This review was so good I bought the book – The Fourth Dimension of a Poem. The reviewer, William H. Gass, introduced me to a new concept – deconstruction, which I had certainly heard of before,  but only in passing.

The High Priest of deconstructionism was Jacques Derrida – who sought to:

Find the element in the system studied which is alogical, the thread in the text in question that will unravel it all, or the loose stone that will pull down the whole building.

I must confess to doing some of this myself – trying to deconstruct the edifice of my parent’s world, and the business world I grew to hate – with a passion. All in vain – it refused to fall down.

I had used the words construction and destruction - and was shocked by destructiveness of the business world.

The literary world – which I was not familiar with – spoke of deconstruction, instead of destruction. This was the same process – with a longer word.

Now you know it too.

A basic sentence has a subject, verb, object structure. The subject does something to an object. The subject is active, the object passive – but both are things, only the verb is active. Buckminster Fuller, who became something of a new age guru back in the Sixties – once proclaimed that he was a verb. And that made sense at the time.

Objects in programming take more explaining – unless you were a programmer in the Eighties and Nineties, when Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) was the rage. Programming styles come and go – with no more logic than the styles in woman’s clothing. Back then, OOP was the thing - and everyone wanted to do it, whether they understood it or not.

Someone should do some in-depth psychoanalysis of this sometime, and figure out what was really going on. But that won’t be done because we were all swept up into something bigger – the boom of the last decade of the last century and the bust of first decade of this one. This has all kinds of names (such as the Dotcom Boom) – but at the time we called it mostly the Internet Boom.

At the time, we felt that the Internet was so powerful it had created a New Economy where everyone would get rich automatically. And part of this, somehow was OOP, There was also Java – which took the programming world by storm. Which incorporated both OOP and the Internet.

This was too much for me – and in 2001 I retired and moved to Costa Rica. I still keep in touch with what is going on in the Software world. And right now I am re-thinking the significance of objects. And realizing that it they were a significant part of what was going on in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

The Industrial Revolution (and there were several of them) were processes in which machines became more and more important. And people became less and less important. And the most important part of this change was our growing inability to understand this.

We were fast becoming objects – things. We no longer existed as humans.

As humans, we were animals – with an important difference. And we were fully aware of this difference – at least in our better moments. But we were losing this awareness.

I will never forget my mother screaming “I’m not an animal!” And indeed she was not. She was a strange being we had no words for – but she acted like a demon.

For the time being, I want to call these people objects – but I also want to note that they are demons. And to be fair, I have to put myself right among them.

Now I must say more about being an object. It is similar to being a machine – but with important differences. It can be programmed – and it can use this programming to interact with other objects. It has no mind of its own – no existence of its own. If it did, it would be destroyed.

The overall structure is familiar enough – a machine. But a machine with programmable components.

Is this anything new? No, it is not terribly new, societies have been acting like machines for a long time. Human machines built the pyramids.

But it is different in a subtle way – the components (objects) are more flexible, and they expect (even want) to be changed frequently. They do not want to have a permanent identity – as people do in more traditional societies.

A cynic will observe that if you peel away all this surface craziness – there are still humans underneath this. And their basic functioning (the reproductive urge, for example) has not changed. Perhaps, but one can also observe that things like the sex drive have also been profoundly altered – and sex objects are common.

We may not have become objects entirely – but we are close to it.

I cannot claim any originality here – I can only refer to two other writers:

• Evgeny Morozov, who wrote To Save Everything, Click – who is from Estonia.
• Slavoj Zizek, who wrote The Puppet and the Dwarf – who is from Slovenia.

They have the unique advantage of being from nowhere. As I do – I live in the Limbo between the US and Costa Rica – and the Net.

This is from the back cover, by Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the president of the Republic of Estonia:
—
When it comes to anything “Internet” related, Evgeny Morozov is the writer who brings us back to earth. Lubricated by snake oil, too much of what we read about the Internet and the possibilities offered by modern technology is hypertext hyperbole.

