary human beings who got caught up in something very bad and, at the time, rather unprecedented. This is not to excuse their behavior, obviously, it’s simply to point out that it doesn’t do you any service to demonize any group of people. It’s much better to try and understand from the inside.

There was a scene in Promethea where the character is confronted by a horde of demons, and the way that she decides to deal with them is by owning them, by identifying each demon’s qualities and saying, “Yes, I’ve done that; yes, I accept responsibility for that,” at which point she actually physically eats the demon that she’s referring to. What a lot of magic is about is coming to your own individual terms with the universe, which is to say yourself, given that the entirety of the universe that is observable to you or me is that which actually exists inside our heads. And coming to an understanding of those things made me a little bit bigger because I had a part of my mind that could look with compassion at a class of people that I had never been able to do that with before. Not to like them any more, but to understand them.

Full Story: The Believer: Alan Moore

When I wrote about Soylent and Silicon Valley’s quest to reinvent food for TechCrunch I checked with a registered dietician from the Oregon Health and Science University about stuff. She was pretty down on it. So was the dietician consulted by Business Insider. And now io9′s Lauren Davis has talked to three more experts:

We reached out to a handful of nutritional scientists to get their opinions on the product, and they were generally surprised that anyone would want to replace their food with a single mixture. Their opinions of Soylent were overwhelmingly negative. Steve Collins, founder and chairman of Valid Nutrition, a company that manufactures Ready to Use Foods for the prevention and treatment of malnutrition, said, speaking through a colleague, that, except in exceptional circumstances, he felt that trying to replace a diverse diet with a single product was misguided. Susan Roberts, Professor at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, likened Soylent to already available nutritional shakes. While there might be some benefit to Soylent’s low saturated fat content, she said, there are certain risks inherent in a non-food diet. “[T]here are so many unknown chemicals in fruits and vegetables that they will not be able to duplicate in a formula exactly,” she said in an email. She says that, if Soylent is formulated properly, a person could certainly live on it, but she doubts they would experience optimal health. She fears that in the long-term, a food-free diet could open a person up to chronic health issues.

Tracy Anthony, Associate Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Rutgers University, speaking to us in an email, criticized the formula specifically.

Full Story: Could Soylent really replace all of the food in your diet?

The Soylent company has now released an ingredient list and it’s much more “food like” than creator Rob Rhinehart had implied previously:

-Maltodextrin (carbs)
-Oat Powder (carbs, fiber, protein, fat)
-Whey Isolate (protein)
-Grapeseed Oil (fat)
-Potassium Gluconate
-Salt (sodium)
-Magnesium Gluconate
-Monosodium Phosphate
-Calcium Carbonate
-Methylsulfonylmethane (Sulfur)
-Creatine
-Powdered Soy Lecithin
-Choline Bitartrate
-Ferrous Gluconate (Iron)

Nicolas Winding Refn — who dedicated Drive to Alejandro Jodorowsky — is reportedly adapting Jodo and Moebius’ comic book The Incal:

France Inter also talked with Refn on the Croisette, and while they don’t provide a direct quote, they do report that he’s working on an adaptation of Jodorowsky and Moebius’ comic series “The Incal.” The original six book series launched in 1981 and is set in a dystopian future, detailing the battle over the powerful Incal crystal. The comic series is notable in that it followed the collapse of Jodorowsky’s “Dune,” and utilizes some of the similar designs that Moebius had created while working on the movie. (The forthcoming documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune” goes into more detail about that, and you can read our report on that flick right here).

Full Story: Indie Wire: Nicolas Winding Refn Reportedly Working On An Adaptation Of Alejandro Jodorowsky & Moebius’ ‘The Incal’

(Thanks Ales)

Here’s an animated trailer for the comic:

If that looks familiar, it’s because Moebius was also the designer for The Fifth Element. He and Jodorowsky unsuccessfully sued the director Luc Besson for plagiarizing The Incal.

(The above video is a higher quality version of the trailer originally shared by Quenched Consciousness curator Ian MacEwan)

Fabienne Hurst writes:

When the then-Berlin-based drug maker Temmler Werke launched its methamphetamine compound onto the market in 1938, high-ranking army physiologist Otto Ranke saw in it a true miracle drug that could keep tired pilots alert and an entire army euphoric. It was the ideal war drug. In September 1939, Ranke tested the drug on university students, who were suddenly capable of impressive productivity despite being short on sleep.

From that point on, the Wehrmacht, Germany’s World War II army, distributed millions of the tablets to soldiers on the front, who soon dubbed the stimulant “Panzerschokolade” (“tank chocolate”). British newspapers reported that German soldiers were using a “miracle pill.” But for many soldiers, the miracle became a nightmare.

As enticing as the drug was, its long-term effects on the human body were just as devastating. Short rest periods weren’t enough to make up for long stretches of wakefulness, and the soldiers quickly became addicted to the stimulant. And with addiction came sweating, dizziness, depression and hallucinations. There were soldiers who died of heart failure and others who shot themselves during psychotic phases. Some doctors took a skeptical view of the drug in light of these side effects. Even Leonardo Conti, the Third Reich’s top health official, wanted to limit use of the drug, but was ultimately unsuccessful.

Full Story: Der Spiegel: WWII Drug: The German Granddaddy of Crystal Meth

(Thanks Trevor)

See also: An Interview with Infamous Meth Chef Uncle Fester

Nick Schou writes about Jesse Katz’s “apology” for ruining Gary Webb’s life:

The New York Times, Washington Post and L.A. Times each obscured basic truths of Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series. But no newspaper tried harder than the L.A. Times, where editors were said to have been appalled that a distant San Jose daily had published a blockbuster about America’s most powerful spy agency and its possible role in allowing drug dealers to flood South L.A. with crack.

