<nettime> lots of good comments and topics

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

My email is acting goofy so I'll reply to lots of topics in one.

For Sawyer's question about the phenomenological (or experiential) account of life with Screen, from my point of view, I'd list twelve stages of dislocation.  These are very off the cuff.

First:  Empowering.  Screen in 1993 seemed free, capable, and open, relatively.
Second:  Ambitious.  What's not possible with so much access?
Third:  Utopian, reformist, transformative.
Fourth:  Competitive and hubristic.  King of the hill.
Fifth:  Remorseful, conflicted, self-conscious.
Sixth:  Pessimistic, disillusioned.
Seventh:  Dystopian.
Eighth:  Detached, disengaged.  Injured and unhealthy.
Ninth:  Reconsidered, gradually, with great hesitance and skepticism, caution and apprehension.
Tenth:  Recontextualized.  The network Screen wasn't what I thought or hoped; did it compare to canvas?  To book?
Eleventh:  Affordances.  Did prior media forms (print, paint, radio, TV) offer participation?  How? Compare today.
Twelfth:  Leonardo and Esperienza.  Pure chance association.  Random finding.

These phases might have cognitive counterparts in the short term as well, across time periods, for example what phases have college students today gone through in their relationships with social media; or radio in the 1920's.  But the phases are abstract as phrased 1-12, semi-satirically of course.

How are they reflected in the body?  Certainly carpal tunnel, fixated hand and arm positions, tension in neck and shoulders, eye strain.  Perhaps a general tendency not to breathe fully while "on Screen."  It's a heightened state, typing or scrolling, so there is probably some cortisol in the bloodstream, even adrenaline sometimes, dopamine, endorphins, a whole melange.  Stomach acid, dehydration, overcaffeination, for some, at times.  Also there may be anxiety and depression, or anxious and depressive responses if not the full blown thing.  All of these somewhat also applied to writing, painting, radio, TV, newspapers, and the like: arousal, stimulus and response, social embodiment (like and dislike), fear and safety, weakness and strength.  A depleted offscreen environment perceptually speaking.  The Screen is not conducive to mindfulness meditation, can be very habit-forming, and therefore may cause a lot of chronic stress and general health problems.

Another key factor, response-wise, in body and mind both, is "checking for messages."  This might be the key.  It was big on the early bulletin boards: did anyone post.  It rang out like a clarion call, the first words uttered aloud by the internet very arguably were "check your messages."  You check it constantly, hopeful in the morning and frustrated by nightfall.  Like a baby?  Perhaps.  One cradles it, cuddles it, gurgles at it.  Then it was hits, did anyone visit?  Then it was likes, perhaps, though I was too old for that wave and skipped it absolutely.  Then it became crupto chits, same as people watched the ticker tape transfixed in the 1920's.  Finally the helpless feeling of physical immobility and total incapacity to stop actual harms occurring in the world: environmental disaster, war, oppression, regress, the potentially fatal heating of the planet.  A feeling of being buried alive.  Maybe followed by the last feeling, bodily and emotional, intellectual and expressive, wh
 ich is something like a recognition, "but I can wake up from this, it isn't literally real, I can go for a walk, I can breathe air into my lungs, I can pick up trash by the river, talk to my neighbor, pen a postcard," and so on, then this physical respite gets followed on by ideas like Buddhism say or neuroscience, and a more lived approach to living, garnering the unreality of the technology to go along with its reality.  The rapid birth of AI-GPTs prompts a wince, a flinch, a hunch: oh no not again.  Here we go; but maybe wiser this time.