In this riotous read, Morozov continues his quest to restore empirical rationality in our own thinking about our techno-Utopian pipe-dreams. We have become gullible to what Morozov calls solutionism, the idea that whatever complex situations we face, we can solve it simply by finding the right algorithm, and thanks to technology we can find a solution.

We have seen this before with Condorcet and other thinkers of the Enlightenment, but then, as now, too much reliance on mathematics when we are working on problems of people and society leads inevitably to failure. Today, we who live, work, and dream in cyberspace need Morozov to keep our feet firmly planted on Terra Firma.
—

I heard about this book from reviews in Scientific American the MIT Technology Review. Scientists (real scientists) are more rounded people than we give them credit for.

I would add only one thing – the people he is presumably trying to write to (the masses) no longer exist. And there is no way they can be brought back to life.

You have heard of Globalization – which is supposed to be the next big thing. But I am here to tell you that this next big thing is nothing. Literally. I could go into a long dissertation about something and nothing here – and I am listening to a book right now called Why is there something instead of nothing? that does just that. But I will spare you.

Let me start again. The world (the human world, that is) for the last three hundred years or so has been obsessed with making money. But we (and especially the young) are no longer much interested this. It doesn’t turn us on any more. And if it doesn’t interest us – it is going nowhere. 

Let me put this yet another way. We all know about booms and busts. Everybody gets excited about something (it gets hot) then they lose interest in it – and it gets cold. These cycles (what used to be called the Business Cycle) used to take years. Now they are lucky to last for a day.

This indicates, to me, that they no longer have any substance. There is nothing behind them.

People still want money as much as before – but they no longer want to work for it. They will steal whatever they can lay their hands on (legally) but will only pretend to be working. And this applies to companies, as well as individuals. Everybody. You don’t have to be a genius to see where this leads to.

I have been speaking so far about motivation – or the lack thereof. And I continue to believe this is the most fundamental problem.

But this can also be seen in more concrete ways – we are running out of gas (oil). All the development of the last three hundred years or so was fueled by fossil fuels. Energy reserves left over, by accident, from millions of years of plant life.

And climate change is fast upon us. We can deny it all we want – but it is a fact.

The overall result (and that is all that counts) is this:

Progress is running out of steam.

There has been a lot of sound and fury lately about America’s spying on everybody. This is nothing new to Bruce – he has been writing about this for a long time – but few have paid any attention to him – and no doubt few will continue to pay attention to him in the future.

Trying to understand this issue is just too much work – even though he works as hard as he can to simplify it, without overlooking anything important.

If you want to know about this – and really know about it – take some time to read, and digest, what he says here. Especially the first part Government Secrets and the Need for Whistleblowers.

Here is the final paragraph:

Our government is putting its own self-interest ahead of the interests of the country. That needs to change.

When I start thinking about this I back up in time to the biggest collapse of all – the fall of the Roman Empire. There are endless theories about how this happened. But at the time, only one thing was obvious – tribes from the North were plundering Rome. In other words – a vast military defeat was in progress. The unthinkable had happened – and all people could do was run as fast as they could – usually to Northern Africa, where the Mediterranean kept them safe – if impoverished. Rome never recovered.

Will this happen again? I doubt it – although most people seem to think it will – that terrorists are at the gate, about to overwhelm us. The slightest thought will show anyone that this is not so. But still people are terrified – and America maintains a huge military presence to reassure them. And a huge spying network to monitor everyone. As does China.

The end will come, I believe, in the Economy – and is now in progress. We live in a Global Economy where every part of it depends on every other part. Right now, the European economy is in bad shape – and a collapse there is almost certain. The American economy (the biggest one there is) is feeble and cannot help it. China – now the manufacturer for the world – is completely dependent on the rest of the world to buy its products.

Add to this the behavior of the Financial Industry – which is busy raiding the global treasury. Making a very few very rich – and making everyone else poorer in various degrees.

The end result is not hard to predict – global economic collapse.