Much of the Times’ attack was clever misdirection, but it ruined Webb’s reputation: In particular, the L.A. Times attacked a claim that Webb never made: that the CIA had intentionally addicted African-Americans to crack.

Webb, who eventually could find only part-time work at a small weekly paper, committed suicide.

No journalist played a more central role in the effort to obscure the facts Webb reported than former L.A. Times reporter Katz. [...]

“As an L.A. Times reporter, we saw this series in the San Jose Mercury News and kind of wonder[ed] how legit it was and kind of put it under a microscope,” Katz explained. “And we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California.” [...]

As Katz admitted to Mantle, “We really didn’t do anything to advance his work or illuminate much to the story, and it was a really kind of tawdry exercise. … And it ruined that reporter’s career.”

Full Story: LA Weekly: Ex-L.A. Times Writer Apologizes for “Tawdry” Attacks

See also:

Webb’s original “Dark Alliance” stories from the San Jose Mercury News.

The Crack Up, Webb’s 1998 follow-up for Orange County Weekly.

The MIT Technology Review reports:

Russell Poldrack, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin, is undertaking some intense introspection. Every day, he tracks his mood and mental state, what he ate, and how much time he spent outdoors. Twice a week, he gets his brain scanned in an MRI machine. And once a week, he has his blood drawn so that it can be analyzed for hormones and gene activity levels. Poldrack plans to gather a year’s worth of brain and body data to answer an unexplored question in the neuroscience community: how do brain networks behave and change over a year?

Full Story: MIT Technology Review: The Quantified Brain of a Self-Tracking Neuroscientist

Jim Vorel on Animal Planet‘s bizarre Mermaids hoax:

‘Mermaids: The New Evidence’ is the worst thing I’ve ever seen on TV

There’s absolutely no hyperbole in that title. Last night on Animal Planet I caught the replay of “Mermaids: The New Evidence,” the follow-up to Discovery Channel’s abysmally bad, misleading and rage-inducing “docufiction” from last year, “Mermaids: The Body Found.” It’s the worst TV I’ve ever seen. Nothing else comes even close.

Last night’s special was even further from reality from the first documentary, which at least went through more trouble to appear legitimate-looking. Instead of being comprised of talking head interviews, it was done almost in the style of an extended round-table on a 24-hour news network, which I suppose is fitting in an odd way. A shill of a host acted as the “moderator,” asking canned questions to our returning star and conquering hero from the past program, “Dr. Paul Robertson,” a man touted as being “a former researcher for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.” Other guests were brought forward to share their own mermaid revelations and screen poor CGI footage of supposed mermaid encounters.

I’ll start out by simply pointing out the stuff that anyone with access to Google can discover immediately — “Dr. Paul Robertson” is not an actual person, but an actor. His name is Andre Weideman. Here’s his IMDB page. It’s safe to assume that all the other supposed researchers and government officials on the special were also actors, or they wouldn’t be there.

Full Story: Herald Review: ‘Mermaids: The New Evidence’ is the worst thing I’ve ever seen on TV

See also:

I Wanted the Story to Seem Real, Says “Mermaids: The New Evidence” Producer

Science Channel Refuses To Dumb Down Science Any Further

Monster mummies of Japan

I wrote about the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a boarding high school in Aurora, IL, for Wired:

The IMSA Wednesdays are like Google’s “20 percent time” — only better. “At Google, 20 percent time is actually tacked on to the rest of your job. ” says Daniel Kador, another former IMSA student. “At IMSA, it really is built into your schedule.” And though Kador and other students admit that they spent more than a few Wednesdays just goofing off — as high school students so often do — they say the environment at IMSA ends up pushing many of them towards truly creative work. And it pays off.

After teaching himself to program at IMSA, Chu went on to the University of Illinois, where he worked on NCSA Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, following in the footsteps of fellow IMSA alums Robert and Michael McCool. And, eventually, he joined several other IMSA graduates as an early employee at PayPal, where he still works today.

Chu is just one of many tech success stories that have sprung from IMSA over the years (see sidebar, page two). Other IMSA alums have gone on to discover new solar systems, teach neurosurgery, and found such notable tech outfits as YouTube, Yelp, SparkNotes, and OK Cupid. And the spirit that moved Chu to teach himself programming is still very much alive and well. You can think of IMSA as a Hogwarts for Hackers.

Full Story: Wired Enterprise: Hogwarts for Hackers: Inside the Science and Tech School of Tomorrow

Photos by: Greg Ruffing

Tim Maly is at it again:

It was a post by Allison. Nothing special, something like “Mmmm tasty lunch” with an image attached. The image was a broken link. No big deal. I tried to find the original tweet but there was some problem with the unique ID and you don’t make it easy to page through past tweets. I’d have given up if I hadn’t noticed the timestamp.

The timestamp was in the future. Two days in the future. Weird bug. But @timebot was always a side project and I was on some big deadlines.?

Two days later, Allison decided to go to our favourite sandwich shop. I don’t know the details of what happened. But I do know that at 12:23:51pm on October 3rd, @allililly tweeted “Mmmm tasty lunch” with an image attached and no broken link. The timestamp matched. The unique ID matched. The formerly broken link in @timebot’s message now worked. I got that vertiginous feeling again.

To keep things simple, I’ll spare you the details of the next occurences, or of the time an errant tweet nearly broke up Sandra and her girlfriend. Let’s just say that I’m convinced that, somehow, @timebot is pulling not only tweets from the past, but tweets from the future.

