marc pietrzykowski

Just about finished with You Are Not A Gadget, and it continues to provoke, though there are some whopping gaps in Lanier’s various and sundry arguments, like blaming the current fashion for “retro,” mashups, and the like on the way software is written; I see the connection, but it’s pretty tenuous, and ignores all the other factors that make so much of popular culture so godawful boring, like the influence (and distributive constraints) of corporate culture, which is something that Lanier valorizes other places, claiming that the open source community could never produce an iPhone. Well, duh, but is an iPhone really revolutionary? And if so, then what does that say about our expectations for revolution? Anyhow… one thing this book has helped me think more about is mind/body dualism, as I spent around 10 years explaining to myself that the philosophical separation of mind and body was artificial, a Judeo-Christian boo-boo that Descartes helped persist into the 20th century; that mind was nothing more than an expression of body, a function of brain chemicals interacting with external stimuli. I had begun to realize, prior to reading You Are Not A Gadget, that the stories I had been telling myself about mind/body dualism were in fact a reaction to evils done in the name of dualism: the mortification and denigration of the body and of loved experience (in favor of some future state of spiritual bliss). The idea that a soul floats down (up?) into the shells of our bodies still strikes me as absurd, but there remains, despite the efforts of neuroscientists and AI researchers and the like, something decidedly ineffable in how we move from neuronal activity to thought. There is still a ghost in the machine, and yes the data keeps piling up about what brain cluster lights up when this happens or what chemicals are triggered when that occurs, but the data could be as large as the universe and we still will not have explained human consciousness, perhaps because we are asking the wrong questions, using the wrong languages… but it makes me happy, the idea that I’ve been thinking in the wrong direction for 10 years or so; it makes me happy because now I get to think a different way about the problem, which is in itself a pleasing sensation, but moreso because acknowledging that that nature of our time in these bodies is largely a mystery is somehow delightful, and even liberating.

241) Ultra-Lounge, V6: Rhapsodia

I never went head-over-heels for the lounge revival of the 90’s, maybe because I already listened to a lot of this stuff already: Julie London is so nice when you are hungover… so, not sure where I got this CD, but it’s a very serviceable mix, though I could do without the Muzzy Marcellino.

242) Housemartins: The Best of the Housemartins

Up Hull! Such an odd voice, Pual Heaton, instantly distinguishable. I never knew Fatboy Slim was in the band for a while…

243) Split Enz: True Colors

Makes sense this would follow the Housemartins; was I looking for nasally singers from more obscure parts of the British Empire at some point? (Hull and New Zealand). Not my favorite Split Enz, but I am a fan, and “Shark Attack” is pretty great, and of course “I Got You.”

244) Jurassic 5: Power In Numbers

If there wasn’t so much godawful hip-hop coming out in the mid-90’s and early 00’s, Jurassic 5 would not have gotten so much hype, methinks. They are a fine hip-hop collective, but very uneven (a good editor sure would help), both musically and lyrically. Still worth owning to throw into a shuffle…

245) Wu Tang Clan: Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

Wu Tang’s version of “I Am Curious, Yellow.” Alright, it’s great. Still makes me think of Kool Keith “Why are you looking hard with a hood on and Timberland boots, / staring at me for one hour – / – when you could walk up and shake my hand? Why? /Why are you making those mean faces in your videos with the fish lens effects? Why?.”

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I’m working my way through Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget, a gaggle of essays and blog length bits oriented around the idea that much of the internet, thanks to things like Facebook and Twitter and other “web 2.0″ applications (including, importantly, the whole idea of cloud computing) has become an exercise in groupthink. I’m very inclined to agree, even as I type these words into a textbox made by WordPress… but I’m not sure the software is so much the point, except in as much as the way software is written encourages us to think and shape our personalities in reductive, fragmented ways (which also sounds about right). Social networking sites should allow for more individual expression, certainly, but the software is too brittle, from UNIX on, to encourage anything but conformity, which in turn encourages more conformity. I think that is the thrust of his opening arguments, but the book is written in fragments too, which almost seems like one of those parlor game lit theory ideas from the 1970’s and 80’s, Derrida “resisting” meaning through intentionally avoiding meaning, jumbling up the text as a means for resisting the “linear”–but I just think that’s how Lanier organizes things, like a programmer would, into modules of meaning. Perhaps I will know better when I’m done, and the book requires careful reading, lest you sound like this dolt , who makes the old “if it’s too loud, you’re too old” argument and sounds like a preening teen on American Bandstand. In fact, Agger (the dolt) actually helps prove Lanier’s point by reflexively, and with little depth, attacking any critique of the “hive mind” romantic and undemocratic. Decisions made by a mass of anonymous folks are NOT democratic decisions. Gary Kasparov commented in a recent article that more and more, chess masters are playing the way a computer would play, because they are trained by computers, but who wants to watch 2 computers play chess? Or, have a computer program that describes the outcome of a baseball game, rather than actually watching the game… or that makes music, or any one of the manifold human activities that are interesting because of how they deviate from the norm, not because of how the hive anoints them.

237) Animal Collective: Strawberry Jam

Interesting enough noises and production stuff, but not much to the songwriting, and no soul that I can see, not even digital soul… not sure what the hype is about, except that people confuse production values with song quality quite a bit (see: movies that are CGI experiments).

238) Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus

Also some great production here, but production meant to emphasize a great set of songs, interesting, dynamic, challenging songs, rather than production being an end to itself. Try playing “Hiding All the Way” at your local bar during happy hour, you will be much loved.

239) Minutemen: Double Nickles on the Dime

Still pretty stunning, twenty years and hundreds of listens later. If you are a musician and don’t dig this, you need to go back to school.

240) N.E.R.D: Fly Or Die

And again, production as the key to the kingdom… 2 or 3 good songs, and a lot of wallpaper. Wallpaper is fine, I just don’t want to stare it for long peroids of time.

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