Shadows on a cave wall

Around 35,000 years ago a series of 26 symbols began to emerge on cave walls and rock formations around which our neolithic ancestors gathered and sheltered. Overlooked until recently a pattern has begun to emerge of a global written language, or at the very least a globally recognized system of synecdoches that signify an intelligence in our neolithic ancestors far more complex than previously credited. While some of these symbols can be clearly seen in Irish sites such as Newgrange, itself around 5,000 years old, examples have been found on all six inhabited continents up to 30,000 years earlier, indicating a continuous pattern of symbol usage over the course of at least 30,000 years.

Our current Latin alphabet evolved from the earlier Etruscan, itself based on Cumaen Greek which first appeared around the 8th century BCE, placing our own letters in existence for less than 3,000 years, or 10% of the lifetime of the neolithic synecdoches.

The need and desire to communicate complex thoughts with the Other is something that has been a driving force in the human psyche since the first clearly identifiable humans evolved. Indeed recent research suggest something much older, with a proto-language being postulated in the hoots and bellows of Campbell's monkey's in the Ivory Coast, yet to date recorded communication seems to be the exclusive provenance of humanity.

And yet despite 35,000 years of literary evolution I have found myself frustrated with my inability to communicate with those around me. It seems that the more time I spend trying to understand a concept, the poorer I am at relating my understanding to others. I grasp for the words, looking for the ability to synthesize what I think and believe into something explainable to those around me, and I find that I can't. There is a bottleneck between the concepts in my head and my interactions with the Other and in the immediacy of conversation communication fails me.

Misunderstandings by the Other, the sense of failure in the Self birthed by the constant stream of questioning and clarifications my statements induce, the internal anger at my own inability to effectively share my thoughts with those around me.

Why am I not better at this?

Is that what writing is? Is that why synecdoches and symbols evolved, to condense a series of thoughts and concepts into a single sigil easily grasped and understood by all who view it, imparting knowledge through familiarity, an agreed first principle of gnosis?

Or is it the opposite, are symbols a trigger to self-understanding rather than the object of understanding itself? In conversation you have the ability to question statements and demand further clarification from the Other, but in writing the Other is removed and you have only your own knowledge and experience to question, thus the work necessary to understand is greater. Is knowledge gained through debate less ingrained because the work to gain it has been shared?

Or is this thought just a salve to sooth my own frustrations at not being able to communicate effectively with the Other through conversation? A bad workman blames his tools, thus by necessity it is language itself at fault, not my own ability to use it.

Why am I not better at this?

Links
The Origins of Writing at New Scientist
"Alpha Beta" - John Man traces the evolution of the Latin alphabet
NY Times on simian linguistics

The root of all evil

Blurgh.

That, my friends, is the technical term for how I am feeling this morning. Normally at this stage in the day I am up, bouncy and refreshed and ready to take on the world, at least in blog form. My day begins, post ablutions, with a trip to the it's-criminal-just-how-close-it-actually-is local coffee shop and the purchase of a tasty frothy beverage of the hot and non-alcoholic kind. The wind in my hair, the rain on my cheek, the caffeine in my bloodstream are all part of my daily ritual of awaking, but the stars are aligning (and not in a good way) and something about this ritual has to change.

I went in to Brown Thomas this week to look for Gaggia coffee machine. Now BT would not normally be the type of shop I would share my custom with, being almost the exclusive domain of Ladies Who Lunch and their Celtic Tiger Cubs. Were I outfitting myself for a best dressed partner (there being no easy acronym for "wives, girlfriends, and that mysterious category of 'other' that allows the still-married Taoiseach to bring his mistress along to State events and not be condemned by the Catholic Church) competition in the Fianna Fail tent at the Galway Races no doubt BT would be the place to go for a lovely smock, but normally I would not darken its doors. However a quick online search told me that BT had a Gaggia shop, so off I went.

BT is obviously run by Ireland's most clever and well funded psychologists, for its ground floor is an intricate rat's maze through which one must dart and scurry avoiding the shambling automatons that look scarily like actual humans save for their hideous painted clown visages and glowing nuclear orange skin that stand hyena-like guarding a fresh kill over their counters of placenta-enriched lotions and potions that absolutely guarantee your husband won't leave you for a younger model like he left his first wife for you.

