Conversation Skills
Travis: I have a lot of practice with failing, though. None with fighting. But I think the failing skills will overcome that.
Sent at 10:43 AM on Wednesday
Kingtycoon: I'm getting worn out of failing. It's got to work out soon right? Trying is not just it's own reward right?
Eventually it pays off.
That's right, come to me for your maudlin pity contests!
And why come would you move out to suburbia? I am dissapoint.
Not, mind you, that we were the best of neighbors, Barny and Fred or whatever.
Sent at 10:45 AM on Wednesday
Travis: schools, mostly. and v's weird, sad homeownership kick.
It doesn't really matter where I live, though.
All I do is work and familyplay.
I go out drinking once/year.
Kingtycoon: I think I missed you at Noodle Cat, just.
Travis: I had to go give the wife some IVs
I got in super trouble for staying out as late as I did.
Sent at 10:49 AM on Wednesday
Kingtycoon: All of my friends who've gone on to be
married play at having this thing about being in trouble and obedient.
I mistook this for sincere and was all: 'What's wrong with you obeying
and groveling!'
before I figured out that they just like having bosses.
I blame school. It's a bad thing to do.
Sent at 10:51 AM on Wednesday
Travis: I'd like to write books intead.
Kingtycoon: Me too.
Travis: But I need insurance and money to feed my kid.
Kingtycoon: It's harder now than it has been in the past.
On both counts
all 3
Travis: And V got it in her head to makes sure Matilda has a house before anything terrible happens.
WHich is, whatever. Too sad to argue against.
Sent at 11:03 AM on Wednesday
Kingtycoon: Yikes. I look often at the $7000 houses with many bedrooms and bathrooms in east cleveland.
If only the property taxes weren't so high. We could call it gentrification, if we were gentry, take over a neighborhood.
for cheap.
Sent at 11:05 AM on Wednesday
Travis: These are plans for 20 year old usses
If only we hadn't been so navelgazey.
Sent at 11:30 AM on Wednesday
Kingtycoon: When I was 20 you could buy those houses for $30k!
The time is ripe. But I guess, maybe you don't go by EC? I forget that you are at heart not a man of cities.
Sent at 11:32 AM on Wednesday
Travis: You could do amazing things when when you were 20. Me too. But we were too busy dancing to undancable music.
I am two hearted.
I am a lone city man. I am a comfortable family man.
Sent at 11:56 AM on Wednesday
Travis: but I am primarily a disassociated inbrain man who doesn't notice the details anyway.
Sent at 11:58 AM on Wednesday
Kingtycoon: We agree.
What book will you write this year?
Sent at 12:15 PM on Wednesday
Travis: I'm thinking of somethign tech-based.
fakehacking, realityhacking.
With the thesis that humans are more human with technology.
But with an actual plot? And characters?
New territory for me.
Sent at 1:20 PM on Wednesday
Kingtycoon: Did you read the Artifical Ape?
Travis: Nope
Kingtycoon: I don't know if you're on Mordicai's mailing list for swag
Travis: Should I?
Mordicai and I have very different literary needs
Kingtycoon: Well, his work will send you free books if you ask him.
I read about 1 in the 10 he sends me.
Travis: I should try that.
TOR or all of?
Kingtycoon: Whatever the parent company is - that's what you get. He rarely has Tor junk to send.
Sent at 1:23 PM on Wednesday
Kingtycoon: Thesis of artificial ape - the main one,
is that Technology precedes intellect and that technical expertise is
the sine-qua-non of human beings.
Interesting supports re,: baby-slings of the prehominids
and language as the archetypal human technology.
Sent at 1:31 PM on Wednesday
Kingtycoon: But I concede on the major point, that
Ethics, humanity and goodness are evolved traits, devised and managed by
the wiser minds among the minds.
Sent at 1:36 PM on Wednesday
Travis: I mean specifically digital technologies, but it all works together.
Sent at 1:38 PM on Wednesday
Kingtycoon: Digital technology is an extension of language, moreso than it is an extension of the electron.
Travis: Point is: phones, everywhereaccess frees us
from a lot of menial brain labor. The same way machines and tools freed
us from money work, let us be higher primates, analytical tools and
outsourced memory have freed up our brains.
At this point, our brains only have to do what machines can't. Which should make humanness a clearer, more discernible thing.
Kingtycoon: That's maybe compelling, my counterargument is that the brains we have aren't fit for that kind of circumstance yet.
To me, this is why we drink.
Travis: It might turn out that that's nothing. Ego, maybe.
I don't knwo what it is.
Kingtycoon: nah, I mean the lack of focus inherent in the unattended mind.
Travis: But at this point technology counts as a new sense, a new vital component to our experience of the world.
Kingtycoon: the ADD Genii
that's blunted and funnelled by the numbing of senses
Travis: We're all blind kids suddenly given sight, freaking out about all of the options and colors.
Every other sense feels dulled by the overwhelming newness.
But our brains will adjust.
Kingtycoon: Yes, and the generation transit is the painful instance.
Travis: Not much we can do about that.
Kingtycoon: The brain will be made to adjust by accretion of mineral portions.
Travis: We'll be renamed the fucked generation.
And, what? The brain adjusts constantly and to everything.
Kingtycoon: Mineral accretion, the silicon forms dams
in the dendrites, the mind becomes a portion of a network mediated not
by networks but dams and logjams - the information is all too much, it's
held back, for our own good.
Travis: Start limping for no reason, in a week, your brain will accept it and you'll be a permanent gimp.
problem is, technology won't sit still long enough for us to cope.