Full Story: Twitter API returning results that do not respect arrow of time

Previously: Tim’s The Corporation Who Would Be King

The New York Times has a profile of Karen Berger, the editor of Vertigo Comics. Berger announced earlier this year that she is leaving Vertigo. The Times has no update on what she’s doing next.

For the roster of artists she leaves behind, Ms. Berger’s exit raises questions about the future of Vertigo and where its renegade spirit fits into an industry and a company that seem increasingly focused on superhero characters who can be spun off into movies and TV shows.

“It’s really hard to tell at this stage,” said Mr. Gaiman, a best-selling novelist and fiction writer who was scouted by Ms. Berger in the 1980s. “That was DC Comics, now we have DC Entertainment. It is a different beast, being run by different people.”

Sitting in a DC conference room a few days ago and surrounded by shelves of Vertigo titles that she published, Ms. Berger, a soft-spoken woman of 55, said she quit to pursue new challenges. “It’s time to ply my storytelling skills elsewhere,” she said. [...]

Comic sales have fallen off substantially, Mr. Morrison said, and the qualities that defined Vertigo’s titles have become widely imitated. They have “bled into the mainstream in such a way that you almost didn’t need it anymore.”

Mr. Morrison said he could still remember when his Vertigo series “Sebastian O,” about an assassin in Victorian-era England, sold about 90,000 copies of its first issue in 1993 — a modest quantity that would make it a Top 10 best seller in 2013. (DC said it doesn’t provide sales figures.)

Full Story: The New York Times: Comics’ Mother of ‘the Weird Stuff’ Is Moving On

There is no one who shaped my tastes more than Berger. I can’t wait to see what she does next.

DMT: The Spirit Molecule author Rick Strassman’s organization the Cottonwood Research Foundation announces:

We’re excited to announce the acceptance for publication of a paper documenting the presence of DMT in the pineal glands of live rodents. The paper will appear in the journal Biomedical Chromatography and describes experiments that took place in Dr. Jimo Borjigin’s laboratory at the University of Michigan, where samples were collected. These samples were analyzed in Dr. Steven Barker’s laboratory at Louisiana State University, using methods that funding from the Cottonwood Research Foundation helped develop.

The pineal gland has been an object of great interest regarding consciousness for thousands of years, and a pineal source of DMT would help support a role for this enigmatic gland in unusual states of consciousness. Research at the University of Wisconsin has recently demonstrated the presence of the DMT-synthesizing enzyme as well as activity of the gene responsible for the enzyme in pineal (and retina). Our new data now establish that the enzyme actively produces DMT in the pineal.

The next step is to determine the presence of DMT in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), the fluid that bathes the brain and pineal. CSF is a possible route for pineal-synthesized DMT to effect changes in brain function. Successfully establishing DMT’s presence in this gland adds another link in the chain between the pineal and consciousness and opens new avenues for research.

Full Story: Cottonwood Research Foundation: DMT Found in the Pineal Gland of Live Rats

(via Disinfo)

Previously: Scientific Evidence of Psychedelic Body Fluids

Psychopomp Volume One: Cracked Plate, the literary dark fiction novel by Amanda Sledz, is now available on the Amazon Kindle.

You can still read my interview with Amanda here and read an excerpt from the novel here.

You can also buy it in print from Amanda, Powells or Amazon.

This week cyborgologist Nathan Jurgenson joined Chris Dancy and me on Mindful Cyborgs. Nathan is the co-founder of the site Cyborgology, co-founder of the Theorizing the Web conference, a contributing editor at The New Inquiry and a sociology graduate student at the University of Maryland.

You can download or listen to it on Soundcloud or on iTunes, or just download it directly.

Here are a couple highlights from the transcript:

If you’ve taken a lot of photos, if you’re a photographer and you spend a lot of time with the camera in your hand or up your eye. You develop the thing that is called the “camera eye,” that is even when the camera is not at your eye you start to see the world through the logic of the camera mechanism. You see the world as a potential photo with a framing, lighting, the depth of field and so forth. And that’s called the camera eye and I think social media, especially Facebook, has given us the sort of documentary vision or the Facebook eye where you see the world as a potential Facebook post or tweet or Instagram photo.

That is you see the present as always this potential future past, this sort of nostalgic view of the present. I don’t think it takes us out of the moment. Some people say that, that you’re not experiencing life in the moment because you’re worried about posting it on Facebook. I think that’s just a different experience of the moment. But it’s worth debating whether that’s a better experience or worse experience.

What Eric Schmidt was getting at when he was talking about how using a smartphone is emasculating and you need to have this Google Glass that is somehow more masculine or something like that. It was really, I thought, offensive. And I think the correct reading of that was that the smartphone, now, everybody has a smartphone. How can you look like you’re a rich, powerful man if you have this thing that everybody has?

Well, there’s Google Glass now and again reinforces how what a cellphone used to do. When people see you wearing the Google Glass will say oh, well, you’re an important rich, powerful man. It’s really I think sad in sort of an offensive way to market that product. They’ve done a terrible job marketing Google Glass I think.

More show notes, plus the complete transcript, inside.

Episode 3 -The noisiest of our preoccupations blended states and documentary vision.

Hosts: Chris Dancy and Klint Finley

Art Aaron Jasinski

Music Ross Nelson

Listen: Soundcloud, iTunes, Download

Continue the discussion:  Twitter, Facebook,Google Plus

INTERVIEW:

• Theorizing the Web Conference
• Cyborgology 
• “Time away from your machine is offline?”
• “Do we put people down for beinging connected with technology”
• “Do you have documentatry vision?”
• “you see the present as always this potential future past”
• “Don’t congratulate yourself not taking your phone out of your pocket”
• “Creating a medical condition out of medical condition?”
• “We create the addiction to create “Normal…social ranking via digital useage”

TOP STORIES: 

1. Quantified Self Conference Amsterdam Wrap Up http://quantifiedself.com/2013/05/the-2013-quantified-self-europe-conference-roundup/

WORD OF THE WEEK:

Pathologizing -Regard or treat (someone or something) as psychologically abnormal or unhealthy.