(I bought two, just in case)

But why brave all this? Is a Gaggia not the ultimate symbol of the Celtic Tiger years, the product of an Ireland that abandoned generations of milky-tea history and surrendered to the rich-roast frothy embrace of neo-liberalism? Possibly.

My Grandparents are tea drinkers and have been all their lives, with their day divided into inter-tea periods as they count down the hours to lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, and finally 9pm supper with a biscuit and the news. My parents, however, are all coffee drinkers as are my uncles and aunts, a generation of jittery twitches and nervous bursts of energy poured into fruitless endeavors abandoned in their prime when the short focus of attention moved on to the next shiny thing. My own generation fell in love with the foamer and the three Euro mochabochachocachino as a sign of our disposable wealth, and the kids behind us in the office have already moved on to Red Bull and Frosties for their morning pick-me up, each generation outdoing the next in its need for a pharmacological start to the day. No doubt the future drones of Gen Z will arise from bed into the milky embrace of a crackaccino (it's got cocaine in it) before hopping into their flying car and off to the office, with Molokos all round at lunch. Yum.

However today and now there still remains that annoying €3 a pop aspect for my vice of choice, and this has begun to weigh heavily on my mind. A morning beverage six days a week leaves little change from a twenty euro note, with fifty one weeks (the beverage dealer being closed between Christmas and New Years) bringing us to just over €900 a year. Yikes. At that sort of money the €250 a small Gaggia will cost starts to look like a more reasonable investment. And so off I went to brave the degradations of that sticky-sweet smelling oompaloompa-land.

Only to find that Gaggia is no longer cool enough for Ireland's bright-orange young things, banished from the shelves now all the hip cats quaff Nespressos.

I have many problems with this. Nespresso is a capsule-system from Nestle (kills babies), which a) is a proprietary system that instead of being able to use whatever coffee you like requires you to continually buy Nespresso capsules from Nestle (kills babies) at the proprietary Nespresso store in BT that occupies the space where shiny-chrome Gaggias once stood. I like my hot frothy beverage open source and DRM-free thank you very much, b) it is incredibly unenvironmentally friendly with each capsule being a single cup's worth of coffee encased in an unrecyclable plastic and aluminium mix destined to end up in the gut of a migrating Tern, c) none of the coffee that ends up in Nestle (kills babies) Nespresso capsules is Fair Trade, and coffee bean pickers and growers are among the most exploited workers in the world, and finally d), and this is the biggy, its Nestle (kills babies), and Nestle kills babies! All the George Clooneys in the world can't mask the smell of blood richly infused in each and every perfect cup of Nespresso.

So off I left feeling simultaneously saddened and disgusted with myself for compromising my principles enough to venture in and cheated that I left empty handed. With the donning of the ritual sackcloth and ashes that marks the start of each golden shame-spiral, I thought now would be a good time to question my relationship with my morning beverage and coffee in general.

I am a poor sleeper, I have high cholesterol, I am prone to stress, and am, at times, a frustrated ball of nervous energy, all before I have a single cup of coffee. Perhaps an excessive amount of coffee drinking, in fact any level of coffee drinking, is not necessarily a good thing for me.

I am, however, unable to drink proper tea for I find it too acidic, am not a fan of hot chocolate, find hippy herbal teas too anemic, am too young for Horlicks and too old for Ovaltine and so basically have been driven back to coffee time and time again despite all its obvious flaws.

Until this week when someone suggested Chicory. What? Chicory. Actually Chicory Root, specifically Prewett's Organic Chicory drink, no caffeine and now completely gluten free. Yay.

To be honest its not too bad, the French have been diluting or substituting coffee with chicory for hundreds of years and it comes across as a slightly weak, odd tasting coffee. It has filled the need this week to have a cup in my hand as I think and type, but like a smoker with a lollipop the body memory may be fooled but I still know its not the same.

Blurgh.

(oh, and if you think the whole Nestle killing babies thing is a tad exaggerated, check out this article from the Guardian in 2007 that gives a pretty good overview of what Nestle have done and are still doing, and why the boycott of their products is as important today as it was when it started over thirty years ago)

Encounters at the end of the world

Just back from the first TASC Encounters public lecture, featuring Mark Mortell in conversation with Fintan O'Toole. Much of the conversation was drawn from O'Toole's recent book, "Ship of Fools", the source of much of my wrath and ire in January, and although Mortell, coming from the opposite end of the political spectrum to O'Toole, had a tendency to cut O'Toole off from longer polemics just as they started to get really juicy (purely in the interest of fairness and balance, you see), overall the format worked and the night was in equal parts inspiring and infuriating, and completely engaging.