And because it requires too much thinking – which is not seen as a good thing for people to be doing. Or at an even more basic level – it requires a certain amount of being – to give you the ground to stand on to make judgments.

This is not to say that people do not make moral judgments – they make them all the time. But these are only judgments they have picked up from other people – and they want to be like them. In fact the they I just referred to is a tenuous, fleeting thing with no enduring presence. Being is a dangerous state that people avoid as much as possible.

Or, to put all of this in another way – we have been reduced to behaving and thinking like small children.

None of this is very flattering – and since we are adults (and should know better) we are ashamed of ourselves.

There are all kinds of books (and all kinds of speeches) about some of the smaller issues I have described. But no one wants to put it all together – and say our overall situation is nothing less than terrifying. Why?

People go to movies that scare them to death – just for the fun of it. Preachers rant about the apocalypse. But this kind of scare seems to be too much. Too much for us to handle.

I must respectfully disagree. There is nothing too big for us to handle. If we have to, we can look death calmly in the face. Although it makes little difference how we look at death – we all die anyway. And we have to say the same about all of us collectively – we are dying. Or more accurately – we have died, and are now just finishing the process.

If I tell people what I have just told you – they will just say “It couldn’t possibly be that way!” And proceed as before – happily messing up the world, and themselves.

This is a kind of accomplishment, I have to admit. But it strikes me as a perverse one.

Television was changing what people were. A process of which the people themselves were completely unaware. They had lost their powers of self-awareness long before – and had become something we cannot comprehend, and have no words for.

Note in that last sentence I was referring to two types of people – the mass of people, and those who are trying to understand them – a much smaller number – and a completely unsuccessful bunch,  it seems to me. We have been clobbered by a change so vast we cannot begin to understand it – and don’t really want to.

Part of the problem was the amount of time involved in this change. Its gradual onset coincided with the beginning of the Modern World. A sea-change so vast, so subtle, and so huge that even now – six centuries later, it overwhelms us to think about it.

We should begin by admitting just that – that the coming of the Modern World was something so huge we have great difficulty comprehending it. And then take it from there.

Instead, we ignore the whole subject – and concentrate on smaller pieces of the puzzle – such as the development of Industry. But even here, we drop the ball and succumb to platitudes.

We might as well admit that we have been overwhelmed by something – but don’t really know what it is. Humility is one of the finer virtues – and we should exercise it more vigorously.

But one thing we should not be too humble about is our uniquely human skill – our consciousness. We are self-aware – to a degree no other species can approach. Probably due to our large brain.

And we are also aware of our surroundings in a way that other species are not. We can analyze it – take it apart and put it back together in new ways. No doubt some of you will object “How about the chimps that use sticks to fish out termites?” I can only reply “How about the primatologists that are watching them do this?”

I am not one to idealize the human race – we have faults that are astonishing. But at least we have some awareness of them – or used to. One of our biggest problems now is our lack of awareness of our built-in limitations. Or to put this another way – our astonishing lack of Wisdom. This is a problem, if there ever was one – we have become stupid.

This brings me back to my original question “How did we get this way?” We didn’t set out to become stupid – how did we end up this way? My answer, in a nutshell, is – because we outsmarted ourselves. This took some doing – and we need to give it some thought.

One way to look at this – is to look at our use of energy. For thousands of years this was provided by human and animal muscle power. Which was based on agriculture. Wealth was land – the more you had (and the more slaves you had) the richer you were.

Then we discovered wind power and the first Industrial technology – the Sailing Ship. A wind-powered machine. And we discovered a new source of wealth – trading. In the European South, this amounted to nothing more that using slaves to mine Gold and Silver in the New World.

But the North developed differently – and became much richer, based on different kinds of exploitation. Based on new kinds of energy – originally Coal. And the invention of workers to run the all the machinery that now became more and more important

Note the appearance of two things – machines and the workers to run them. I will not go into the background – things like banking and its creation of capital that made Capitalism possible. Needless to say,  they were important too.

