Weber’s Polar Night

Hopefully, those of you who’re interested have found time to watch the new season of BSG.

I’ve heard the ratings are down a bit. If so, that’s a shame because the show is reaching its “Apocalypse Now” apotheosis: the trends of previous seasons are maturing. For the characters, the results aren’t pleasant.

Although categorized as science fiction — because of the starships, thinking machines and synthetic, “human form” cybernetics — I think it’s more accurate to call BSG a new and extended speculative political fiction riff on, among other things, the themes covered in “Doctor Strangelove“.

As you probably remember, Dr. Strangelove is a dark comedy about the paranoia which defined the high Cold War years. It’s also about the mad pursuit of nuclear ‘defense systems’ created to banish the fear born of that paranoia. (A pursuit which paradoxically increased the very thing it was meant to cast out: an almost Hegelian ‘negation of the negation’).

In BSG’s case, there’s a defining trauma — the Cylon’s near total destruction of humanity — followed by a desperate and reduced life within the rusting bulkheads of the “fugitive fleet”. Because of the painfully undeniable reality of both the near-genocide and the despondent, claustrophobic conditions within the fleet, a multitude of sins and psychoses can be explained and indeed, provisionally forgiven.

But during this final season, brittle social arrangments are starting to break down; intriguingly, this is happening amongst both the fleeing remnant of humanity and the once seemingly all powerful (and, in the case of ‘human form’ Six, always well dressed) Cylons.

Religious conflict and, interestingly, a strange sort of paradoxically hyperactive ennui seem to be at the heart of the growing disorder in both camps.

…

BSG and the Conquest of Mexico

Recently, I’ve started reading William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843). This book recounts the remarkable story of Hernan Cortes‘ fatal intervention into Aztec history. Contrary to the tale I was told in school — which was that the Aztecs, overawed by the sight of white men on horseback armed with guns and cannons, quickly surrendered and converted to the Christian creed — Prescott describes a complex, lengthy and violent conflict between European invaders and their ferocious Aztec opponents.

And while the saga has many critical elements — internecine struggle between Spanish factions, discontent amongst the Indian peoples under the yoke of Tenochtitlan, Cortes’ craftiness and dual desire for gold and converts, etc — to me, the key element (and the one most resonant with BSG) is the war of religious ideas.

During last Friday’s BSG episode the Baltar character single handedly raided the makeshift temple (really, only a cramped room onboard Galactica) of a group of polytheists. Declaring their multi-god faith to be false he smashed their icons, disrupting the quiet ceremony and, more ominously, the assumption of peaceful religious coexistence.

This fictional incident reminded me of the following moment from Prescott’s history, in which the conquistadors, eager to prove to one of the subject peoples of the Aztec empire that their gods are false, desecrate a temple.

Prescott writes:

<snip>

These two missionaries vainly laboured to persuade the people of Cozumel to renounce their abominations, and to allow the Indian idols, in which the Christians recognised the true lineaments of Satan, to be thrown down and demolished. The simple natives, filled with horror at the proposed profanation, exclaimed that these were the gods who sent them the sunshine and the storm, and, should any violence be offered, they would be sure to avenge it by sending their lightnings on the heads of its perpetrators.

Cortes was probably not much of a polemic. At all events, he preferred on the present occasion action to argument; and thought that the best way to convince the Indians of their error was to prove the falsehood of the prediction. He accordingly, without further ceremony, caused the venerated images to be rolled down the stairs of the great temple, amidst the groans and lamentations of the natives. An altar was hastily constructed, an image of the Virgin and Child placed over it, and mass was performed by Father Olmedo and his reverend companion for the first time within the walls of a temple in New Spain. The patient ministers tried once more to pour the light of the gospel into the benighted understandings of the islanders, and to expound the mysteries of the Catholic faith. The Indian interpreter must have afforded rather a dubious channel for the transmission of such abstruse doctrines. But they at length found favour with their auditors, who, whether overawed by the bold bearing of the invaders, or convinced of the impotence of deities that could not shield their own shrines from violation, now consented to embrace Christianity.

[...]