Much of the content revisited classic O'Toole themes; Ireland is stuck in a 19th century mind-set, our recent problems are caused by the aura of impunity that surrounds the actions of our Celtic Tiger gentry, we've never as a nation had to fight for our democratic institutions so they never have really taken hold in the hearts and minds of our citizens in the way they did in Europe post WWII, our political and civic development is hampered by the lack of a true left/right dichotomy in our political culture which in a very real sense suggests that we do not have a functioning democracy, and so forth.

As we worked our way through the Q&A session I found myself increasingly despondent by the lack of possibility for true change, as questioner after questioner asked where our anger was, and why the streets were not filled with citizens appalled by the injustices inflicted upon them. I wondered, not for the first time, if I wouldn't be better off to just pack my bags and leave the country for good and turn my back on the whole mess, just in time to hear O'Toole explain that traditionally emigration and not revolution had been our greatest form of social protest - if you don't like what's being done to you, historically you leave - much to the detriment of the nation as whole.

Oops.

This is an interesting notion, and one that sadly did not occur to me in this way before, and on the walk home I realised that Ireland is a Darwinian model of hereditary subservience. The most rebellious of each generation faced with the frustrations of battling against the authoritarian institutions of church and state chose the easy option and upped roots and left, leaving behind the less adventurous and more complacent. Generation after generation of those left behind bred for complacency until we are left today with a nation that can barely muster the energy to sigh a collective "Meh" when the corruptions of our leaders are exposed and our futures publicly bankrupted by the cabals of our political dynasties and their financiers. It is survival of the apathetic, sure what can we do about it so why bother even trying?

At last TASC is trying. The formation of this progressive think-tank has been one of the most positive developments in what passes for Ireland's Public Sphere in recent years, and events like tonight will hopefully form the foundations of a new energy and will to make things better in the hearts and minds of all who participate.

Or give us all something to reminisce about in twenty years time in Paris, New York, London, Sydney, Boston, Berlin, Chicago...

Links
TASC
TASC Progressive Economy blog
"Ship of Fools" by Fintan O'Toole

A bit of pruning

"As you can see the two blackcurrent bushes here, probably closer than you would ideally plant" - Trevor Sargent

"Well obviously you've had them for a few years and you've done a bit of pruning but like a lot of people you haven't been terribly brave and you've left a lot of the old wood and I'm afraid we're going to need to do a bit of damage here" - Nicky Kyle

Nicky Kyle in conversation with Trevor Sargent, January 2010.

It really is time to call shenanigans once and for all on the current Government. Last week the Greens publicly support (then) Minister O'Dea during a vote of confidence only to have Senator Dan Boyle Tweet his lack of confidence in O'Dea after the vote, and so the Minister had to resign late on Thursday evening. The Government survived but the Greens publicly stood up to Fianna Fail. This afternoon the Evening Herald runs with a leaked story about Green Minister Trevor Sargent interfering in a Garda case, and he resigns within a matter of hours.

Has any political assassination ever been conducted so clumsily and cack-handedly? Fianna Fail have bypassed the whole horse-head-in-a-bed stage and moved directly to ambushes-at-toll-booths. We are now at full-on "they pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue' in the best Oirish accent Sean Connery can muster.

Sargent is a decent person, he led the Greens to election victory and then kept his word that he would not lead the Party into coalition with Fianna Fail, resigning as party leader after the members voted in favour of the ill fated deal. Over the last twelve months political commentators have suggested that he was the only Green TD who stood a chance of keeping his seat come the next election, and now he has had to resign in disgrace, collateral damage in the ongoing soap opera that masquerades as our current Government.

Its like watching your parents constantly fight in public, after it happens often enough you get over the shock and just wish they would hurry up and get a divorce and stop embarrassing you in front of your friends. Seriously guys, we know you still love us and we know its not our fault. Sometimes two people just aren't meant to be together any more. Now go your separate ways and get with the whole 'buying us lots of presents out of guilt' already.