Kingtycoon: Or else you could wake up and have dysphoria that day, hating that leg and deciding to walk like a gimp...
Travis: We do that already. That's what the peneal gland is all about.
Or some other part back there?
Kingtycoon: The apocrypha about the QWERTY keyboard right? That they had to handicap the typists or else they'd tangle the arms
Oh sage of sages to say: "The Pineal Gland Does This!"
Travis: But maybe you're right. We have these brain
structures in place to limit the information overload of our other
senses, but digital tech comes in unfiltered and unregulated.
Kingtycoon: hammer it out on tablets.
Right -but we'll
figure out how to mediate our interaction with our technology - our
technology mediates our interaction with the world, it's a tool, not an
end.
Hence the Bear at the end of a Spear.
Travis: Wasn't Descartes crazy about the pineal gland?
When was the last time you had a speculative conversation about facts?
Kingtycoon: I only care what McCluhan thinks.
Most of the time actually.
Facts are a silly idea no? Empiricists, you're all too cute.
Travis: So you're trying to remember the name of the lady from Punky Bruster and you get together with group and brainstorm?
Because we used to do that shit all the time.
For thousands of years.
Kingtycoon: Are you going with a Wisdom of Crowds
thing here? Or the mass delusion that you can get a big enough group to
rename soliel moon fry or whatever
Travis: Most of our early life was sitting around, drinking coffee, eating food, and trying to figure shit out.
Now we google it and it's done.
Kingtycoon: But google isn't a machine with a machine on the end! it's a can on a string with me at the other side, telling you a thing
Travis: It's a huge part of culture and cultural communication that has totally disappeared.
Kingtycoon: the celphone mediates our interactions, i
only wonder (and kind of doubt) if we'll want more - if this is as
close to telepathy as needs be.
Travis: Google is a can stuck to everyone's can.
Kingtycoon: ha
You're talking about the sitting around in a group confabulating ideas and knowledge right?
Travis: Right.
Kingtycoon: But I can't hear you because I have to go play DnD with my crowd of weirdos tonight.
Travis: Like, remember when people would talk about history?
Kingtycoon: Where we sit around and do what you're talking about.
Travis: we would tell crazy ass stories about shit we heard from some guy one time and accepted as true.
That doesn't happen anymore. (except on facebook?)
or the order of the cohen bros movies.
Or when T2 came out.
These used to be conversations, now they are search terms.
That's a big deal.
But you see? Now we're talking about ideas. Abstract analyses.
Kingtycoon: Yes. This is the thing.
Travis: That's human shit. That's what the machines can't do.
Kingtycoon: Are abstract analyses possible without
language? So language gives birth to abstractions- ideas are what? An
artefact of language or the whole point?
Machines only mediate these things! They aren't replacements, they augment it.
You say, with
sad-sack conservatism, that a thing was lost and it was good - but
really you're saying - a thing was gained, so much gained in fact that
from this lofty precipice I can see the weakness of what was once common
and is now rare.
Travis: yes, that's what I was saying.
and am.
Kingtycoon: (and besides that, soon enough you'll find your kid will have these chats with you, and you'll feel many ways)
Travis: When we were doing all manual labor, we were hardly human at all.
Ants, maybe. Organized monkeys.
Kingtycoon: In a better system of classification we'd have a clearer line of descent with the ants and the bees rather than the naked apes.
Travis: I'm also not saying if losing things is good or bad.
We were probably much more content without language, just toiling away and breeding.
Kingtycoon: There's a tone of nostalgia, I can see it between the white and black.
Travis: The nostalgia is for sitting around, having conversations. Not the subject.
Kingtycoon: doesn't mean it's there, just that I saw it.
Travis: I'm much more interested in the kinds of
conversations I would have at 20 now with access to all known facts and
global insight.
I like humans. I like humans being humans. I argue that these weird pocket computers make us more so.
(why do we still call them phones, anyway?)
Kingtycoon: IN the past, I often thought of the
dog/wolf/bear and how the bear is an archetype for god because it
succeeds alone where humans, dogs and wolves cannot.
It's got the same biome, the same niche almost, and yet - we rely on each other and it does not.
Travis: I've always focused on the independence subjectivity demands.
And how it's awful.
We all have a need to be dogs and ants and bees, but our brains are bears.
And that sucks.
Sent at 2:03 PM on Wednesday
Travis: Hence: every story, song and fight of ever.
Have to go cover this conference now.
Detroit is the saddest of sad.
Sent at 2:06 PM on Wednesday
Kingtycoon: So, I like the Phone that's called a phone with it's weird save-disk icon, we hold on to this idea of Godhood and Person-being
but it fades to
irrelevance as we look right at our phones, sweet as they are, and
realize - there's nothing on this fucker if there's no-one on the other
side.
Detroit is so golden, it cheers me to think of it. The Forest City...
For elves.
What you were saying made me think about
the different levels of network interleaving - like there's the physical
link and the data link and the presentation layer - wikipedia will tell
you all about that and the ports they use. What I was thinking is -
Maybe that's a good explanation, of the
levels of involvement between the people. In the ancient world these
relationships appear to be weird and tenuous - the Person was a person
and the others only accoutrements - not really a social or humane
intimacy between them. I think of the people now, who are indefensible
to me and how there is a profoundly robust network interconnection.
Back and forth. But compare to the story of Job - who's sons and
daughters all were lost but were replaced - if you lose your wi-fi
signal and find another you don't mourn its loss - and so he was the
same, he didn't care about his children just that he had them.
Maybe because they weren't human yet, in the way that you were saying.