Since 11 Sept 2001 and the creation of the DHS which followed, some people (How many? I don’t know) entering the US have been subjected to a variety of humiliations. Every Internet news savvy leftist and civil libertarian is familiar with stories of unwarranted detentions, deportations, odd “security” interrogations and so on.

There is, for example, the recent experience of Erla Osk Arnardottir Lillendahl, a woman from Iceland who reports being shackled and denied food, water and rest for 14 hours and held for a total of two days after arriving at New York’s JFK. Her apparent crime was overstaying her visa by a week or so…in 1995. Here’s an excerpt from her blog entry describing the detention:

<snip>

I was completely exhausted, tired and cold. Fourteen hours after I had landed I had something to eat and drink for the first time. I was given porridge and bread. But it did not help much. I was afraid and the attitude of all who handled me was abysmal to say the least. They did not speak to me as much as snap at me. Once again I asked to make a telephone call and this time the answer was positive. I was relieved but the relief was short-lived. For the telephone was set up for collect calls only and it was not possible to make overseas calls. The jailguard held my cell phone in his hand. I explained to him that I could not make a call from the jail telephone and asked to be allowed to make one call from my own phone. That was out of the question. I spent the next 9 hours in a small, dirty cell. The only thing in there was a narrow steel board which extended out from the wall, a sink and toilet. I wish I never experience again in my life the feeling of confinement and helplessness which I experienced there.

[...]

Full (and I recommend you read it).

Let’s look beneath the story’s immediate details and consider the mechanics.

A woman is detained and treated as if she were a dangerous criminal (or, more to the point, terrorist) because of a twelve year old technicality. She’s subjected to what sound like civilian-adapted versions of the “harsh interrogation” techniques used at Camp X-Ray. She’s asked questions about her beliefs. Her jailers maintain an abrupt and harsh demeanor as if they’re tough operatives working against the clock to uncover the location of a ‘dirty bomb’.

What is this if not a form of pornography?

Someone - I believe it was a friend of Susana Breslin - recently said that pr0n performers are modern gladiators. The ancient Romans used gladiatorial games as, among other things, a method of vicariously experiencing the danger of combat: a danger they held in high esteem. Of course, the gladiators were actually fighting and dying but the circumstance (for example, the war against Carthage, re-staged in the Coliseum generations after the fact) was often a simulacrum.

Porn is very much like this. The performers may or may not be experiencing pleasure but the circumstance - for example, the pizza delivery boy gifted with much more of a tip than he hoped for - is pure fantasy, a world in which vigorous sex can happen anywhere and anytime. Porn performers stand in for us, doing things many of us can’t, or won’t do.

The sexual act is real: the setting, unreal.

…

The DHS’ creation was inspired by the fantasy that the US faced an imminent threat to its existence (and this is the key thing to keep in mind: not merely a new law enforcement problem, but an existential threat) which required the founding of a vast state apparatus. In truth, outside of contested hot zones and ‘failed states’, terrorist acts are rare and the total number of active participants small.

What is there for a vast state apparatus to do?

Incidents such as the story of Erla Osk Arnardottir Lillendahl reveal its true job: DHS, TSA and the entire “Global war on Terror” complex are elements of a new sub genre of government sponsored, live action security pr0n. The cruelty is very real, but the circumstance (the security allegedly being created via cruelty) is false, through and through.

Lillendahl had no information to reveal; she concealed no perfidious plans. And yet, she was interrogated as if she held dreadful secrets which desperately had to be uncovered. She became a victim of a gladiatorial event which requires live participants to complete the fashioning of its simulacrum. The guards, the supervisors the rent-a-cops: all stand ready with nothing to do hour after hour except try to portray themselves as grim faced defenders of freedom.

Empowered by their superiors to be arbitrarily vigilant (and with vigilance unofficially defined as cruelty and excess of zeal), it’s inevitable they would select an unsuspecting person, guilty of a minor transgression or victim of a bureaucratic error, upon whom they could act out their false scenarios and dark fantasies.

“You tiny bastard,” she began, and not, it must be pointed out, in the careful whisper Overpastry surely hoped for.