EVENTS:

BDigital Global Congress, June 12-14, 2013 Barcelona http://www.bdigitalglobalcongress.com/ (Big Data)

Cyborg Camp May 11, 2013 Vancouver - http://bc.cyborgcamp.com/ (Cyborg)

Gf2045 June 15-16 NYC http://gf2045.com/about/ (Futurism)

Buddhist geeks August 16-19 Boulderhttp://www.buddhistgeeks.com/conference/ (Mindfulness)

SHOW TRANSCRIPTION:

Mindful Cyborgs – Contemplative living in the age of quantification, augmentation and acceleration, with your hosts Chris Dancy and Klint Finley.

 

CD:      Welcome to Mindful Cyborgs. Hey, it’s Chris Dancy and we’re back with Episode 3 – I can’t believe it’s 3 already. How are you doing, Klint?

 

KF:       I’m doing well.

 

CD:      Klint, as I’ve shared with you last year – or actually it was this year, time moves really weird for me — I went to this conference in New York City called Theorizing the Web. It was like one of the most amazing things I’ve ever experienced. Overwhelming, emotional, weirdly connected. Made me think way too much and messed with me for months afterwards. I stood up and recovered. At that conference I met Nathan Jurgenson who is a social media theorist as well as being an editor over at the New Inquiry, which I proudly pay for every month, and a sociology graduate student from University of Maryland. And we are lucky enough to be joined with Nathan today.

 

Hello, Nathan.

 

NJ:       How’s it going?

 

CD:      We are so excited to have you on. I think we’re both big fans.

 

NJ:       Oh cool, cool. Happy to be chatting with you.

 

CD:      So, Klint, you’ve read some of Nathan’s work. I have read some of Nathan’s work. Nathan, could you just kind of give us a real quick overview of who you are, what you’re writing about and what types of things you find interesting?

 

NJ:       Sure. Like you said, I’m a graduate student in sociology at the University of Maryland and a contributing editor to the New Inquiry which is one of my favorite things. I’m really proud to be a part of that. And together with P J Ray who’s another graduate student in sociology we founded  the Theorizing The Web Conference – which is a lot of fun, really cool to meet you there – as well as the Cyborgology blog.

 

And the blog’s name I think says a little bit about the work that I do, Cyborgology. The cyborg reference there is Donna Haraway’s conception of the cyborg which is really beginning thinking about humanity as always enmeshed with technology, and that’s not just since computers but since always. And that’s really where all my work comes from: at this intersection of technology and society.

 

I think for a long time we’ve conceptualized technology and society and “the online” and “the offline” as largely separate. And I’ve always begun all my work from the perspective that they are enmeshed and trying to maybe blur some of these lines that we’ve typically drawn.

 

CD:      You talk about this “IRL Fetish” or “in real life fetish.” Can you explain that to me and to the listeners a little bit?

 

NJ:       Yeah, so, I was sort of noticing how people describe disconnection and logging off in this way that I thought wasn’t just appreciating being away from your computer. And I appreciate being away from my computer, I wrote the essay largely outdoors. I like that. But people are more than appreciating being disconnected and offline, but rather fetishizing it.

 

What I mean by fetishizing it is making two mistakes. First, thinking about the time that we spent away from our screens is really offline. And second, using this appreciation for being disconnected as a way of putting other people down.

 

And so that’s what I really described in the essay is that this time that we spent offline – and I reference Sherry Turkle who wrote in New York Times of that talking about how we should take walks on Cape Cod like her and appreciate being offline – how those experiences offline are still very much influenced by the internet. For instance the walk on Cape Cod was experienced as “not Facebook,” and that became fodder for her op ed. For us maybe it would be fodder for our social media profiles.

 

And then the second part of that mistake is putting people down for being connected with technology. Often times we talk about the digital as virtual or less than real and I think when we say IRL to mean “not Facebook” or “not the internet” and I think that’s fundamentally wrong. If we say that, then IRL stands for In Real Life. Well, Facebook is real life. The internet is real. Digital connection is real.

 

So, we’re making two mistakes. One, thinking that the virtual, the internet isn’t real, and second thinking that our offline experiences are totally real and not virtual at all. And they are virtual, they are influenced by the internet. So again it’s beginning from this idea of the enmeshment of the online and offline rather than the separation.

 

KF:       I find that really interesting because I’ve been really guilty of being and IRL Fetishist over the past few years. It’s forced me to reconsider what I’m actually trying to get out of a disconnected state. I’m curious when you started to formulate this idea and how did you arrive at this?

 

NJ:       I was reading Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality Volume 1 and he described how sexuality, the story that we typically tell about sexuality is that it used to be very repressed and now we talk about it and we’re breaking taboos and being subversive and uncovering the mystery of sexuality. And Foucault thought that was very silly, that in the age of restriction and taboos of sexuality we’re oppressed with it. We talked about it all the time.

 

Foucault thought it was very interesting that we were pretending like there was the silence around what he called the noisiest of our preoccupations. And I felt that there was a parallel there between that and how we talk about reality and disconnection. We talk about it as if it’s going away, that people aren’t talking face to face anymore, that people don’t appreciate the tactile and the tangible and the material in this age of digital connection.