You know, for kids

Just a quick note this evening to drool over "The Rabbits" by John Marsden and illustrated by Shaun Tan. An Australian children's picture book (as in a book from Australia, not necessarily exclusively for antipodean enfants) it tells the history of the European conquest of Australia from the indigenous perspective and throws in a whole lot of amazing thoughts on sustainability and ecology all wrapped up in some of the most jaw-droppingly stunning artwork I have ever seen in a book, as if Ralph Steadman and Dave McKean had collaborated on Yellow Submarine. Just beautiful.

"The Rabbits" was one of three Tan books I picked up a while back on the recommendation of Mr Rhino, the other two being "The Lost Thing" and "The Arrival", and all three get the Unkie Dave seal of approval.

You don't actually need to have children of your own to buy them, but its probably best to buy them online so you avoid looking creepy while hanging out in the kids' section of your local bookshop minus any actual accompanying children. If you feel odd keeping them for yourself, surreptitiously give them to your friends' children as christmas and/or birthday presents and then run away quickly leaving mummy and daddy to deal with the subsequent questions of "What does 'They stole our children' mean?"

A fun night for the whole family is thus ensured.

Links
Shaun Tan's website
Interview with Tan in Dublin
Interview with Tan in the Guardian

Available on Flexible Terms

Friday afternoon, Dublin 2, from the Grand Canal to Stephen's Green the signs are all around you. Dublin is 'To Let'. Dublin is 'For Sale'. Dublin is 'Available on Flexible Terms'.

Stephen's Green, Bank of Scotland. No, not the one just closed down with 750 lost souls across the country and a white notice on the door to its customers saying, "who could have know?". No, the one opposite that, diagonally across the Green and around the corner from the Concert Hall. Boarded up and empty since its tenants all fled, flagship and landmark tagged in red and yellow paint by children become urban shadows. The refuse of homeless nights gathered around doorways and behind metal grills built to block all trespass. Soiled sleeping bags. empty coffee cups from the empty coffee shop across the road, now too available on flexible terms. Who could have known?

Hume Street Hospital, opened in 1911 and closed December 2006. Empty, derelict, tendered out to developers and set to become a wellness centre and restaurant. In its doorway between two sets of Georgian columns lie four people all under 25, two men, two women, wrapped up in blankets and sleeping bags like Charlie Bucket's grandparents. Grandpa Joe, Grandma Josephine. Grandpa George and Grandma Georgina. All under 25. Its 4pm on a Friday afternoon in the doorstep of the future wellness centre. Twenty five meters away and around the corner on Ely Place and you're in the Royal Hibernian Academy. Twenty five meters and a million miles away for the Mirror Mirror exhibition of artists' self portraits chosen by artists who portray the self, in a great round circular hug of self-appreciation. A mirror raised to Ireland and all we see is ourselves in the foreground, the background remains opaque. Twenty five meters away between the decaying pillars of our glorious past our present is ignored and our future is made purposefully opaque.

The National Institute for Spatial and Regional Analysis says there are 302,625 homes lying empty in the country. The Department of the Environment says there are 56,000 households in urgent need of social housing. Five empty houses for every household that needs one. The Homeless Agency reports that there are almost 2,500 homeless people in Dublin alone. The NISRA says we built 4 times the number of houses needed in Dublin between 2006 and 2009, yet every night at least 100 people are turned away from the city hostels and shelters and back onto the streets.

6:30pm, Wednesday 17th, Green Party Senator Dan Boyle brings down a Government Minister with a single Tweet. The Greens take a stand, they express their principles, the Minister for Defence goes or they go. "I don't have confidence in the Minister" says Dan Boyle and so the earth moves and the stars align and the Minister is forced to go. His crime, to deny making allegations to a journalist about a political opponent. The Greens can stomach the simultaneous introduction of a Blasphemy Bill and the bankrolling by the taxpayer of the Catholic Church's payments to victims of Clerical Abuse, a Criminal Justice Bill that allows convictions on the word of a retired Garda alone, the submission of irregular expenses by the Ceann Comhairle and the mortgaging of our future to bail out property developers and bankers with NAMA. None of these issues trouble the Greens who stood shoulder to shoulder with their Government colleagues at every juncture, but allegations that a politician tried to smear an opponent in a campaign is their Rubicon, this is the high moral ground where the Greens choose to take their stand.

56,000 households in urgent need of social housing says Green Party leader John Gormley's own department, but this is where the Greens choose to take their stand, over whispers in a bar and recorded innuendo. 2,500 homeless people in Dublin alone, 302,625 homes lying empty nationally, the developers and banks who created this catastrophe are being rewarded with public money, and the Minister for Defence is the one they have no confidence in.