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As to XLterrestrial's comments I do also agree.  There is real soil, real water, real animals, fish, plants, birds, fungi, weather, and temperature also which are not just symbolic representations.  It always pained me how 80's theory so easily put all this aside so absolutely, along with anything biological about body and brain.  Like, what are they thinking.  No such thing as disease?  No such thing as violence?  Blurred distinctions sure, gray areas, ambiguities yes, but no such thing?  I'd say we are reaping what was sown to a very great extent.  I wish some of those old theorists were still alive to maybe say "gosh I think I was off base a bit."  Maybe some are and will, but such things rarely happen with humans.  Even supporters of a theorist are usually unable to rescind their support much if at all.  Like with Freud and Foucault.  They just aged out, first the theorists then the supporters of the theorist, because who can afford, literally, to disown their own dissertation?  
 But the supporters of the supporters are still in their prime and not going anywhere, it appears, though perhaps change can seep like rain through a concrete cityscape.

If La Joconde's garment is in fact Experience's attribute of the present-time layer of engineering and technology, its diaphanous emulation of the water, soil, and atmosphere, echoing rivulets, clouds, and tufa, then it is certainly as many have said an ecohumanist work.  Seeing it by eye is half of getting the world in reality there, which must be by the bridge of time's path, and this has similarities to meditation (Buddhism being in part an earlier renascence of Experience vis-a-vis Tradition circa 500 BCE).  It also obviously relates to indigenous knowledge systems (e.g. the culture hero and other personifications of adaptive learning), as well as to Sufism which reached Dante via writers like Avicenna and Rumi and thereby found its way to Leonardo.  All roads lead, and the finger-point has created the world since remote antiquity.

One tangent: as a college kid long ago I was in a history class pondering the Capitalism v. Communism debate and it occurred to me "there isn't really any meaningful worker control of the means of production under, say, Stalin, or even Lenin, certainly not Andropov; it is far more accurate to say it's a committee -- a soviet -- that controls the means of production, like a factory, on the (putative) behalf of the workers.  No workers really control the factory, either in the USSR or the USA; it's controlled by a committee, a soviet or a boardroom, which the committee in both cases will proclaim they are doing on behalf of the workers but it's rarely on anyone's behalf but their own."  So for me the difference blurred almost infinitely from that moment onward.  Crony capitalism, in other words, is very state-owned, and nationalist socialism (of the 1920's and 30's, and not just in Germany) could be hideously libertarian.  Even Bernie Sanders admits the current US system is fairly soci
 alist, but set up to benefit the powerful rather than the many.  Because the powerful always fear the many, whether in the USSR or the USA.  This gut feeling, because I can't claim it is more than that, has always affected my view on all theory, be it French, British, German, or otherwise, leaving me with little or no help from theory sui generis.

Now on to my own PoV today.  In 1923, Max Ernst painted "Les Hommes n'en Sauront Rien," which means "Of This Men Shall Know Nothing," a surrealist oil painting based on Freud, sex, and Leonardo (though Geoffrey Hinton seems to have overlooked, perhaps because everyone did, how Ernst copied Leonardo's Codex Leicester for his psychic astronomy).  In 1975, Hinton, who won the Nobel for AI, wrote a decent paper about the Ernst painting.  Later in 1992, having switched gears for good, he wrote for the Scientific American an article on "How Neural Nets Learn from Experience."  That started it all, the whole tempest we are in today give or take; but he doesn't use the word experience in the article just the title.  It's one of those words.

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My takeaway is that everyone is calling for a New Renaissance, or virtually everyone, or are actually doing it.  But the Renaissance is inchoately appreciated: it had two faces on its coin, one being Leonardo and the other Machiavelli.

Machiavelli is the modern practice of raw power without constraint of any kind, not even conscience or the possibility of conscience; one might call it "total war."  Leonardo is the ongoing attempt to find conscience and responsibility in a modernizing world, where former certainties have been lost, an attempt which, being a slippery slope, could be equated to "total peace" or "global sustainability."  Machiavelli's image, vision, screen, and mirror was Il Principe, a mirror for princes, a shaper of agents, an early form, it is not too far off to say, of machine intelligence.