 

That’s the story that we’re telling and I think it’s fundamentally false. We’re actually meeting face to face even more. There’s plenty of research out here that’s showing that people who use social media more, spend more time offline meeting face to face. They spend more time in political protest. They go out and vote more. They join clubs more and, in fact, not only are we not losing face to face conversation and doing things offline, not only are we doing that more than ever before or at least in recent history, we’re also obsessed with it.

 

People just go on and on. Every week there’s a new op ed about somebody congratulating themselves for spending a day without their phone and it’s getting really, really ridiculous and people are really patting themselves on the back for doing what people are already doing all the time. And so I really thought this whole disconnection, digital Sabbath, all this offline stuff, all these debates were sort of disingenuous.

 

They were sort of starting from the wrong position that didn’t match up with what we know from research. So that’s IRL Fetish. That essay was a way of for me, I think, just sort of resetting the entire debate. That’s what I hoped it would do and I’m kind of excited by how well that essay did.

 

CD:      It was amazing because I had so many people that I shared with who just totally wanted to crucify you, I mean they were just like, “Who is this digital antichrist that’s writing this?” and I’m like “For God’s sake calm down. He’s just a writer. It’s his opinion.”

 

But it reminds me a lot of the 90s when I was, y’know, I’d meet people who would brag to me about how they don’t have television, they don’t watch television and these are people my age who even though they grew up in an age of television they’d evolved out of it and it wasn’t really important to them. Or my grandfather who in the 70s would say to me as a child, “You’re watching the boob tube.” It’s almost like a digital classism that I see.

 

But I loved it. I want to thank you for writing it. Klint?

 

KF:       I was actually going to bring up TV. I think we forget how much time people used to spend watching it. Or often still do, but they’re watching TV and they’re on social media at the same time, so there’s more of a social connection happening rather than just sitting at home watching television alone.

 

NJ:       I think The Atlantic they have that cover story “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” Which I hate to say was a very, very poorly done article that sort of cherry picked research. Some of this is an empirical question. You can look at social media users and look at what they are doing, who they meet, how big their social circles are, how typically involved they are and the research is really pointing in the one direction that social media isn’t displacing what we do offline.

 

That whole displacement, that whole zero sum idea of the online and offline – more online means less offline and vice versa — that’s what I call digital dualism. That zero sum displacement idea. And that’s really not what’s going on. The online and offline are sitting right on top of each other. They’re enmeshed and it makes complete sense that it’s a more and more situation. People who are spending more time online are also spending more time offline because they are two separate worlds. That’s entirely possible. So I think it’s really important to ask that question about social isolation and loneliness in our modern society, and certainly the suburbs and car culture and television led to that. And suddenly we have this new blip, very recently people are a little bit less isolated, especially young people.

 

And it was really a shame to see Facebook or social media being singled out as a part of this modern loneliness when really it’s one of the few things that we have that’s going in the other direction away from social isolation.

 

KF:       What about blended states? When you are in a group of people and everyone has out their phone texting or adding things to Facebook, communicating with people who are somewhere else rather than with each other?

 

CD:      Klint that was exactly… You and I need to get out of each other’s heads. So at Nathan’s conference someone said, and I’m going to paraphrase it very poorly, and if it was Nathan who said it Nathan’s going to come after to me with a crowbar… But someone said we spend a majority of our time reconstructing the present within the digital space. So just like you’re saying people together taking photos and saying what they’re doing, why they’re standing in front of each other. So, Nathan, do you know what I’m talking about?

 

NJ:       Yes, this is one of the things I’ve written quite a bit about. What I call “documentary vision” or “the Facebook eye,” which I’m making reference to the camera eye. If you’ve ever taken a lot of photos . . . are either of you photographers by chance?

 

CD:      Just an iPhone photographer.

 

KF:       I actually really try not to ever take photos.

 

NJ:       Oh okay, so this might even be more relevant for you. So, if you’ve taken a lot of photos, if you’re a photographer and you spend a lot of time with the camera in your hand or up your eye. You develop the thing that is called the “camera eye,” that is even when the camera is not at your eye you start to see the world through the logic of the camera mechanism. You see the world as a potential photo with a framing, lighting, the depth of field and so forth. And that’s called the camera eye and I think social media, especially Facebook, has given us the sort of documentary vision or the Facebook eye where you see the world as a potential Facebook post or tweet or Instagram photo.

 

That is you see the present as always this potential future past, this sort of nostalgic view of the present. I don’t think it takes us out of the moment. Some people say that, that you’re not experiencing life in the moment because you’re worried about posting it on Facebook. I think that’s just a different experience of the moment. But it’s worth debating whether that’s a better experience or worse experience.

 

And to the first question that was asked, it’s also very much worth debating what is the good manners for having your phone on public. If you’re sitting at a bar with three other people around the table and all three of them are looking at their phones, I don’t blame technology in that situation. I would say that you need to find some new friends. Those people are being assholes with their phones and we should work and not do that. But at the same time let’s not congratulate ourselves for never taking out our phone even once. If you need to send a text every once in a while, send your text every once in a while. If you’re not paying attention to the people you’re with then you probably don’t like them very much or they don’t like you very much for doing that. And I think we can do this, work through these manners without patting ourselves on the back for keeping our phones in our pockets, but also not keeping your phone out and ignoring other people. That’s just acting like a jerk. I hope we need to theorize that much more deeply than that. That’s just being a jerk. Stop doing it.

 

CD:      I love that. It’s funny because I was on Bloomberg Television about a month ago and the producer’s name’s Cory. He’s at Cory TV Online. I never met someone who was a television person. And literally he walked around during our interview, he’d interview, interview, interview and then stop and he’d like come back to “real life.” Sorry, I don’t want to get crazy. And then he’d start literally talking to me and the producers and the camera people as if he was in that third eye you’re talking about except he lived in that third eye. He lived as if he was always setting up scenes even when he wasn’t. It blew my mind.