“You tiny, tiny bastard, how dare you - with your mono-mind and pathetic inability to accurately recollect the events of a single day let alone years’ worth of living - how dare you talk to me like a child at a summertime birthday party reaching for one burger too many against its concerned parents’ wishes!”

In spite of their fear (for the bear still menaced nearby, the barrel of his anti-proton gun crackling like a thunderstorm in a bottle) people leaned forward to hear more of Tri-Thought’s unrelenting beratings. What did she mean, they all wondered, by “tiny bastard”? Was she referring to his cock, or perhaps his bank account. The source of their wonder was Overpastry’s quite obvious height advantage over the enraged woman: he towered at least a 0.4 meters above her - and a bit more when she wasn’t wearing her mood enhancing platform shoes.

This difference created a disconnect between the specific form of her insult and the visually available facts.

What no one except a trained and alert cognitive augmentation specialist (or alternatively, someone who, momentarily forgetting the weapon held by an angry, genetically enhanced bear pointed in his or her general direction, carefully listened to what the woman said and put two and two together) could not have known was the fact that what was “tiny” about Overpastry - at least from Tri-Thought’s point of view, wasn’t his penis or his net worth or his life experience or his collection of Kombucha themed love stories (such as the beloved “De-toxed and In Love”) but his aggregate thought capability relative to that of the retired exotic performer.

Tri-Thought, during her years as a wildly sought after dancer - had made a tidy sum of money much of which she devoted to cognitive augmentation surgery. In short, she had three brains: the quite fine one she was born with, and two from South Korean elecronics giant LG; part of their “Indestructable You” coopertative, implantable processor series.

She remembered everything…perfectly. Every event, every feeling was stored, indexed, catalogued and completely accessible in 3 dimensional color images, displayed in the mind’s eye of the implantee.

Needless to say, this made Tri-Thought a formidable opponent in any argument (and most any situation).

She pointed a finger, with its perfect nail, painted a flawless mauve, at Overpastry’s chest and started in again.

“I will handle this situation you weeping, soiled pants half wit! No freakish, escaped mercenary bear - no doubt a Blackwater gene puppet who recently shook free of the juice - is going to ruin my morning ritual of refreshing citrus fruit, oat muffin and heart rate lowering tea!”

No one was more surprised than Mr. Abernathy Overpastry of 1370 Composite Street, Cleveland, Ohio, when an immense Brown bear - outfitted with a brightly colored safety vest and armed with an old timey ray gun (the sort of first gen anti proton device your grandfather might have used to hunt skull faced dogs and those annoying, robotized Norwegian rats that host late night talk shows) - rudely made its way into the Starbucks near his posh office, demanding, in a deep, bear voice, to be served “only the hottest of coffees, kissed by the sweetest of sugars and served in the most expensive of coffee mugs or protons will be loosed from their atomic prisons and howling, your howling, will ensue!”

Mr. Overpastry turned to his companion, a former stripper, once quite famous, whose performance name was Ubiquitous Glitter but who now, instead of returning to the name bestowed upon her by her parents - Denial Highchair - insisted upon being called Tri-Thought, and whispered: “you have a tendency - a weakness, I would call it - to say the wrong thing at the wrong time which, in a delicate situation such as this, will almost surely mean our swift, subatomic doom.   How I would miss your smile, your cruel jokes, your long legs, your perfume brewed from the husks of collapsed stars. I could not replace you so I ask that you stay as silent as the grave lest you disappear in a burst of anti smoke. This bear means business, as is the way of his people.”

Tri-Thought, insulted by this little speech, ground the high heel of her libido enhancement shoes into Overpastry’s right foot. A violent gesture which had the curious effect, owing to the shoe’s unique properties, of arousing him even as he cringed quietly in stabby pain.

“You tiny bastard,” she began…

“When man entered the atomic age he opened a door to a new world. What we’ll eventually find in that new world nobody can predict.”

Dr. Harold Medford, THEM!

They understood…

a half century ago.

Even pop scifi movie makers appeared to understand…

That a threshold had been crossed, a new world found, a new reason to both hope and fear the future, that unmapped country.

When you look at those pop sicfi films from a half century ago - from the best to the worst - there is a common theme: we are not what we were, we have become something new, even as most of the old stays with us, even as our everyday appears mostly unchanged. We have become something new and we’re not ready.

