While emailing with Terence Blake, I just had a minor brain storm. I’ve been reading his blog, and it’s really very interesting. I don’t agree with everything he’s written – heck, I don’t agree with everything I’ve written – still, I was telling him he should get his blog in a tree killer version when it hit me:

He writes essays, but they are blog posts. I like to write essays. Francis Bacon liked to write essays. He even wrote a book called “Essays”, which I’ve read a few times. I’m not a big fan of Bacon’s philosophy in those essays, but I am a big fan of him having written these essays. So I thought “What if… I wrote Essays in response to his essay topics?” As in “I could talk about his ideas if I wanted to, but I don’t really think that’s so important, as much as my response to the subjects from my perspective some 400 years after his.”

That strikes me as a very useful and interesting thing to do. I have a JILLION other things I need to do, but this would be something I could do, like now – it’s late in the evening and I feel like typing something, but nothing that I can’t do in one sitting.

I am going to start a new tag ESSAYS, and begin this project. It will likely take a long time to complete, but when complete it will be very interesting. Upon completion, I will collect the essays, clean them up, and have them published. Works for me!

So after a solid month of technological bullcrap, my new record is very much coming along. The song titles and lengths are very much up in the air. Some of the songs are going to be from the work I did with Mr Marz, “Half Blue / Half Orange”, specifically, two piece, Old Friends and New Friends.

This work is, so far, even more “personal” than Keraunograph or k.2. If I had to hurl it out the door tomorrow, I would have enough material for the LP, but there is a great deal of refinement I want to do yet. In alphabetical order by tentative code-name they are listed below, with tentative lengths.

Civic – 8min
Huron – 3.50
New Friends – 3.54
Old Friends – 7.24
Ontario – 3.50
Snow in June – 3.45
White Mountain – 5.44
Withdrawal of the Object – 4.22

Which totals out to 40min 49sec, which is about 2 – 3 minutes too long for an LP. I know that Civic is in serious needing of Editing, and Withdrawal is in pretty bad shape right now and may need to be re-performed and then re-edited. I could easily get the savings I need right there.

I don’t like to talk *about* my music before it’s done. Call me superstitious, but that’s how I work it.

I got the artwork from the photographer – an old friend from high school – Mark Kobacz. I’ll be editing that to make it square for the LP and I need to come up with typography and text and liner notes and suchlike.

Overall, I’m pretty excited. This isn’t going as fast or as well as I had hoped, but it is going. Which is good.

Was great – 50 excited and exciting students all looking at audio, so to speak. I am glad Finlay was there to underline some of what I said – it helped get important ideas across. And I enjoyed Brian’s lecture on the music biz. I was able contribute to his lecture and underline some of what he discussed.

On other news we got a “real Classroom”, and the lectures will be meeting there. I’ll be emailing everyone the info tomorrow AM.

And I am now 258 lbs. – down 14 from two months ago. I’m pleased.

New things in the works. This semester I teach 3 classes – Practicum (4th year final project), Communication Theory (more like Media Theory), and Intermediate Audio Production. This evening I went over the syllabus with one of my adjuncts and it looks like we are ready to roll with Audio Production tomorrow AM. Looks like a great class.

Communication Theory is Wednesday, and I am putting the finishing touches on the first powerpoint and the the syllabus tomorrow. This will also be a great class – I change it up every year, and so far, it is improving as a class, year over year.

This weekend I cut two of the chapters of my dissertation out and put them into folders for dissection and conversion into articles.

I also downloaded StutterEdit and Iris for audio production on my next record. I’ve recorded a pile of “tracks” that need processing into coherent works – it’s that “collection process” that is so tricky, as it is as much an editing process as it is a compositional one – sometimes the creativity consists of removal, the willful imposition of absence that creates a new presence. The title is something borrowed, and everything on it, is.

I’ve gone through most of my website and converted writings to pdfs. I have also uploaded a lot of artwork for CD covers as well.

Since we’re requiring our students in Audio to keep a weekly journal, I’m going to do the same for the next few months and see how that goes. I have a friend who put up multiple entries per day. That’s a level of disclosure I wouldn’t know how to do. But it is amazing – much like twitter – tweets of minutae or links to ideas – I just don’t operate like that. I also have a friend who keeps a daily online journal. He photographs almost everything, and given that he lives in a very beautiful place, it is a lovely and restful thing to engage his diary. Sadly, my days are so unpredictable, sometimes it’s hard enough for me to remember to bathe and tie my shoes much less do a daily journal. I am so glad I have a calendar in my iPhone…

So, I am thinking a weekly missive can be done. If my students can do it, I can too. This semester.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the launching of Telstar, and the birth of truly global information and communication technology (ICT). The Satellite Launches.