 

NJ:       Well, I sort of think we are all always doing that. It’s just more explicit. What social media is really doing is performing and documenting. And all these things that we do in social media is really making explicit what we’ve already done. We are always performing with a costume we call our clothes and with a script of the sort of things that we all learn to say and do. And so it’s just a little bit maybe more obvious in that situation, but to me it’s a great metaphor for what we always do all the time.

 

CD:      Klint, I don’t know about you but I literally want to just rent an apartment next to Nathan and listen and eavesdropping and talking all day long.

 

NJ:       Probably not. You probably don’t want to do that. laughs

 

KF:       Going back to the etiquette of using a phone I think in a lot of cases we know it’s rude but we feel compelled, possibly out of doing an obligation to be connected to things that are online – at least those of us who have time sensitive work to be concerned that something important is coming in on the phone – or just a broader addiction to getting this information off the phone. Or at least it feels like addiction. And that’s what I was wondering about is do you think that there’s anything to this notion of addiction to information, or addiction to this sort of digital connection?

 

NJ:       Yes, I’m very, very against the addiction, sort of pathologizing framework of talking about this  for few different reasons. The first thing that pops into my head is some people really are tethered to their phones because of work obligation, and then what we do is we put down the person, the individual, for what is really a social and structural problem that is that workers are increasingly being asked to be on the clock or near their phone 24 hours a day. That people are being on call or working longer and longer hours for less and less pay and it’s causing people to be at their Blackberry, or whatever, their phone all the time. And then that stinks and I think that’s something that we need to work through, if that’s even legal, what are the workers’ rights in the situation. It’s a social problem and I really don’t like the rhetoric of them blaming the individual and talking about that as a kind of an addiction.

 

And the other reason why I don’t like addiction is precisely that kind of pathologizing, creating almost a medical condition out of digital connection. And what I typically think when we create these new pathologies, these new problems or illnesses that people have is we often create that illness to simultaneously create what is normal. We talk about addiction to then be able to frame our own non-use as healthy and normal and they create this divide between healthy and non-healthy, which is really a way of doing some sort of social ranking, being able to put myself above the other person because I’m a healthy normal person. They’re abnormal or unhealthy in some way and probably need to seek some kind of a treatment or something like that. So the addiction framework or almost the medical kind of framework for this I think glosses over the social problems and the social injustices of workers being asked to get out their phones and be connected all the time.

 

CD:      That’s what I took out in real life piece. The one thing I took when people asked me was once I read it I realized that I knew people who literally justified or made . . . they found validity in the relationships they were running from by creating an alternate universe that they called online. And it reminded me of when I started my first corporate job in the early 90s and they were pushing down my throat that I need a work/life balance. And there is no work/life balance. There’s life. And I didn’t need justification of having a job to prove that I had a family.

 

I loved it, loved it, loved it, loved it.

 

We’re going to jump into some real quick news. I’ve only got two tweets and two headlines, or two news items. Nathan, do you want to stick around for another 5 minutes?

 

NJ:       Sure.

 

CD:      So, Klint, as you know the Quantified Self European Conference happened. Two really interesting things I read and I’ll put a link and in the shownotes out to a bunch of wrap up blogs. One, massive health home implications. But one was At Home Rapid Strap, At Home Urinanlysis. And then which I thought again saving . . . it’s one thing to go to WebMD or fact check your doctor when he leaves the room. It’s another thing just to do the testing yourself at home, and those are things I didn’t know that you could actually get at this point. But then there’s this thing called Beddit which is basically a device that supports tracking your sleep but it purports to be so sensitive that it can capture individual heartbeats and breath. And I just thought, wow, are we there at the point where the bed is now more alive than our partner in the bed with us? What do you think of these devices that are just coming out of the woodwork and these sensors that’s just . . . what do you think?

 

NJ:       I’m no expert in the quantified self movement. I read Whitney Erin Boesel’s piece in Cyborgology. It was really, really good on gender and quantified self and it certainly doesn’t surprise me. What I know about the quantified self movement, doesn’t surprise me that the bed would be part of self quantification. It’s part of the self so why wouldn’t it be quantified under that rhetoric.

 

Personally, my first thought usually with the QS people is I think the most interesting part of quantified self probably isn’t the movement that calls themselves quantified self. I think I’m interested in lower case QS rather than uppercase. I think for instance keeping track of how many likes our photos get would be an example of quantified self that is far more prevalent and probably diffused through society.

 

I think those are things I’m most interested in. But as far as these devices or things like that I’m no expert in those.

 

KF:       I sort of like the idea of the bed insofar as just to make the sensors and tracking devices more invisible. Rather than wearing some sort of weird strap into bed the bed itself just keeps track of your movements and your heartbeat and so forth so that we can have less and less of external devices that we have to carry around and configure and just have all of that stuff disappear into the background.

 

CD:      And then you go to the opposite direction with things like Google Glass and all the devices that we do wear very externally. I was just at a conference in Vancouver. They asked me my opinion on this and I said to me it reminds me of homosexuals who came out of the closet in the 70s and 80s, me being one of them, and the type of flamboyant clothing we would wear. And it just seems like we’re in this kind of revolution where we have to prove just how techsy we are almost with a digital hanky code by wearing certain types of devices to show people yes, I’m identified as this person which hopefully will migrate through that period of time. I don’t know.