What I want to concentrate on is the ever-growing importance of machines. And how we were becoming machine-people. This brings me up to my paternal grandfather’s time – the early 20th Century – and the Railroads. When we were also becoming car-people – as my father certainly was.

Then things really went crazy – right after WWII – right when I graduated from college as an Electronic Engineer in 1959. Electronics was something we were totally unprepared for because it was so different from anything that had gone on before it. We were sucked into it – and never came out of it.

Electronics produced Television that turned us into couch-potatoes. This is where McLuhan came in. But he could not begin to cope with the Next Big Event – the Computer.

The perfect machine – but we did not see it as that. But as the perfect extension of ourselves – it made us super-people – we thought. Not noticing that it had reduced us to serving it. And the few people that it has empowered.

Palast can be hard to follow – because he tries to cover too much ground. I have summarized his latest here:

1. Barack Obama ordered the drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki. Wikipedia entry here, which has much more information.
2. Two weeks later he also ordered the killing of his teen-age son, Abdul-Rahman al-Awlaki, and his cousin and friends – at a location hundred of miles away.

Here I quote the final paragraphs:

During the Ronald Reagan years, that President sent weapons to Ayatollah Khomeini in return for the release of hostages taken by Hezbollah. The Russians got their hostages home another way. The USSR didn’t accept an arms-for-hostage deal. Rather, the KGB systematically assassinated the hostage-takers’ cousins, mothers and brothers one by one—until Hezbollah released all the Russian hostages.

By rocketing the children of those we fear, we are indeed teaching them a lesson. But what are they learning?

Next year, Malia Obama turns 16. I hope we never hear that harm has come to Malia while some chuckling spokesman for al Qaeda says, “She should have had a far more responsible father.”

I have overstated the situation, of course – there is still some concern for the individual – but not much. And lurking in the background is an even more fundamental problem – the reluctance to think at all. Which, is part of the first problem – the individual prefers to let others do his thinking for him. To tell him what to do, and how to be. The independent individual is seen as a danger to the group.

For thousands of years powerful governments of all kinds have been a threat to the people in them. But at the same time of immense benefit. To have an advanced civilization, some sort of advanced society must exist. Just what this might consist of, how it might work, has been one of our most important concerns.

It is obvious that society should be good for itself, and for its people. But even this perfectly mundane statement no longer seems to hold. We seem to think that something else is better (more important) than we are. That being human is not enough. We have to be something better than just being people.

History should tell us what this is – but it has not. We are like the Israelites wandering in the desert – still looking for the Promised Land. Not realizing that what they are looking for is within them.

This is a very old problem – but recently (in the last few hundred years, or so) it has gotten worse. We have been carried away by various enthusiasms – including technical ones.

I am an example of this. I quickly discovered that the computer was the perfect writing tool – and the Internet was the perfect place to write on. But I have also worked in the Computer Industry – to my intense sorrow – and I have never really gotten over that. Something was badly wrong there – and I was determined to find out what that was. 

What I saw was mass insanity – and there is no better way of putting it. It should have been a fine industry – one that benefited everyone – but what I saw was just the opposite. It was destroying everyone in it – and everyone associated with it. Virtually everyone.

Instead of helping people – it was using them to help itself – and its own insanity. To use another analogy – it was a black hole and was sucking everything into it.

As people not yet consumed by this black hole – we should steer clear of it. But instead it exerts a fatal attraction – and we are sucked into it also. Greek mythology also spoke of the siren’s song that ships and sailors should avoid. But that was minor, compared to this.

Now I must return to my subject – the balance of power between an individual and this society. But for us, society has become something much larger. It includes a rapidly expanding technology that is consuming everything – including us as consumers.

It is hard for us to imagine technology as a social force – but it has always been that. When we invented agriculture, for example, it re-invented us – completely.

And the explosion of technological innovation that we call the Industrial Revolution (and there have been a number of them, actually) - have been too fast for us to keep up with.

The result has been something easy to see – but nearly impossible to comprehend. People have been taken over by their things – and no longer exist as independent beings.