But there’s no choice, they say, no choice at all. There’s no going back.

Fundamentally, this is, I think, what sets the pop scifi of the 1950s - the source material for many of our machine dreams - apart from what we see currently: the mixture of hope and fear, warning and celebration, seems to have disappeared, like morning mist. Perhaps Blade Runner, that extended meditation on loneliness, was the last great filmed example.

What has taken the place of the old nightmares which once walked hand-in-hand with the old dreams?

Jehovah.

Don’t talk to me about Jehovah.

Before that pan dimensional piker appeared on the scene, stealing my worshipers, claiming my territory, I lived an exceptionally beautiful life; really, I can’t begin to describe, not in this clumsy mortal language, the eye searingly radiant splendidness of the life which was - gone now because of that monotheistically obsessed bastard.

Mind you, I brought it on myself. “Zeus, why don’t you leave off the shape shifting and raping for a bit?” Hera nagged. But when you’re a god, you do as you please, yes? Listen, don’t try to bullshit me, you would’ve done the same you self-righteous jackass. In days gone by, I might have assumed the form of a kangaroo and buggered your mom, or yawned and lovingly inserted a lightning bolt at light speed up your left nostril, just because it was a lazy Sunday and left nostrils temporarily annoyed me.

That’s just how it was.

Well of course, Yahweh, Jehovah, whateva comes along - with the help of his masochist of a son (and what the hell was that little show? Executed on a cross by the graceless Roman Empire? You know what Herakles would’ve done if they’d tried to shove him up on one of those things? Try to picture hearts and entrails and severed heads…everywhere…bloody well right) - anyway, Mr. “I Love You” comes along and says, “come unto me, all who are weary and burdened and I shall give you rest.”

Of course the monkeys soaked it up, ran to their little meetings and huddled together for warmth. And really, who could blame them? After a long stretch of my bullshit (and you can’t be fooled about yourself: I admit it, I was a shit head much of the time what with the trans-species sexcapades, the cosmic chess games with mortals as pawns, hurling lightning up asses, killing Cronus and Rhea to pump up the Olympians…and so much more - long rap sheet children), they were done, over and out with the old ways.

And the thing is, for the longest time Yahweh was right up there with the rest of us - thundering from the sky, sending heralds to mete out punishment, making bizarrely arbitrary decisions just because. He was a small time war and harvest god for a minor tribe of goatherds who smelled so bad the fucking goats couldn’t take it; we all knew him of course, he’d show up to meetings, drink ambrosia and get fucked up like the rest of us. But he had plans. Hera and Aphrodite saw it, Athena and Ares too. “Watch that one”, they said. Even Shiva, who scared the shit out of everyone (and let me tell you, he’s a true bad ass, you don’t play with Shiva..total nutter) whispered, in that rough way of his, about “keeping an eye out.”

But none of us saw his master stroke, the move that slid in under the god-radar: the slimy operator sent his son to become one of them, to eat and sleep with them, even die right in front of them, at their grubby hands (and it was a messy death too, not quietly in bed surrounded by grandchildren and a weeping widow). Not only that, but he sold the whole thing, which really was a carnival side show for immortals, as a sacrifice for mortal benefit. Brilliant. Not one of the old gods could match that move’s deftness. One of the greatest marketing maneuvers ever. But there was more: not only was it a sacrifice but a sacrifice to restore a lost harmony between humanity and Yahweh!

A lost order that had no room for the rest of us.

Oh, it took a few centuries but soon enough we were pushed to the margins like a bunch of punks. Look out everybody, the new kid’s in charge! Only he wasn’t all that new and it was all a slick act.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the fucker gloats, holds his perceptual conquest of practically one half of the world over our heads (still doesn’t mess with Shiva though…he’s not crazy and the Indian team possesses some serious worshiper mojo even today).

But all that’s going to change…and soon.

In his most recent book, ” A Brief History of Neoliberalism“, David Harvey analyzes the neoliberal turn that first Western, and later, practically every economy on Earth took to varying degrees of depth over the past 30 or so years.

