This is sort of a spiritual response to Reza Negarestani’s talk at the Guggenheim.   It just sparked in me the notion of history from a Hegelian Marxist framework and the notion of history from a computer’s perspective. As a log file?

What is history for Hegel? It is an anthropocentric process. It is the history of human consciousness. It is not for example the history of life on earth -that is the natural science. So, there was a moment when history did not exist, and then when humans became conscious – history began.  And of course if you have a beginning, you also have an end (I guess we could argue about this). But I will not talk too much about the end of history and what that means for Hegel.

I have been reading a lot of Flusser, and the relationship between the line and history, between writing and history.  A technology that moves from left to right, that has a beginning a middle and an end creates a historical context, which has these same properties.  A visual culture, that relies on pictures, does not have this. There is no beginning, middle, or end to a painting.  It does not create a history.

We are now living in the age of the techno-image. While the images may seem no different from the images on the cave of lascaux, they are.  Because our techno-images arer created and displayed by uniform bits they can be infinitely combined into different experiences of the image. I can apply a photoshop filter to an image, I can cut and paste other content into the image, I can string a few images together and create an animated gif or a movie.  For Flusser, this means that we are ahistorical in a different sense, there is no beginning middle or end, there is on the creation of the system or context for the image.  This is something like infinite, or different, types of worlding or world building – competing ontologies or metaphysics.

Lets return to the computer log.   What is this? When I create a computer log I can flag different types of statements or errors to be logged depending on its severity such as : debug, info, warning, error and critical. In fact I just pulled these from Django debugging documentation. These different errors then can be handled in different ways – I create a error handler. They can be emailed or sent via sms, or posted to facebook, or recorded into a log (or a multiple of these things).

The error is the techno-image and the log is the echo or reflection of this image in writing, in the historical world. As a log, it is no longer a techno-image but the written word.   How is the computer log different from the Akkadian tablets recording wheat donations to the temple, or similar ancient records? Where as the Akkadian tablet is a record or proof of something that happened, the log is an epiphenomena of the EVENT of the error.    Although it exists in the historical record, this is not its final state.  There is the possibility through further manipulation and transformation it can be USEFUL again -that is it can be used to make decisions or to drive decision making, or to educate a knowledge set.  I can use the log file in a business intelligence software to help diagnose issues, I can aggregate it with other data and make predictions. All the user behavior on facebook is logged as information into a machine log and then further manipulated into preferences that are packaged as commodities and sold to advertisers.

The Machine Log is nowhen, as Reza says. It is not a calendar record, but an EVENT record which is outside the sphere of time.

I had a fantastic conversation with Dan of Esoteric Codes.   Esoteric codes explores code as a creative medium and posts projects and writings that approach code from this perspective.

Dan is incredibly knowledgable about the history of code as art and the different communities of hackers, artist, academics who contribute to this field.

I have been interested in this field for years, but one of my concerns is the fetishization of code. When we talk about code as art, is it analogous to a doctor praising a beautiful suture (which I would find difficult to elevate to art).

But Dan has a notion about individuality. In professional software development, the goal is to make your code as generic as possible.  This is so it is as maintainable and readable as possible.   In this context, good software as a craft, would be different from software as art.  Software as art would be something like software that elevates personal expression. What about personal expression in something like a suture? Well perhaps that would be knitting or weaving and no longer medicine. So when you you are writing your code, not to improve some sort of corporate infrastructure but to express something deep inside your being – what is that?

I read a book and listened to a podcast about cities yesterday. I have lived almost my entire life in cities and I have not really thought much about it. What is the purpose of a city? What is a city versus a town? How do humans organize themselves?

Is a human city like a ant hill or a bee hive – a mechanism for communal work? Lets think about what sorts of things that a city presupposes?

A government bureaucracy:  When you have a functioning city you need to coordinate at least waste removal and road repair as well as things like a professional police and fire fighter force, then you need a support layer to support these functions. In a village, perhaps you can get away with a volunteer force rather than a professional force. There seems something more of the gift economy than the market economy.

The economy in general:  Do people do different things in a city versus a village versus the country?  At first people aggregated in cities to work at factories since factories needed a large concentrated labor force, and this is what a city does – it concentrates people in a small area. As economies have shifted towards service jobs, and as transportation has made it easier to locate factories (and workers) outside of cities – cities have transformed to centers of commerce – one big market. In cities, then, most people engage in some sort of service work ( even knowledge work  I would call service work) – and this leads to the customer service complex which all urban denizens suffer from. Each person, no matter where they are in the hierarchy, are a utility for someone else. A famous musician is a utility for a wealthy lawyer who wants to throw a party, a wealthy lawyer is a utility for a corporation who is suing another corporation, and so forth.  Humanity is stripped away and becomes a series of inputs and outputs to provide help to other people in the city.

The Money economy: A City is impersonal. You do not know most of the people in the city, you may not even know your neighbors.  You cannot transact based on trust – enter the money economy. You must work for money, and then spend money.  In general you spend money on taxes to support the bureaucracy  (point 1). So not only do you have to work for the goods you need to survive, but you have to work to support the city itself.

Why would cities exist? Is this a good thing? There was the notion that now that people can work anywhere cities may disappear or become less important. Instead the opposite is happening. We see an increase concentration of people living in cities. Why is this? My guess is that it allows humans to focus on one particular thing- while outsourcing all other needs to other members of the community. It is almost an instrument for the individualization of a human – if you think that each human should specialize. If you think humans should be generalists – then the city works actively against that aim,

In Judaism there is fixation on memory, perhaps we could call this a memory complex.  There is an admonition to never forget, for example, the horrors of the Holocaust. The passover seder is repeated every year to remember how the Jewish people were released from bondage in Egypt.

Much of the talk about memory, is not just about the past, but about reliving the memory in the presence. Something similar to imitation dei deus. It is as if each individual at the Seder was themselves released from bondage. This is not just a memory but a reenactment in some respects.

The term forget comes from the old english and roughly is a compound of for and get – miss and grasp. So forget roughly translates to lose grasp and is a modifier of a basic term to grasp. Contrasting this with the ancient greek we have lethe- forget. This is personified by the river Lethe that all souls pass on their way to the underworld. The opposite of this is alethe – or truth.  So in English we start with a state of knowing and lose that, and in Greek we start with a state of forgetfulness and the lack of forgetfulness is memory or truth.  Or to put it another way, we can find and lose things in English and in Greek the memory is always there it is just covered (forgotten).

What does it mean to remember and what does it mean to know? Is memory a burden or a  blessing? Does it prevent us from acting or help us act correctly?