A mirror raised to Ireland and all they see is themselves in the foreground, the background remains opaque.

"Available on Flexible Terms" the signs on the streets of Dublin say.

Links
Mirror Mirror at the RHA
Hume Street redevelopment plan
Homeless Agency Dublin report
NISRA's original analysis here and follow up here
Eoin O'Brion at Politico on the current Social Housing Crisis
Department of the Environment's Homelessness Strategy National Implementation Plan (PDF Link)

The headline just writes itself

Possibly the best ever headline appeared in my morning feeds from today's Guardian Online. Curiously the link now directs to the rather more sober "White House adopts low profile as Barack Obama meets Dalai Lama", which while factually accurate lacks the joie de vivre of the original.

I like doors

Many public toilets in China have no doors. There may be a slight partition to separate individual seats, but in many areas such niceties are absent and rows of users sit communally like sports fans in a stadium. While the average Chinese user thinks nothing of this having been accustomed to such a situation since an early age, most Westerners encountering such facilities experience something akin to mortification and opt to do without. Rose George in her rather excellent examination of the challenges of global sanitation "The Big Necessity" describes her first encounter with what is innocently referred to as an "open-style" convenience:

"This is my first open-style experience. I ask [her guide] if there is an etiquette. Where should I look? What is considered rude? Is it obligatory to say ni hao [hello]? I have no idea, because this is turning my concepts of public and private upside down. I know that some schools and institutions in the Western world have doorless toilets, the better to foster compliance or - in the case of the military - to extract individuality. But I grew up in a culture that provided privacy abundantly and without question. I like doors. At the Happiness and Prosperity service station, I know I will miss them"
- 'The Big Necessity', page 146

A few days ago I, like countless thousands of other people around the world, was prompted in Gmail to sign up for Google's new Social Network functionality, Buzz. I like Google; in the past there may have been valid suggestions of me hitting the Kool-Aid a little too much and still today I am something of an occasional evangelist, normally giving each new product a whirl before deciding that it doesn't really add too much value to my digital life and discarding it after a few days. While I am no fan of Social Networks I still clicked "yes" to take Buzz for a test drive, and then the problems began.

To begin with Buzz autogenerated a Social Network for me based on my Gmail contacts. I use my Gmail for both business and personal contacts, so my default network was drawn from both groups. This default setting also happened for any of my contacts that signed up to Buzz, so many of my business contacts had me added to their network automatically. Secondly Buzz generated a default list of online activities from Google products that I use and broadcasted this activity to everyone it had decided should be in my default network, Picasa uploads, shared items in Reader and posts from this blog. Thirdly it altered my Google Profile, a publicly displayed and indexed "about me" page, from being listed as "Unkie Dave" to my real name, and included a directory of all online activity it had decided to broadcast. In addition it added a list to this public profile of everyone it had decided should be in my network, and everyone into whose network I had been added by default, essentially broadcasting my Gmail contacts to the world along with links to each of their profiles containing similar information about them. While all of these functions could be eventually switched off from within Buzz, the default setting rendered everything public.

So thanks to Buzz my private life was broadcast to my business contacts against my will, my business life was broadcast to everyone, and all of this via my profile was indexed by Google and included in their search results.

And worst of all, for five days it was impossible to opt out of Buzz once you had signed up.

The problem here is not that Buzz was poorly tested and launched too quickly and without enough explanation; Google prides itself on launching early and often, then modifying its products based on real user feedback, "do first and ask forgiveness later" is a phrase you hear often around the Googleplex and the company is synonymous with launching almost-there Beta products. It is also not solely that the motivation behind this was to forcibly and instantly create a giant social network from a standing start that would be immediately monazitable; there is, as they say, no such thing as a free lunch and Google's entire success is based on online advertising, more eyeballs on more products mean more advertising revenue, and after all Google is a business. All of this makes perfect sense according to Google's business model and I find no real fault with it.

For me the main problem with Buzz was the basic premis at launch that people should want to share everything with everyone, that there is no division between different categories of contacts and all your activities should be exposed to the world for all to see. It is the notion of enforced sociality.

Maybe this is a generational thing and for folks who are growing up Twittering on their phones from the classroom and experiencing peer pressure to acquire as many online 'Friends' as possible even though half those 'Friends' will inevitably bully them online as well as off, the notion of the separation of public and private, online and offline, is alien and of no concern.