 

NJ:       Yes, I mean that’s what Eric Schmidt was getting at when he was talking about how using a smartphone is emasculating and you need to have this Google Glass that is somehow more masculine or something like that. It was really, I thought, offensive. And I think the correct reading of that was that the smartphone, now, everybody has a smartphone. How can you look like you’re a rich, powerful man if you have this thing that everybody has?

 

Well, there’s Google Glass now and again reinforces how what a cellphone used to do. When people see you wearing the Google Glass will say oh, well, you’re an important rich, powerful man. It’s really I think sad in sort of an offensive way to market that product. They’ve done a terrible job marketing Google Glass I think.

 

CD:      Yes, we featured your tweets on the subject on the show.

 

Two tweets a week, one of them of course is from Nathan Jurgenson, our favorite topic so far. But the other tweet was from Cyborg Camp and that was “While designing the future. We don’t want to disturb normalcy too much and the concept was MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable).” And the person who actually was talking about this came up with the concept of minimal viable person.

 

So, if you take a smiley face, just a hand drawn smiley face in one end and you take a realistic cartoon on the other. There is this uncanny value of people want imprint more themselves on products that are not fully drawn lifelike things. They actually want something as he called  minimal viable person.

 

Do you have any thoughts or concepts around his theory that people want technology to be less like them so they can imprint themselves on it?

 

NJ:       No, I hadn’t thought about it. You put me on the spot there a little bit. Yes, it’s super interesting.

 

CD:      Klint, with all the tech and all the companies you meet, I mean has anyone the concept of minimal viable person when designing services applications or devices?

 

KF:       No, I’ve never come across that idea.

 

CD:      So, we’ll wrap up with a Nathan Jurgenson tweet which was sometimes you read Twitter and you like look at something and then you’re like you re-tweet it instantly but then you look at for like 30 seconds which seems like 7 years because you really want to soak it in before you share it with anyone else.

 

Nathan tweeted “I think social media’s over stimulation largely occurs when we’re away from the screen.”

 

KF:       Yes, Nathan, what do you mean by that? Because I read that and wasn’t really sure.

 

CD:      I think I know what he means by it. That’s why I loved it but I was just like . . .

 

NJ:       You tell me what you think I meant by it.

 

CD:      Because when I’m away from the screen I cannot wait to go back to Oz. When I’m in Oz, I’m just there. There’s munchkins running around. It’s normal. It’s just it feels natural. It’s a complete weird reverse fetishism. I’m hyper stimulated when I’m away from these things. They enriched my physical life even though that would be a fetish.

 

NJ:       Yes, I think that’s in the spirit of what I meant. I think I’m most interested in . . . I think the way that social media, or say Facebook specifically, the way that most impacts us, most influences us is how we sort of downloaded the logic of these sites into our heads, how we carry them with us. I think Facebook’s biggest influence happens when we’re away from the screen. How Facebook has influenced ourselves and our identity and as I was talking about earlier even the way that we perceive the world, for instance, as the potential Facebook photo, as a potential status update. When we’re away from the screen that stuff all happens when we’re not even logged into Facebook.

 

And so one time I was on a subway. I think it was like 3:00 in the morning and there was these young very drunk people behind me and one of the girls said, she said “real life is the place where you take photos for Facebook.” And I was just thinking she’s the smartest person I’d ever heard on a train and she was articulating exactly that point that Facebook’s influence isn’t just what happens when you’re logged in and sitting in front of the screen. Instead social media’s stimulation or overstimulation is what happens when we’re away from the screen partly because we don’t even know it.

 

CD:      Boom! Boom! Nathan, thank you so much for being on this show. It really means a lot to me personally. I’m such a huge fan. Is there any place people can see you speak? I’m going to tell people how they can find you online and stuff. Are you’re going to be at any events or any place where people can catch up with you… “in real life?”

 

NJ:       I’m going to be speaking at a conference in Milan a week from today. And boy, I don’t know if I have any. Conference season just sort of ended. I don’t think I have another one till the American Sociological Association annual meetings in New York City in August. But if you go to follow my Twitter or whatever you’ll be able to keep up with where I’m at or if you want me to speak somewhere let me know that might be the easier way.

 

CD:      Yes, and we’ve got people who do that sort of thing. So, you can follow Nathan. He is @NathanJurgenson. I’ll put in the show notes. You can Google him. He comes right up. You can read his stuff over at New Republic and Cyborgology.

 

NJ:       The New Inquiry.

 

CD:      New Inquiry. I always say that. I don’t know why I say New Republic. I need to figure out what the psychological kink is for me there. Klint, you’ve got some things coming up, don’t you, events?

 

KF:       Well, just the Digital Global Congress in Barcelona. It’s from June 12th to 14th. I’m speaking the first day of June 12th about quantified work.

 

CD:      And we’ve got two other events. We’ve got Global Feature 2045 which is that Russian billionaire renting out the Lincoln Center and turning us all into avatars June 15th and 16th in New York City. And of course we’ve got Buddhist Geeks August 16th and 19th in Boulder, Colorado.

 

Well, thanks so much Klint and Nathan. It’s been a real pleasure. We will see everybody back here in 2 weeks from Mindful Cyborgs. I like to think our producer Ross Nelson from Brown Hound Media and the creator of the Mindful Cyborgs art, Aaron Jasinski. Thanks so much.

 

NJ:       Thanks for having me on, Chris, and, Klint. Good to meet you.

 

KF:       You too. Thanks. Bye.

 

NJ:       Bye.

Here’s an essay question from a scholarship application to Eton, an elite boarding school in the UK:

Laurie Pennie weighs in:

questions like this – topics for debate designed to reward pupils for defending the morally indefensible in the name of maintaining “order” – crop up throughout the British elite education system, from prep schools to public schools like Eton to public speaking competitions right up to debating societies like the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, which are modelled on parliament for a reason.