Leonardo knew Machiavelli very well and knew he represented the techbroligarch class which would soon inherit the earth and bring about its death or near-death (see "Of Selling Paradise" and "Of the Cruelty of Man," two short disquisitions on environmental ethics and ecosystem collapse written by Leonardo in his notebooks and available at Wikiquote).  Leonardo, like Dante, Roger Bacon, Blake, Montaigne, and pretty much every decent person, poet, scientist, and artist since 1100 wanted to oppose the war pigs.  Leonardo fought them, then and now but mostly now, with his Universal Portrait, his untitled woman on a balcony.  The world's most famous i.e. omnipresent artwork may be a work of high information engineering created to defeat Machiavelli should future audiences i.e. we of today do our part, share, and lot.

Hinton is aging, and may never be asked much less answer any questions connecting his work on Ernst to that on AI.  He may or may not resonate with Joyce, who lamented, and warned, "machines is their cry."  But yes the lingo of Futurism is back in full force.  Grosz painted a military leader as a heap of excrement, bodily in part, in 1926, and was hounded to his death for doing so.  Ernst painted "Les Hommes," which he named in ALL CAPS, in 1923.  We are repeating a lot of stuff on a hundred-year time lag (but not everything, for sure).  Roosevelt -- TR -- realized some regulation was needed, but today we are still on the robber barons' timeline.  Plus we have a big new war on, the New Cold War, so any hope for peace must find a way to talk to China.  Why not start with the topic of Experience?  They have a very good verb and noun for it to start from.  In fact it formed the basis of the 1978 debate over Mao's succession -- The Two Whatevers -- and that definitely pertains by analogy
  which can sometimes be all you need to make a difference.

In an important sense, though, we are already "Post-New-Renaissance" for the purposes of computer networks.  We're already in the 1520's, with the new Inquisition.  Leonardo lived through the end of the time of relative freedom for Florence.  He died in 1519, and in 1516 his home city, the great flower of the world, banned Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (which had only been rescued from oblivion a century prior) and Rome soon started Inquisitioning anyone who liked it, read it, had a copy, or talked about it.  (Take for example Giorgione, who painted La Tempesta about Lucretius circa 1506, brushstroke for brushstroke matching Leonardo's Mona Lisa.)  Because Florence was in a Cold War too.

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But just checking the text, we find Experience ("experientia" in Latin) was the key for the start of it all, all this modernization we are still doing posthaste and trying to survive: a book by Ruggiero Bacon (as Leonardo called him) called Opus Majus, "the greater work" as opposed to the great one, which he wrote in 1267 for Pope Clement IV who wanted to start allowing science and art to be done in so far as it was safe to allow.  Bacon tried to champion Experience, in science and art, philosophy and even things of the spirit and imagination, as both Galileo and his father Vincenzo still would also try almost 400 years later, over and against Tradition and Authority, even suggesting Reason should serve Experience not just vice versa.

Every nation on earth is still caught in this morbid grappling match.  Reason means, in part, decision and rationale, which mean most not in themselves (a priori) but in what they choose (a posteriori) which can be Experience or Authority.  It's the challenge of freedom which we still struggle to meet.  A priori means before, a posteriori means after, but before and after what?  The dictionary says it means "known to be true independently of or in advance of experience of the subject matter; requiring no evidence for its validation or support."

However if we still have any choices left we can choose better or worse.  So it's not too late for that, at least.  And a new way of looking at the Renaissance, even if nothing new per se is possible under the sun, is practically guaranteed, pixels jumping all over all the time as they do, so seeing it as a choice between Il Principe and La Joconde, between the tragedy of the commons and the comedy in which life sustains, is not so hard to appreciate.

It has never been proposed ever, this idea that La Joconde is Experience personified for effect, which is astonishing to believe but true: that the greatest truth in world history could be overlooked even close to this long.  This would help explain the gap between expectations and results.

Plus the Louvre's new wing for the painting in question is due to open in six years, and it is called "a New Renaissance."


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