Anti-Data: Take Your Pick

Two meanings for our new term anti-data: 1) The refusal to accept being spliced into data, until human beings become nothing more than containers for or living representatives of data. 2) The acceptance of being spliced into data, until neither the body serves as a container for data, nor a representation of data, but pure data itself.

For now, I'll stay human, since I haven't the second choice. If I had the second choice, I wonder how tempting it would be. Under the conditions of the first definition, I am the collection of data defining me, so far as anyone evaluating me and hence having power over me is concerned. They may check my IQ score, amongst a range of others tests, or simply go to my credit report, which should tell them all they need to know: "Don't think you can trust me any more than I can trust you." When forced to play the game of Hyper-Monopoly, one must play by the rules or perish. As many a father has said, "Don't be stupid."

We've all but restarted measuring heads to test the size of our brains but, unlike Nazi Germany, we allow those we wish to be rid of to kill themselves, one way or another. It's much more convenient. The outcasts fail every test, even the final test of bending on one's knees and praying for a redemption that may come in the form of, "Kill your son."

Misapplication of the Application: One Step Out, One Step Forward

As Brian Eno discovered so many years ago, sometimes the best way to achieve interesting results is to misapply an application; that is, to purposefully misappropriate a tool of some sort, be it musical instrument or the brain itself. In this way, my long-time friend Matt Miller, with the help of his daughter Sarah and Excel, somehow managed to "misuse" the Facebook application Farm Town and construct the amazingly-intricate image within this post. Thus, Matt and Sarah "misused" two applications, and whether it comes to Santa or any other subject, the more the merrier. In fact, I think you should make this image "go viral" in appreciation of the extraordinary amount of work that went into it. Download, email, link, attribute. Remember, or imagine, that Farm Town is normally a game in which one grows crops, tends to animals, etc. It's definitely not an image-making application. And to that, I can only say kudos. For a closer look at the farm, you must be a Facebook friend of "Duncan Miller" and a neighbor on Farmtown. Email for more info.

Such misapplied applications point the only way forward when it comes to any creative endeavor. To achieve originality on your own egotistical terms is nearly impossible, but to go around being original may get you there. For instance, when writing a poem about some experience I've had, I almost always shift the poem from first to third person; "I" become "she" or "he." This little trick, a redirected use of pronouns, then sparks associations I otherwise never would have conjured. And by doing so, I often find that the resulting poem becomes much more than it would have been and often reveals what I was trying to say better than had I been "straightforward."

In these thoughts, you may locate some of my disdain for the memoir. The memoir is full of what memoirs must contain: suffering and redemption. It's an essentially religious genre, with one exception I will soon mention. I have read good memoirs, but they do not meet the requirements of the genre and so become anti-memoirs. The book may begin as the author's story but then becomes the story of something or someone else. No better example exists than W.G. Sebald, whose "novels" (a term applied to Sebald's memoirs because, I suppose, a memoir is generally meant to fulfill a three-pointed contract of the trappings already mentioned plus plenty of room for voyeurism, the way romance novels must supply their quota of escapism) may have single-handedly stripped the mines of memoir for all they're worth.

But back to Santa. That image is his first present. And if you celebrate gift-giving and receiving holidays, may your gifts be ones fit for creative abuse.

No-Meaning: Stop Chasing

There's a burst of rhetoric in a Public Enemy song that goes like this: "Stop chasing." That can be taken a hundred ways, but it means something specific to me, that being the encouragement to "stop chasing" what can never be had, what is offered far away, the attempted grasping of an illusion of a chalice, and the king saying, "If only you do that, then you get this." But the king is invisible, too. It's all invented in the mind.

Thus, I've decided that not even the idea of "creating one's own meaning" is sustainable. The creation of meaning is relational and always relies upon the acceptance of others or falls by their rejection of it. What kind of meaning is that?

Some time along the time line, we hit each other in the heads with rocks so often that we began to believe meaning must exist. But even in evolutionary terms, there is no meaning unless we ascribe it. There is survival, and so what? The worst apes amongst will survive. I can't consider that meaning. And even if it is, it's not much of one. Night falls, grab the blanket. Sun rises, out to work.

I will hereby name the developmental stages of life. Baby: Absolute consumerist. Adult: Consumerist and producer. Old age: Back to absolute consumerist. There's your meaning, if you prefer it in stages.

