Also, Redondo Beach looks lovely. Maybe this is a sign from the machine world to move to the beach! --Now I'm imagining a kind of dystopian future where if a computer machine program gets your info wrong, you have get your real life to align with the machine, or else be deleted, like error 404: page not found. (The other day at my kid's orthodontist appointment the insurance sheet had me married to - you cannot make this up - my friend's 75 year old dad. Apparently I had Andrea down as an emergency contact for the kids on the dentist file, and somehow an error then had her father as my husband. How?! Sorry, Matthew. I'm married to Warren now. The computer said so.)
I think what you're writing about, in addition to the machine-world madness we're forced to live in (whenever I get one of those automated voice assistants on the line, my brain always tries to guess what I need to say to make the machine happy. It is painful trying to get my brain to think like a machine. Usually unsuccessfully) is our disintegrating capacity for hospitality. Hospitality requires a well-kept home. Part of making guests feel welcome and valued is to invite them into a space that is cared for, and ordered, and has little details that make someone at ease and delighted -- you know, like a chandelier in the front entrance that sets the tone - elegant and playful - for the entire house. The point is to let guests in and make them feel at home. But in order to have them *feel* at home, a space actually has to belong to you: cared for, paid for, ordered. You can't let the guests take over (or in my case, the teenagers) because they don't have the investment in the property that you have. You want to love others by inviting them in. But first you have to love and care for one's home so that others are welcome in it (caring for a home is the constant work of keeping entropy at bay). Hospitality is service to others. It is probably the most ancient virtue. It involves generosity and protection and graciousness and even humility. But it can't happen if there is no sense that one has one's own space that he can then offer to guests.
Justin Smith-Ruiu at The Hinternet had a piece touching on this recently. An excerpt: "I think, in other words, that the “solipsistic internet”, beyond the open internet of social media and the closed internet of Asparouhova’s antimemetic spaces, is the most important part of the story of our current technological revolution. The frustrations and humiliations it brings do not make for nearly as compelling news as the cancellations that occur on the open internet, and that seem to vindicate the Girardian view according to which the great majority of people are a bunch of imitative and desperate joiners looking for scapegoats to enable them to feel like part of a community. On the solipsistic internet —solipsistic not in the sense that I actually believe, there, that I am the only person in existence, but only to the extent that “it’s just me”, solus ipse sum— there simply is no question of community at all. And to that extent the solipsistic internet does most completely, if in a low-key way, what the open internet has long been accused of doing in dramatic fashion: it shreds our human bonds, and leaves both society and our psyches in tatters."
He describes among other things the now ubiquitous experience of being locked out of digital spaces due to poorly conceived password protocols and the like - and I worry that some opportunistic force will provide us all with the perfect Machine skeleton key to our digital lives, all for the low-low price of our absolute compliance.
I just love the neologism, “Neo-shithole”! Your post arrived as I am on day 11 of trying to bypass faulty validation algorithms in a “system of record” to pay incentive funds to an industrial customer to be more energy efficient. Virtuous outcome rendered impossible by helpful systems peeps trying to do good, God bless ‘em. We are all caught in a structural trap (from Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together). My colleagues have taken inspiration from your term, realizing that we are stuck in this neo-shithole together. I enjoyed the term so much that I had to share it over and over: “I find this term uproariously funny because of the combo of semiotic irony, deep truth, and sheer wit.”
Please keep writing on this specific theme. The communications-cluster fuck-nuisance-tax thing. It’s cathartic.
I was at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk recently and was also forced to download the park mobile app to park. Someone needs to remake that 1990s movie Falling Down — but this time the indignity that breaks the protagonist involves forced apps.
But did you get the x-ray scheduled?