One month later, the song “Telstar” was released by the Tornados (basically Joe Meeks’s band). I discovered the song as a young child sitting in our car (1960 Rambler American Wagon) with my mother waiting to pick up my dad from work. It was a warm sunny day, the windows were open, and it was quiet in the parking lot, which looked like THIS, only instead of a Disney monorail, there’s a Johnson and Johnson factory…
She had the radio on (AM, of course) and the song Telstar came on and I was immediately struck by it. It was so completely different from everything I had ever heard or known, and from there sparked my creative interests and activities in electronic music.
Five years later, a broken and despondent Joe Meeks murdered his landlord, and committed suicide.
Two years after Meeks’s murder/suicide, the US Military glue computers to ICT and come up with ARPAnet, the forerunner of the Internet.
Everything about telstar was prophetic: It’s first image was of an American Flag, and this was not publicly available. The first image was of Secret Global American Hegemony via electronic culture – imperialism through technology, which was to follow.
The first broadcast fulfilled the first image: The first pictures were the Statue of Liberty in New York and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. News personalities like Huntley and Cronkite presented “news”, mostly American, with the BBC from Brussels. Kennedy was to speak, but the timing was off, so Sports Spectacle was offered – part of a baseball game. Later, a press conference with President Kennedy, regarding the value of US$, was broadcast. We live in the legacy of Telstar.

Telstar’s end is also important: its circuitry was fried by EMP from high altitude nuclear weapons testing, and stopped operating in 1963. It is still in orbit – SPACE JUNK.

This is a development of an idea I’ve had kicking around for a while and recently posted in another forum. The question is – why the collapse from customers to consumers and citizens to taxpayers?

There’s a difference between a customer and a consumer and there is a political corrolary to this, the difference between a citizen and a tax payer. We can see how this devolution from citizen/customer to taxpayer/consumer has taken place.

A customer has a relationship with the provider and has some agency with the provider. A consumer is more infantilised, more of a “feeder”, and has less agency. This also feeds the monopolisation trend we see around us – customers are empowered to go elsewhere, consumers, less so. Consumers consume whatever gizmos the monopolists provide them, and have a dramatically different set of expectations than a customer does. The consumer sees power in the choice of the gizmos they consume – an iPhone instead of Android, a PC instead of a Mac, a burger instead of a hotdog, Miller instead of Budweiser, Prius instead of Hummer. This ability to choose between not only a or b but a panoply of varieties of consumer items gives people a false sense of agency. They are not really dealing with Toyota or GM or even the dealer when they buy a Prius or a Volt instead of a gas guzzling tank. They go to the dealer, and they might haggle over a price with the dealer, but there is very very little beyond that – they might as well be talking to a counter person at Walmart, as there is no residual affective claim between the seller and Customer. It is this reciprocity that forms a kind of cathectic binding that creates the Customer. And it is that loss of Main Street in the maw of Walmart that also eviscerated that binding, that last vestige of the gift culture, from the front line of the economic society.

In this way, the invisible hand of the market is revealed to be the iron fist of extraction. There is need. There is scarcity. There is requirement. There is exchange.

Desire ends in satisfaction, so needs are defined in terms that exceed satisfaction, and the brutality of this is transparent, in both the European and North American sense. It is transparent in the European sense, in that it is completely obvious. It is also transparent in the North American sense in that it is completely invisible. It is obvious in that everyone understands the ideology – arrange matters so that the asymptote is “(get) something for (giving) nothing”. It is transparent because it is ideological – it is the accepted norm and thus invisible. However, once implemented, it logically evacuates previous systems of exchange and whatever affective fields that were part and parcel of said previous system.

This leads to an infantilisation process, which includes removal of accountability from both the consumer and the provider, even as the extraction remains obvious. This disempowering process removes the last vestiges of agency in the customer in their transformation into consumer. Once they are consumers, they simply feed off the system and seek optimisation to the asymptote. The corporations seek the same. The result is a mass extraction from above and below, with a nearly autistic dismissal and blindness to the social contract and the binding of people together through affective and interest associations. Once so removed, we are swept into this violent system that perpetuates itself through violence, only violence displaced and mediated, leaving an empty core of hedonics and a self-interest in an empty and meaningless self.