Some find meaning in faith, war, peace, atheism, community, agoraphobia, boredom, busyness. All find it, and all lose it, or hang on to it by the shreds of peasant clothing.

This may sound depressing and full of complaint, but if one eschews even the existentialists, then one moves into a zone beyond compression of life into stages, beyond redemption but also damnation, and into a world in which all meaning is temporary and disposable. Wipe that frown off your face with a trademarked device and remember that he who has no meaning has none to lose. He hasn't much else, either, but at least he hasn't that.

Zeroism: Beyond Division

Proof for the not-argument of Zeroism continues in the following elegant mathematical analysis of the not-theory by Toshi Nicole Casey:

Division by zero is not possible. Anything divided by zero is "undefined." Atheism means essentially that there is no God (no God-head), but dividing the concept by the numerical properties of Zeroism, then the concept becomes "undefined." The idea of belief is so obscure that knowledge of it is the absolute value of zero, which is zero...and the problem ends. The solution is "undefined" and not subject to any further investigation. Done. And. Done.

Precisely. Zeroism cannot be defeated, nor can it serve as victor.

Attacking Zeroism is like throwing spears at the sun.

Death-Mill: Human Development

To the left is my nemesis, my twenty-four hour per day noonday demon, sucking so much meaning out of me in its almost-endless roster of developmental stages that I come away with the sense I'm on a death-mill, a treadmill that stops now and again for measurements of every type. During those stops, I'm tested to see if I've reached the normative stage. While nearly every textbook begs the question of why textbooks exist in the first place, other than to make readers question their choice of careers (and so publishers can get away with exorbitant book fees), this one sets the pace for charts and sidebars so frequently pasted to the page that I have to wonder if those aren't the actual text and the rest extended captions.

Just look at the cover. Textbook manufacturers never departed the 1970s. The images all bear the glossy glow of a circa 1977 Playboy photo. Everything appears to be in the first stage of catching fire, the burst of light of the properly-struck match. I might try it as a lighter; it would finally serve a purpose.

Why do I choose this particular textbook for my attack? First, and above all, it's a cultural cookie-cutting device, no matter how often it mentions multiculturalism. Like a rocket to death, our life is built of stages, so many stages that no matter how long we live, we miss a few. The human being, if viewed by a therapist from this basis, sees patients as being somewhere along the line of development, like apes not quite human but close. Not only a god could help the student in the grip of a counselor trying to shake the little bastard into the next normative function.

The range and frequency of statistical measures only prove the point that some things can't be proven by statistics. For every statement that begins to whisper "fact," there's enough counter-research provided to make anyone realize there are no normative stages of development, only those constructed in a narrative that mysteriously blends into a perfect capitalistic cocktail once we add the word "productive." Thus, the child is judged for productivity as soon as he or she can talk, if not before. This is psychology at its worst, designed not to differentiate individuals but to shove them into the slot machine of our economic system, in which, if losing that game, they can always buy lottery tickets, although that might indicate riskiness in life choices.

To think even paper, much less trees, was used to construct this construct, this plot-pointed life that plays out like a movie no matter how unique one's major life events, makes me weep. I feel in need of deprogramming. The harder practitioners of this thinking try to treat students and adults as individuals, the more they won't. Not even death escapes. You can't die your way out of this television series. You're just waiting to be incorporated into a survivor's grieving process.

Process: all is process. The idea of human development as an issue of wholeness, the whole human being bridging the span from birth to death across a structure someone built before the person is even born, ultimately makes the reader wonder what possible point there could be in living out a prefabricated plot. And if all else fails along the way, you can, when old, begin pottery lessons or start a bridge club.

No wonder people drink themselves to death. That plot's worn thin, too, but at least you've no idea what the hell you're going to do when drunk. Perhaps that's why alcohol is so popular. Then the hangover, the stages of recovery, and developing a new network of friends. But for a while, who knows, you might even end up in jail.

Defenders of the book will say I'm only refusing to see that there's nothing different about me and that my position, or lack thereof, in life can be plotted, but that I'm too much in denial to handle it. They're right: I am in denial, willed-denial, if I cannot live a life that's not been plotted as if by film murderer Syd Field. I cannot stand the thought, and I will not stand for it. Give me a pair of dice and a quarter for making decisions. Take the William S. Burroughs' scissors to my first draft and shred it into a new collage. The alternative is no way to live but only a slow progression towards the final and prewritten process.