I, however, value my privacy. Even though I blog, share things that I read online and have publicly accessible photo albums, I do so as 'Unkie Dave'. Its all traceable back to here, as is any comment I make on other people's sites, so I am accountable for all that I do online and do not consider that I use the web anonymously. But I still try to maintain some divisions between my work, public and private lives and I value those divisions.

With Buzz, Google took away my doors and exposed my business to the world, and whether it was to foster compliance, extract individuality, or just make a quick buck, I'm altogether not too happy about that.

I like doors.

Pattern Recognition redux

It occurred to me that yesterday's post might have sounded too negative about Midi implementation and electronic music in general, which is unfortunate given the amount of time I spend attempting to engage with both. Jaron Lanier while being one of the creators of virtual reality as we know it today is also a collector of unusual and exotic instruments and a professional musician. He takes refuge in the analog world to recharge and recuperate from the digital realm he is more usually immersed in, and this might partially explain his disdain for digital music as a poor substitute for the richness and variety of expression analog instruments provide.

I am neither a professional musician nor am I able to play a traditional analog instrument, I am however a collector of unusual digital instruments, specifically those designed to allow non-musicians (ie those who can neither play a piano nor read music) to tap into their inner music and share it with all and sundry. To date the Tenori-On from Yamaha and Korg's rather nice Kaossilator have been the most successful in my seemingly endless quest to get the noise in my head out into the really real world. My computer is another, and it is here in the digital realm that you can do many things simply not possible otherwise.

The P22 Music Text Composition Generator is an amazing online tool that takes any text and converts it into a musical composition by assigning a MIDI note to every letter, number and most text characters. And its free. So I thought I would take a look at what could be done with it.

I took the entire text from yesterday's post "Pattern Recognition" and ran it through the generator, creating a rather long midi file. I then uploaded this into Logic, Apple's music production software suite, and created eight tracks, each with the identical MIDI sequence. I then assigned a different virtual instrument from within Logic to each of these tracks, though of course I could have connected my Mac to any number of external instruments and synths and used the MIDI track to control them. As this was just a proof of concept I didn't bother cutting up or altering any of the individual tracks, the only changes made to them once the instrument was assigned was on individual volume levels of each track, and I will admit to getting a bit creative with these. I ended up going for a tempo of 900bpm, and this brought the entire track down to just over eight minutes.

The whole thing took only a few hours until I had something I was happy with. I exported the track as an MP3 and uploaded it to Soundcloud, and the results you can hear for yourself below.

Pattern Recognition by UnkieDave

So there you have it, the sound of the written word. Something that would never have existed in an analog setting. Not better, not worse, just different.

Of course once you have music expressed in digital form you can continue to manipulate it to an extreem level. Photosounder is another program that expands the possibilities of musical creation by manipulating images and converting them to audio. Uploading the 'Pattern Recognition' song into Photosounder converts it into a visual representation of all the individual notes, so we now have a visual representation of text as filtered through audio:

Of course far more interesting is the reverse of this process where pictures are uploaded into Photosounder and then converted into an audio file. Aphex Twin was an early experimenter with this technology and some of his tracks are actually audio generated by digital images of his face. Plaid followed with sounds generated by images of their album covers and Venetian Snares threw in pictures of his cat to his appropriately named "Songs about my cats", as analysed below by bastwood.com

The point of all this is simply to argue that there is as much opportunity for genuine creation in digital music, and creation in ways not possible in an anlog only environment. Lanier derides mashup culture, with endless remixes and nothing new being born from the electronic environment and I disagree with this strongly. It is true that looking at most mainstream music you see nothing more than endless cycle of covers, samples and clumsily manipulated loops with little or no spark and imagination, but that has less to do with the method and tools used and more to do with the following of strict musical templates as dictated by the music industry.

Digital can be as creative as analog but only if it escapes the preprogramed templated world that an industrialized environment attempts to confine us all in. This is as true for the online environment of the web as it is for the offline world of musical expression.