Several key features of neoliberalism are dissected:

1.) Neoliberalism as a power restoration technique (i.e., restoring to capitalists the margin of power lost during the post war years of high growth and detente with labor)

2.) Neoliberalism as imperfect tool against stagnation and the problems of over production

and

3.) Neoliberalism as a method for monetizing practices and spaces previously excluded from market concerns and controls

To properly understand the strategic concessions Microsoft made to the entertainment industry — concessions that led MSFT to deploy a software-based version of the Advanced Access Content System ( AACS) in Windows Vista — you need to carefully consider that third aspect of neoliberalism.

Enter the Advanced Access Content System

Briefly, the Advanced Access Content System is a platform, created at the behest of the entertainment industry, whose sole purpose is to enforce a (it is vainly hoped) completely un-crackable environment for “premium content” to flow through from player — device or software-based — to a display and/or audio output. Of course, the phrase “premium content” is a term of art inasmuch as the actual content might be anything from a slapdash teen sex comedy to the most subtle examples of musical or filmed art.

The motion picture and recording cartels have long been disturbed by the fact that people could record, remix and redistribute “content” at will. Over the years, many copy protection schemes have been tried; all have failed. Advances in computing power and storage capacity — moving in parallel with advances in cryptology — have finally made the old dream of an automated copyright enforcement system achievable.

Achievable, because under the AACS system, ‘intelligent’ hardware is constantly on the lookout for security breaches (for example, interceptions of the content data stream from player to output) and empowered, so to speak, to take action. What sorts of action? Actions such as actively preventing component outs from working if the HD-DVD or Blu ray disk you’re trying to view has been flagged as being compromised (or more specifically, if the cryptological “key” associated with the disk has been compromised, leading to your play privileges being ‘revoked’ by the key issuing authority).

All high definition hardware — players, digital sets, audio units — are designed to enforce this automated copyright infrastructure. Your HD-DVD or Blu Ray player will talk to your high def display over what are called High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection compliant outputs. Together, they’ll ensure that RIAA and MPAA copyright concerns are being addressed wherever and whenever “premium content” is being viewed.

The addition of the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) component in Vista enables MSFT and its entertainment sector partners to create false scarcity - that is, by using the technology to limit, constrain and otherwise interfere with your ability to use “content” as you’d like, they can treat lectronically stored movies and music as metered commodities in defiance of what the technology could do and has done, until the AACS era.

The Era of False Scarcity

Microsoft wanted Vista to be marketable as a media platform (and MSFT also wanted to create the de facto standard for software based AACS implementation) so they crafted a complex encryption/decryption methodology within the operating system that obeys — and then some — AACS rules. Doing so gave them negotiating space with the entertainment industry.

As any user of consumer electronics and Microsoft software knows, shit happens. The copyright enforcement, content monitoring and encryption/decryption technologies in next gen players and Vista are always on. This exacts a performance price from the devices (because our CPUs and memory are good, but not so good that they can effortlessly do both content presentation and advanced cryptological functions without exhibiting some problems at least some of the time) and especially from the software, which is very brittle and prone to malfunction.

But beyond the false piracy alarms, stuttering playbacks and other technical annoyances that are already being seen in the wild, there’s an overriding fact to keep in mind: AACS gives the entertainment industry the ability to treat the products you buy as leased objects, which can be (say, in a case of revocation resolution) the source for ever renewable revenue long after they were originally purchased.

It also creates a method for modularizing in unprecedented ways — and therefore monetizing — functions that were previously considered more or less all of a piece, such as playing and therefore viewing the disks you buy.

In order for this system to work as planned, all devices must comply with the AACS standard. The idea is to close all potential areas of escape. Eventually, perhaps after 5 to 15 years, the full magnitude of the lock-in will be in effect as older DVD and audio players are retired.

It’s rumored that Hollywood and the RIAA are fully aware AACS is, despite all their efforts, eminently hackable, and that the true target of these new constraints are ordinary people who don’t have easy access to workarounds.

The goal then, is to have a lever that can be pulled at any time to extract more income from “consumers”.

One of the recurring arguments of the current age is this: how do you prevent terrorism - via military action or police investigation?