Also, Redondo Beach looks lovely. Maybe this is a sign from the machine world to move to the beach! --Now I'm imagining a kind of dystopian future where if a computer machine program gets your info wrong, you have get your real life to align with the machine, or else be deleted, like error 404: page not found. (The other day at my kid's orthodontist appointment the insurance sheet had me married to - you cannot make this up - my friend's 75 year old dad. Apparently I had Andrea down as an emergency contact for the kids on the dentist file, and somehow an error then had her father as my husband. How?! Sorry, Matthew. I'm married to Warren now. The computer said so.)
I think what you're writing about, in addition to the machine-world madness we're forced to live in (whenever I get one of those automated voice assistants on the line, my brain always tries to guess what I need to say to make the machine happy. It is painful trying to get my brain to think like a machine. Usually unsuccessfully) is our disintegrating capacity for hospitality. Hospitality requires a well-kept home. Part of making guests feel welcome and valued is to invite them into a space that is cared for, and ordered, and has little details that make someone at ease and delighted -- you know, like a chandelier in the front entrance that sets the tone - elegant and playful - for the entire house. The point is to let guests in and make them feel at home. But in order to have them *feel* at home, a space actually has to belong to you: cared for, paid for, ordered. You can't let the guests take over (or in my case, the teenagers) because they don't have the investment in the property that you have. You want to love others by inviting them in. But first you have to love and care for one's home so that others are welcome in it (caring for a home is the constant work of keeping entropy at bay). Hospitality is service to others. It is probably the most ancient virtue. It involves generosity and protection and graciousness and even humility. But it can't happen if there is no sense that one has one's own space that he can then offer to guests.
Why are you so awesome?
To be pleasing to you!
Justin Smith-Ruiu at The Hinternet had a piece touching on this recently. An excerpt: "I think, in other words, that the “solipsistic internet”, beyond the open internet of social media and the closed internet of Asparouhova’s antimemetic spaces, is the most important part of the story of our current technological revolution. The frustrations and humiliations it brings do not make for nearly as compelling news as the cancellations that occur on the open internet, and that seem to vindicate the Girardian view according to which the great majority of people are a bunch of imitative and desperate joiners looking for scapegoats to enable them to feel like part of a community. On the solipsistic internet —solipsistic not in the sense that I actually believe, there, that I am the only person in existence, but only to the extent that “it’s just me”, solus ipse sum— there simply is no question of community at all. And to that extent the solipsistic internet does most completely, if in a low-key way, what the open internet has long been accused of doing in dramatic fashion: it shreds our human bonds, and leaves both society and our psyches in tatters."
He describes among other things the now ubiquitous experience of being locked out of digital spaces due to poorly conceived password protocols and the like - and I worry that some opportunistic force will provide us all with the perfect Machine skeleton key to our digital lives, all for the low-low price of our absolute compliance.
I just love the neologism, “Neo-shithole”! Your post arrived as I am on day 11 of trying to bypass faulty validation algorithms in a “system of record” to pay incentive funds to an industrial customer to be more energy efficient. Virtuous outcome rendered impossible by helpful systems peeps trying to do good, God bless ‘em. We are all caught in a structural trap (from Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together). My colleagues have taken inspiration from your term, realizing that we are stuck in this neo-shithole together. I enjoyed the term so much that I had to share it over and over: “I find this term uproariously funny because of the combo of semiotic irony, deep truth, and sheer wit.”
Please keep writing on this specific theme. The communications-cluster fuck-nuisance-tax thing. It’s cathartic.
I was at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk recently and was also forced to download the park mobile app to park. Someone needs to remake that 1990s movie Falling Down — but this time the indignity that breaks the protagonist involves forced apps.
Oh Matt, I’d say this was hilarious if I wasn’t pretty certain how pissed off you were!
It started as a full-on rant, and ended as a rant slightly leavened with theorizing. One does what one can to redeem the day.
:) And you do so beautifully. Thank you! It helps me redeem mine.
We are all Matt now.
That’s what the database says.
What you describe in your piece is a significant reason people are so anxious and literally losing their minds!
Your last 3 pieces remind me why I subscribe and enjoyed your book many years ago.