Pattern Recognition

Monday morning, 11am, reading "You Are Not a Gadget" by Jaron Lanier. He is writing about Pattern Recognition. Actually Lanier writes about a lot of things in fragmentary paragraphs that seem to have originally been separate magazine articles, both online and off, amalgamated, collated and aggregated into a single book. He writes about MIDI restricting musical creativity because digital notes cannot reproduce the full tone and timbre of an analog instrument, limited as they are to a series of 1s and 0s, ons and offs, perfectly suited to duplication but impossible to call unique. Our online lives have become MIDI, as pop music has reduced itself to fit the restricted structure of MIDI so too have our digital selves restricted our sense of actual self to fit in with the categories of singe/married/its-complicated and 140 character reflections that 'Social' Networks demand. By categorizing and classifying we reduce our humanity, stripping it away in chunks to fit the standardized molds that are now ubiquitous and infinitely duplicated. Uniqueness is no more than your fifteen pieces of digital flair emblazoned in widget form on your personalized file in the world's largest marketing database. About me? My virtual farm has four sheep and a fence. What kind of Starbucks Coffee are you? I'm a skinny mochalocaccino.

Friday afternoon, 2:18pm, sitting in a cafe on Fade St, looking out the window onto the street. The glass of the fire-escape door forms an L shape with the main window, as I look through the door the reflection from the window is thrown onto it, the left side of the street is reversed and superimposed upon the right side, both equally bright, equally visible, equally existant. I strain my eyes to see the man walking, is he on the left or the right, real or reflected? The woman at his side, is she walking in step or approaching him from the opposite direction? Will they ever meet or are they only connected in my eyes, a trick of the light? In "The City & The City" China Mieville writes of two cities occupying the same space, superimposed upon each other like the reflected couple in the window of my observation, an infinitely recursive mirror with the citizens of each trained from birth to unnotice the Other. Seeing the Other is a crime, the worst crime, a 'Breach' for which punishment is swift and absolute.

Monday afternoon, 12:56pm, the Guardian Online reports of protests in Bil’in, a Palestinian town bisected by the Israeli Peace Wall. 60% of the town's land has been annexed by new Israeli settlements. Every week since 2005 the locals have held protests at the face of the security line that divides the two communities. Both groups live on the same land, believe that land to be theirs and theirs alone, and outside of their regularly scheduled conflict fastidiously try to ignore the other. This week the youth of Bil’in dressed up as Na'vi from James Cameron's 'Avatar' and marched to the Wall to highlight their plight. The reality of what Jimmy Carter calls an Apartheid state is no longer enough to move a digitized, catgeorized public to action. It's complicated. We can only emote when events are portrayed in day-glo pixels with an epic soundtrack. Analog reality we can no longer grasp, but render the trauma of Bil’in in a digital template and the sense of familiar allows us to see.

Friday morning, 11:30 am. The Library Room of the Central Hotel, meeting and discussing plans for a Space. Stewart Brand's "Whole Earth Discipline" is on my mind. GMO is good, says Brand. Nuclear Power is good, says Brand. Capitalism is good, says Brand. In 1968 Brand launched the 'Whole Earth Catalogue', now considered to be one of the starting points for the Green movement. In 2010 he, like James Lovelock and many others, says he got it wrong. Techo-industrialism may have caused our global woes, but it is now the only thing that will save us. I disagreed with this, still disagree with this, but Brand is on my mind because he's right about one thing, cities are the only sustainable future. In 2007 we crossed a threshold, for the first time in history more than 50% of the world's population were urban. By 2050 the number could reach 80%. Cities have smaller birthrates, better access to education, more opportunities for women, and collective access to resources places less of a drain on those resources than the sum of all individual's access would be in isolation. But city living comes with a price generated by the reality of being human, the desire for privacy in a confined environment, the social convention to purposefully not look, not see, the need to unnotice the Other. A digital city compounds this need with a drive to unnotice the Self. For a City to sustain itself it needs places where the Self can encounter the Other. These places need to be analog, not solely digital. Minds meeting only in Midi create conversations formed along templates. Last year I asked what should I do. "Make a Space" was one answer, and so I am sitting with others developing an analog space.

Monday, 22:08pm. "Information wants to be free" said Brand, apparently the father of the phrase. Lanier says information does not deserve to be free, information is inanimate, information is an artifact of human thought, information is alienated experience, information isn't real, only humans are real. But it occurs to me that humans are only real when they notice the Other, and the Other notices them. "I see you" say Cameron's Na'vi in greeting to each other. "See us" say the youth of Bil’in in their costumes and body paint, "we are real, we exist, we are human".

Pattern recognition/A pattern of unrecognition.

