Do
Not Cache
The Many Beings are numberless — I vow to save
them.
— A common meditator’s promise.
o:O:o
I think most of us are clear that the changes we seek
and hope for in our human experience and history are not going to
be delivered by a drug, a corporation, or a technology. It doesn’t
appear that any of the commonly extant ideologies are going to deliver
on this, either. Some of us believe that a common religion holds
the key — and this too I think is a misunderstanding.
Our many complex ways of understanding and speaking
of the human quest for knowledge and ‘progress’ have
grown so specific and diverse so as to render any possible library
of them an absurd spectacle of the endless divisions of specific
concern and methodologies of knowing. If all of what is available
in human writing at this moment were gathered in one place, we’d
see something very strange revealed.
For a moment, imagine that we have the opportunity
to make a library that contains a single copy, in book form, of
every piece of written media currently on the planet. This would
include a dump of every possible storage medium, such as computer
tapes, hard disks, backup devices, etc — as well as all the
actual written material currently in existence.
One of the surprises in store for us would be simple:
a huge portion of the library would be garbage. It would be books
of numbers, and statistics and ‘data’ — all meaningless
out of context — and often strangely meaningless even when
in context. In other words ‘abstract assemblies of information’
would reign supreme over a vast and incongrous proportion of our
modern library. Every computer on earth would result in ‘many
books’ — since each one would contain unique textual
data in the form of code and documents, preferences, etc—
each uniquely preserved in completeness within a typewritten volume
in our library. There would be vast sections of ‘advertising’
copy, notebook sections from all the human people who write —
reciepts, invoices, bills of lading, licences — indexes, indexes
of indexes, medical documentation, databases, mailing lists —
ad infinitum.
If we were allowed to see this clearly, in other words
to enter and walk around in such a library, we would be shocked
to discover the real disparity between the ‘books’ that
are actually worth encoding and preserving, and those which are
merely copying themselves madly into new and more meaningless forms.
I believe that less than half of one percent of that
library would be comprised of anything that isn’t ‘just
data’.
Strangely, merely 200 years ago — the opposite
was true.
Something is terribly wrong in The Library.
o:O:o
I was around and active with text before the emergence
of what we call the internet, and before the term ‘e-mail’
was a recognizeable concept. I watched what we call ‘spam’
grow from a rare nuisance to a beligerant tyrant whose activity
generally and specifically compromises the branches of the tree
of communications where it thrives. It is generally believed that spam currently comprises over 80% of all email messages sent.
Though I could speak at length
of the problems and opportunites emergent from these noticings,
there is one feature in particular which I would prefer to focus
upon for the moment, and it is a feature of masquerading that we
may refer to as mimcry.
For the purposes of our exploration, we will forget
about the politics and problems of spam, and begin to view the terrains
and participants more generally — as a garden of relation.
In this garden, some credentials grant access to predators who capitalize
on their access and sovereignty in certain terrains, in order to
gain replicative advantage. This is to say that there are forms
of knowledge, or communication who, having no content or ‘communion-offering’
of their own — must include ‘copied portions’
of vehicles or transports that are known to have value.
What I wish to examine here however is a strategy
and its outcomes in terms of real human experience. Our attempts
to understand and deal with ‘spam’ are little different
in basis from our attempts to understand and stop ‘terrorism’
— because in both cases, if we generalize, we can see that
our goal is really the invention of a sort of self-sustaining organ
that is comparable to the liver and kidneys of a human being; in
attempting to thwart spam, we’re trying to ‘cleanse
and renew the blood’ of a communications transport. Though
we think of this transport and its resources as mechanical, this
is an error of adding precedence in the wrong place. All of these
things arise and serve us only to the degree we invent, service
and sustain them. They are living transports of our own connectivity,
however abstracted into mechanism they become. Thus their activities,
modulations, and circumstances offer us a unique window into our
own communications history, and through this window we may notice
something of great value:
Predatory communications momentums are primarily
mimetic in their activities and outcomes. They co-opt transports
and aspects of connectivity and value, in a recombinantly viral
way that obliterates communication and meaning for the sake of their
own reproducibility.
In a biological entity, this would rapidly result
in death, because the terrain required for this sort of ongoing
operation increases geometrically with each passing instant of successful
replication. Before long at all, there isn’t any terrain that
isn’t owned and operated by mimics. Not only are these mimics
not human — they don’t even have formal existence —
they arise, affect us, and change our world from the entirely informal
dimensions of cognition and communication. In a sense, they are
alike with sentient artifacts of our own congress with the character
and relation-aspects of models we make and empower as ‘what
is true’ and ‘what is real’.
Like metabolic artifacts in the blood — they
change the functioning of human history, and the lives of every
living creature on Earth, each moment — without having any
‘formal’ existence at all.
o:O:o
I wish to explore this example of spam in order for
us to see some of the strategies apparant here : fig1
In examining the content we might notice that 13 of
the 47 words are spelled correctly, yet the ‘content’
and meaning is still almost as clear as if this were not the case.
In terms of terrain-space, this content requires 47 words, comprised
of 313 characters including spaces. The purpose of the misspellings is technical; it allows these words to pass through spam-filters configured to hunt for these terms as topics common to unsolicited emails.
Notice the vast block of text at the end. This content
comprises 283 words requiring 2336 characters. All of these terms
are probably correctly spelled. They are contentless content. Like
the shell of a virus, their purpose is to enable the content —
which desires replication resources — into a terrain where
it is known to be damaging or deadly. The terrain is our human minds,
activities, communications, and lives.
In order to attempt to ‘appear more like valued
content’ this species of transport-predator is currently needing
7.5 times the terrainSpace it actually requires to transmit and
replicate its message into a human host. Obviously this is only
a phase in a process that is self-elaborating. More and new kinds
of non-content will be added, so that eventually, the amount of
terrain required to deliver a completely useless message is absurd.
One thing that we can see here is that there is really a single
form of useless message being presented, copied, and empowered —
in order to proceed, it wears different masks.
It’s message is simple: copy me, over yourselves,
faster — harder, now.