The Uninvited Bitch Who Wouldn't Leave

I must confess that, for weeks and weeks now, I've been relentlessly bored except when writing this blog. One respondent to a thread I elsewhere posted wrote, "Boring people bore me," to which I reply, "People bored by boring people bore me."

Deciding to attack the problem as head-on as it gets for me -- reading -- I ordered Richard Winter's Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment. I had no idea that Dr. Winter is an associate professor of practical theology at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis. Once I dismantled the Amazon box and learned that information, I just about dropped the book straight into the trashcan.  But you never know.

After reading Winter's standard criticism of mass consumerism, albeit through the added wrathful black of a theologian's lens, the book was nearly on its way to the actual graveyard of Toth-purchased books, the closet, where I like to keep my many unexplainable and unreadable choices out of view. Then I remembered Zeroism. With that in mind, I decided the professor might have something to say despite or even because of his Christianity, something I could use as a not-Christian.  Being a Zeroist, I've no purity to maintain.

Finally completing his videogame-pornography-sex-and-violence sermon, Winter moves into the thickets. Briefly exploring past centuries and their understanding of boredom, then consulting the bible and other quotable sources, Winter posits boredom as a lack of effort, a refusal to focus, and, most cleverly, a form of procrastination. He reports that long ago, his failing performance in a class caused him to consider that class "boring," and since the identical situation has occurred to me in the last few weeks, I confirm that calling what doesn't come easy "boring" is an easy way out of struggle.

Happiness, paraphrasing Winter, eludes pursuit; it's rather the effect of sustained and non-clutching effort, to move the argument slightly eastward. In the same way, a temporary semblance of "happiness" can be found in pursuit itself and then, when it occurs, capture. That's, of course, the typical cycle of seduction. Sometimes the cycle evolves into something more; more often, it dissolves into something less.

The bored are waiting for something, anything, and that's the problem: they may get it, in the film noir sense.

I admit my boredom has given me unpaid leave to do whatever I'd rather not, which is everything. Part of that deactivation may be a creative "refueling" period and part of it an aspect of depression, but I more agree that it's a form of procrastination. The day will arrive when I "feel like working again." That day will arrive not because I feel like it's the day but because and only because I work and for a much longer period than I'd prefer. I've briefly tried trying, but it didn't take.

This book won't cure boredom, but it does supply a few useful insights. To any non-believing readers, this is a book by and for (though not exclusively, if you can get past a main argument) Christians. To his credit, Winter even positively quotes Nietzsche (though elsewhere hammering him), not to mention our old friend, that son of a bitch Kierkegaard, a believer no one can hate.

Advertising-Rape and the Hypno-Rapist

To a degree, but not the degree some assume, consumption can be controlled. Consumption is less the problem than the coercion to consume. All around us, wherever we go (if we leave the house), we cannot help but encounter a constant seduction-force, the goal obviously being to create a false state of seduction, even if violence is never threatened (although violence is used as a selling-seduction point for numerous products). Thus, we can label such advertising as follows: advertising-rape. Its existence suggests that if we go to Best Buy, we're "asking for it."

Have you ever heard or seen of anything being sold with the warning, "Don't buy this if you can't afford it"?

"Ah," you say, "but that's the seller's job, and it's the consumer's responsibility to say 'no.'"

Why, then, am I not allowed to purchase the drug of my choice? Why am I not even allowed to play psychiatrist with my own brain, since psychiatrists clearly haven't learned the trick? Is buying a teenager a car any less dangerous or potentially fatal (not only for the child but other drivers)? Yet, buying a car for a teenager is perfectly legal, and by "perfectly," I mean in the sense that only in this economic and legal system would it so neatly fit into the strange combination of puritanical protections and anarchic free choices provided to us.

Beyond force-seduction is the pure environmental nausea of visiting some place only to see the equivalent of the place you drove 600 miles to escape. It's everywhere, "following" you on the highway, over the radio waves and via satellite. It's a junkscape facade in which it cannot even be expected that one can at least be spared a gaudiness of anti-design that induces selective blindness to everything but the next bumper, which handily provides a logo, in case you had the jones for logos. Everywhere you go, you are being haunted by the Hypno-Rapist.