Reality/unreality.

It's complicated.

Links
"You Are Not a Gadget" by Jaron Lanier
"The City & The City by China Mieville
'Avatar Protest', Guardian Online
The Village of Bil'in
"Whole Earth Discipline" by Stewart Brand

Why I write

It is now four years to the day since I launched this blog. In the beginning it existed purely as a mechanism for learning about the marvelous world of online advertising. While far from being a neo-luddite, the thought of sharing my own thoughts and ideas with the random flotsam of an online audience seemed alien and incomprehensible. This blog was created to learn basic coding and form an understanding of web marketing and that wonderful dance that is search engine optimization. It was empty, hollow and devoid of any spark of personalization, or that sense of self that comes when the author's voice rings out true and loud.

Over time it has grown and evolved, as I found my voice and began to inject more of my own self into its pages. My opinions, beliefs, thoughts and fears all started to take more and more of a position of prominence as the post count slowly increased. With the transformation of my life that occurred as I jettisoned the shackles of corporate enslavement and set out into the uncharted wilderness of underemployment, my online voice grew stronger and bolder still, untethered by the fear of unconsciously generating a career limiting move within the paragraphs of a particularly passionate post, until at last it grew so strong that at times it threatened to overshadow my own offline voice in both tone and volume.

With any anniversary comes a period of reflection and on this day, with an understanding of where this blog has come from, it is worth taking the time to reflect on why I continue to write, and what purpose it serves.

I write to express myself. I am not Unkie Dave, though Unkie Dave is definitely a part of me. I do not consider that I write anonymously, my presence on the web is always linked back to here and my picture looms larger than life over all that I write. But I do adopt a literary persona as I write, for the liberation that comes with exaggeration. Unkie Dave is louder, grumpier, more bombastic, reactionary, caustic and opinionated than I could ever be in real life, or at least ever be and hope to retain a circle of supportive friends. At times as I write Unkie Dave has a little too much control, and the normal care and attention that I would display for the thoughts and feelings of those around me are hurled majestically out the window in an orgy of sarcastic fenestration. This is unfortunate, for I do not believe that there is ever an acceptable level of collateral damage.

I write to understand. Many of the thoughts and ideas that end up posted here are not as formed as I would like them to be, though hopefully they are all more cognizant at the end of the post than they appear to be at the start. When I am feeling at odds with the world around me, I attempt to place order on my physical space through a frenzy of tidying, construction/reconstruction, and general all-round rearranging of the deck-chairs on my own personal Titanic. When I feel at odds with the metaphysical world around me I blog, and many of my posts provide an altogether too intimate illustration of my own thought processes. My blog is my whiteboard, albeit one with successive formulae written onto and around previous iterations that no doubt are confusing to the chance observer who sees a single post as a snapshot rather than as part of a greater whole.

I write to collaborate. I am hauntingly aware of my own limitations as a thinker and after an eighteen month period of unfocused yet frenzied research into a disorganized and uncategorised jumble of topics the only thing that I can say with any degree of certainty is that I now have a much clearer knowledge of the scale of that which I do not know. My ignorance can now be measured in geological scales. I write publicly in the hope that others more knowledgeable or passionate than I will correct me, guide me or affirm that I am on the right course. I am not trying to provide answers nor do I expect others to do likewise, though I am ever hopeful that a genuine dialogue will erupt to the betterment and benefit of my own self-awareness and knowledge base.

I write to create. I am not a craftsman, I am not an artist and despite vague and halfhearted attempts to prove otherwise I am not really a musician. Writing fills a need in me to feel that I am capable of creating something separate to myself, something that can stand apart from me and be experienced in its own right by those who have no other connection to me than the words that I write. This is different to the desire to express myself, for that is about engendering an understanding of me in the other. Creation is my desire to bring into existence something that is not me, but still exists in the other.

I write to feel happiness. I enjoy writing, for all the reasons above and many more that I do not have the words to express. A completed post puts a smile on my face and an embered glow of warm positivity in my belly, whether from the satisfaction of a finished thought or delight in the final shape that completed thought took I do not know, all I do know is that writing is good for me and I need to do it more.

With all this in mind I thank you, reader, collaborator, guide and friend for sharing this journey through my life, mind and soul over the last four years and I hope you will stick around for the next four.

Unkie Dave

And we're back.

We now return to our regularly scheduled program.