This is how you’re meant to argue when you’re eventually in charge. You’re trained for it, and part of that training is regularly being presented with morally indefensible positions to defend anyway or risk losing whatever competition you’re engaged with. I have seen perfectly decent young men get carried away defending genocide and torture because that’s the only way to win. Those who are unable to do so are taught that they have no business having political opinions. The people assumed to be the future elite are not rewarded for getting the answer which is most correct, most compassionate or humane or even sensible – they’re rewarded for smashing the opposition. And that’s how you get politicians who will argue anything they’re told to, enact any policy they’re told to no matter how many how many people will get hurt, just so that their team can win.

Moreover, this isn’t just a standard homework question. It appears on a scholarship entrance exam, a test designed to be sat by young men seeking to join the ranks of the rich and powerful by virtue of merit and smarts rather than family money.

Full Story: New Statesmen: The Eton Scholarship Question: this is how the British elite are trained to think

Meanwhile, Tim Maly poses some alternate questions.

Alexis Madrigal on his quest to find the first recordings of the urban soundscape:

Could I go back a hundred years and listen to New York or Paris?

When it comes to film, you can see all kinds of old places. Sometimes even in high resolution, thanks to the work of archivists like Rick and Megan Prelinger. These films are incredibly important records for historians and citizens alike. They give us eyes in the past.

There’s an amazing film sequence of San Francisco in 1905. A camera was placed on a streetcar and driven down Market Street, the diagonal that cuts through the city’s core. Pedestrians, cars, carts, horses, the whole dizzying array of urban life before electricity and the automobile turned our cities inside-out. We recognize our buildings, but not our city. Similar recordings exist of most major cities.

I figured that there had to be similar documentation of the metropolitan soundscape, or any soundscape really.

But there isn’t.

Full Story: The Atlantic: The Quest to Find the First Soundscape

Above: The KLF’s The White Room movie

J.M.R. Higgs writes:

Drummond and Cauty claimed that their solicitor was sent…

…a contract with an organization or individual calling themselves ‘Eternity’. The wording of this contract was that of standard music business legal speak, but the terms discussed and the rights required and granted were of a far stranger kind.

“Whether The Contract was a very clever and intricate prank by a legal minded JAMS fan was of little concern to Drummond and Cauty,” Information Sheet 8 continues.…

For them it was as good a marker as anything as to what direction their free style career should take next.… In the first term of The Contract they, Drummond and Cauty, were required to make an artistic representation of themselves on a journey to a place called THE WHITE ROOM. The medium they chose to make this representation was up to them. Where or what THE WHITE ROOM was, was never clearly defined. Interpretation was left to their own creativity. The remuneration they are to receive on completion of this work of art was supposed to be access to THE “real” WHITE ROOM.

The pair claim that they went on to sign this contract, despite the advice of their solicitor to have nothing to do with it. It is worth noting at this juncture that Cauty and Drummond were ignorant of Operation Mindf**k. Their sole knowledge of Discordianism came from Illuminatus!, which Cauty had never read and which Drummond had not, at that time, ever finished. By signing any such contract they were not simply ‘playing along’, for they would have had no context for what the contract was, or where it had come from.

In this reading of events, Drummond and Cauty appear to have taken a Discordian Operation Mindf**k prank letter at face value, and spent hundreds of thousands of pounds making a piece of work that would fulfil their part of a hoax contract that they chose to sign.

As to what the ‘real’ White Room which the contract alluded to was, Drummond and Cauty were typically candid: “Your guess is as good as anybody’s.” In Discordian terms, however, the meaning is relatively clear. The White Room refers to illumination, or enlightenment. The word ‘room,’ however, is interesting. The use of a spatial metaphor defines enlightenment as a place that can be travelled to, or sought in a quest. The search for the White Room becomes a pilgrimage, with the White Room itself taking on the character of the Holy Grail. Drummond and Cauty’s film, when seen in this light, becomes a means to an end. The White Room was not intended as a film that would make money or enhance their careers. It was, instead, a step along the path in a search for enlightenment.

Full Story: The Daily Grail: The Strange Journey of the KLF

I bought Higgs’ e-book KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money but haven’t read it yet.

See Also: The KLF: Genius or Gibberish? (from 1991)

By Cuteosphere

(via Theremina)

I’ve linked to research before casting doubt on the efficacy of “brain training” games and software (other than double n-back). But some new research reported by the MIT Technology Review is more promising:

Cancer survivors sometimes suffer from a condition known as “chemo fog”—a cognitive impairment caused by repeated chemotherapy. A study hints at a controversial idea: that brain-training software might help lift this cognitive cloud.

Various studies have concluded that cognitive training can improve brain function in both healthy people and those with medical conditions, but the broader applicability of these results remains controversial in the field.

In a study published in the journal Clinical Breast Cancer, investigators report that those who used a brain-training program for 12 weeks were more cognitively flexible, more verbally fluent, and faster-thinking than survivors who did not train. [...]

“This is a well-done study—they had not just one transfer test but several,” says Hambrick, who notes that many studies of cognitive training depend on a single test to measure results. “But an issue is the lack of activity within the control group.” Better would be to have the control group do another demanding cognitive task in lieu of Lumosity training—something analogous to a placebo, he says: “The issue is that maybe the improvement in the group that did the cognitive training doesn’t reflect enhancement of basic cognitive processes per se, but could be a motivational phenomenon.”

Full Story: MIT Technology Review: Brain Training May Help Clear Cognitive Fog Caused by Chemotherapy

See also: Dual N-Back FAQ