Many Americans are fond — in a distractedly enthusiastic, television and movie viewing sort of way — of military action. Indeed, even the phrase “military action” immediately places in the mind an image of forward movement, of efficiencies, of things getting done. To say that you will handle terrorism through investigation, through quiet infiltration, through arrests and evidence and courts…this seems weak in comparison to helicopter gunships pushing metal into your enemy at supersonic speeds (that enemy, no longer human but dubbed “the terrorists” and sometimes labeled ‘rats’ or ‘cockroaches’ or ‘termites’ and so on).

This fondness for military technique — perhaps it can be described as an instinct — guarantees that terrorist acts inspire spectacular responses which, in turn, produce further impetus for terrorist acts. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, justified by their architects and defenders as quintessential anti-terror actions (for if the military response is the best way forward, full scale invasion — to replace, via “regime change”, your enemy with his “moderate” brothers — is the best example of the best technique, an apotheosis of counter-terror).

And now, let’s reconsider Baudrillard’s essay, “The Spirit of Terrorism” which, as I recall (but memory is faulty), was roundly criticized as “postmodernist” navel gazing when it was released in 2001. Americans in particular, even those who were opposed to military action, dismissed it as missing the point, of minimizing the martyrdom of the 2000 plus who died in the towers, of sympathizing with nihilists who sought to destroy civilization.

To many, Baudrillard played the role of the ultimate (stereotypical) European intellectual: trapped in his thoughts when he should have been feeling more deeply - feeling the loss of the hallowed dead, the perfidy of the means by which they were killed, the special nature of the American loss, the painful struggle ahead.

Baudrillard writes (translation and translation-related comments by Dr. Rachel Bloul):

No need for a death wish or desire for self-destruction, not even for perverse effects. It is very logically, and inexorably, that the (literally: “rise to power of power”) exacerbates a will to destroy it.

And power is complicit with its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, one could feel that they answered the suicide of the kamikazes by their own suicide. It has been said: “God cannot declare war on Itself”. Well, It can. The West, in its God-like position (of divine power, and absolute moral legitimacy) becomes suicidal, and declares war on itself.

[...]

It’s easy to be distracted by this line “When the two towers collapsed, one could feel that they answered the suicide of the kamikazes by their own suicide” and lose the message: the attacks occurred within the system built by the West - it was an attack from within, not without as conventional thought has it. The “kamikazes” were not anti-modern (as was commonly stated at the time) but thoroughly modern. The scope of the attack — Hollywood-esque in scale — and the means were both completely part of modernity.

Baudrillard writes (translation and translation-related comments by Dr. Rachel Bloul):

When the situation is thus monopolized by global power, when one deals with this formidable condensation of all functions through technocratic machinery and absolute ideological hegemony (pensee unique), what other way is there, than a terrorist reversal of the situation (literally ‘transfer of situation’: am I too influenced by early translation as ‘reversal’?)? It is the system itself that has created the objective conditions for this brutal distortion. By taking all the cards to itself, it forces the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are ferocious, because the stakes are ferocious. To a system whose excess of power creates an unsolvable challenge, terrorists respond by a definitive act that is also unanswerable (in the text: which cannot be part of the exchange circuit). Terrorism is an act that reintroduces an irreducible singularity in a generalized exchange system. Any singularity (whether species, individual or culture), which has paid with its death for the setting up of a global circuit dominated by a single power, is avenged today by this terrorist situational transfer.

Terror against terror - there is no more ideology behind all that. We are now far from ideology and politics. No ideology, no cause, not even an Islamic cause, can account for the energy which feeds terror. It (energy) does not aim anymore to change the world, it aims (as any heresy in its time) to radicalize it through sacrifice, while the system aims to realize (the world) through force.

[...]

Here Baudrillard is stating something most of us cannot accept, not even as part of an intellectual exercise: that the Western system’s success at achieving power created — via a process as natural as the formation of antibodies in response to foreign bacteria — an anti, a resistance, a pushing against. On the face of it, this seems similar to the mantra loosed upon the world shortly after the towers collapsed - ‘they hate us because of our freedoms’. This has a satisfying ring and absorbs easily into our psyches. But the difference between that incantation and Baudrillard’s description is whereas one presents an image of good against evil (lovers of freedom against against their moral opposites) Baudrillard is making a structural argument - the house has been built this way and has this set of problems because of the way it has been built. The Right explains terrorism as nihilistic evil in bloody motion (’false’ faith against real, ‘primitive’ practices against market advancement), the Left as a criminal response to legitimate grievance (the history of Western colonialism, the CIA engineered overthrow of Mossadeq and so on).

Baudrillard pushes these competing explanations aside and says that what is really at war is the system’s attempt to absorb the whole world through ideology and force (”taking all the cards to itself”) pitted against attempts to reverse this relentless, totalizing effort.

Although our superstructure seems sound, there are weaknesses, which our adversaries have uncovered (and this explains so much of our rage and sense of ennui at how poorly things have gone in Iraq: it began with promises of flawless power and knowledge and descended into a parade of meaningless death, sectarian warfare and endless incompetence).

Baudrillard writes (translation and translation-related comments by Dr. Rachel Bloul):

Until now this integrating power had mostly succeeded to absorb every crisis, every negativity, creating therefore a deeply hopeless situation (not only for the damned of the earth, but for the rich and the privileged too, in their radical comfort). The fundamental event is that terrorists have finished with empty suicides; they now organize their own death in offensive and efficient ways, according to a strategic intuition, that is the intuition of the immense fragility of their adversary, this system reaching its quasi perfection and thus vulnerable to the least spark. They succeeded in making their own death the absolute arm against a system that feeds off the exclusion of death, whose ideal is that of zero death. Any system of zero death is a zero sum system. And all the means of dissuasion and destruction are powerless against an enemy who has already made his death a counter-offensive. “What of American bombings! Our men want to die as much as Americans want to live!” This explains the asymmetry of 7, 000 deaths in one blow against a system of zero death.

Therefore, here, death is the key (to the game) not only the brutal irruption of death in direct, in real time, but also the irruption of a more-than-real death: symbolic and sacrificial death - the absolute, no appeal event.

This is the spirit of terrorism.

[...]

full

Dear Buttons:

Sorry I haven’t been able to call you; I’ve been busy, overwhelmed really.

But not with work or family duties. Of course, these responsibilities occupy my time - nothing important is neglected.

But neither of these have prevented me from keeping in touch as I used to.

No, what has consumed what little spare time I have is a leitmotif triggered by a K-Punk posted article about “The Prestige“, a film I’m very eager to see.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Prestige is of course about the power of film and fiction to cast spells. Its own captivation depends upon keeping the question of its own generic status open: are we watching a simulation of 1890s narrative realism or have we - as some IMDB commenters complained without irony - been ‘conned’ into watching an SF film? The film’s final irony concerns the fact that, to function as magic, genuine science must appear as an illusion.

The full essay can be found here.

This got me thinking about science and magic or, more specifically, what might happen if our techniques became so subtle that they were, to quote Arthur C. Clarke, “…indistinguishable from magic”.

In a pop sci fi scenario, this very situation leads to an advanced species believing itself to be gods and insisting, accordingly, upon the worship of mortals.

Perhaps, in the real, this is what the powerful do to the powerless: demand not only obedience but worship.

Recently, on “60 Minutes“, Bush declared:

I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude. … We’ve endured great sacrifice to help them. … (Americans) wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.

Which has, I think, a certain ‘hallowed am I‘ ring to it.

Love,

d.

MEMO

TO: The Atlas Family

FROM: Tom Atlas, your adventurous and beloved CEO

Subject: My God, it’s full of stars!

Earlier this morning, I asked my assistant to bring me a hard copy of an elaborate spreadsheet, detailing profit projections for 2007.

Instead, for some inexplicable reason, she brought me a copy of a print-out detailing the known characteristics of the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly-1 or TMA-1 for short.

I’ve tried to stop staring at it, but its mystery pulls me in, like matter towards a singularity.

My assistant, the mysterious Miss Q, has tried to remove the paper from my hand, insisting it was all a joke and that the image is a mock up from a decades old science fiction film.

I cannot believe it. I will not believe it.

You will yield your secrets to me, TMA-1.

Yes.

Tom