Citizens are empowered and informed. They may not be correct (in my vision of the world, most are rather ill-informed and utterly misguided, but, that is outside the scope of this article, so for now, we can say, “it takes all kinds…”) or not, however, true citizens are actively involved with their neighbourhoods, communities, localities and nation-states. Taxpayers are not. Taxpayers are consumers of government services and see themselves as alienated from the systems of service provision. As consumers, they want what all infantilised consumers want, that same asymptotic impossibility:

Something for nothing.

Napster simply provided exactly what the consumer had been demanding all along and what was native to the enframing of digital technology itself: copies of data, for free (or nearly free). Computers copy data. Constantly. It’s inherent to their operation. With the digitisation of media, the data that represents that media is subject to the same exigencies of basic computer science – it is subject to continuous and complete copying. Essentially: Something for nothing. P2P transference of data is simple and consistent with the internal workings of the computer, only spread out into a network, as the data within a computer is part of its own network of compiled code and libraries and arrays of data, so with P2P, this data is thus extended to other storage substrates.

A customer would have been much more wary of such a proposition, indeed, in a different society, “Free (as in beer)” would be regarded with great suspicion. In our society, consumers are like honey badgers, they don’t give a shit. They will cheerfully gut public education because they can’t see why they should pay for some other families kid’s education. They will cheerfully buy a Prius instead of an SUV, or vice versa depending on the dominant meme. Rapaille doesn’t quite get it on that count – it’s not that the lizard brain requires dominance, it merely seeks advantage. Over hundreds of thousands of years of living in roaming bands, humans found ways to bind each other together through affective and cathectic investments and arrangements. In a gift economy, a gift (FREE as in beer) isn’t really Free. It is a way to bind one to the giver and create relationships.

These relationships are evacuated in a consumer system. Thus, contemporary neo-liberal and libertarian ideology has tax payers see government as an extractive system (as something transparently obvious) and corporations as extractive systems (as something invisibly transparent). This arrangement serves to erase social contract and atomise people away from each other into nodes behind a screen choosing their premediated dollops of A or B sauce on their C or D entertainment opiates.

How we get out of the infinite regress of infantile consumerism remains to be seen. I am thinking that when oil production goes into a permanent decline after 2017, that’s going to evacuate a lot of wealth that was being spent on meaningless consumer items built to be sent to the landfill, and people will have to snap to attention and get on the stick or experience enormous suffering. At that point, the ICT industry (and others) will have to evolve customers and relationships. How that would evolve out of the massive monopolisation process that reigns (and visits violence) from above seems unlikely, so I would think it will have to come from below as consumers empower themselves back into being customers working with people to get (work/play/etc.) done, and thus become citizens who are compassionate and contributing active members of a society instead of taxpayers griping about “the gubmint” and “greedy unions”.

I am going to be making this site a bit more active. For a first post in a long time, I should like to take this moment in tribute to Alan Turing.

I am not a professional economist, nor do I aspire to be one. I am what you might call “an interested and informed citizen” on the subject. To that end, I feel it is my duty to chime in on what I believe should be done given the present times of crisis, and also analyse and criticise what I see as the present sources of our suboptimal state. From this, I think it is valuable to postulate some scenarios. These scenarios are not along a continuum, as I feel continua posit an oppositional and dialectical approach to the problem that doesn’t “do enough”. If one thinks of a continuum like a number line from -infinity to + infinity, centred on zero, then you can think of my approach as a multitude or multiplicity of axia emanating from and continuing through zero, and also providing other zero points for a similar treatment.

That said, there are things I call “granularities” – irreducibles that cannot be broken down further. An example of an irreducible would the minimum caloric intake to healthily sustain a human. This value is a dependent variable on the particulars of a human, but these can be averaged into a fairly narrow range between roughly 1000 and 3000 calories – 50 isn’t nearly enough and 1,000,000 is far too much.

Now, granularities can be absolute, such as Planck’s limits, or they can be “false vacuums”, where a change in context, form, or practice collapses the granularity and it shrinks to a smaller value, and what once seemed as a fixed bottom value may serve as a new ceiling value.

So, we have a variety of continua and a number of granularities – and these operate over time in a variety of different and continuously evolving contexts or flows. For humans, these flows are regulated and delimited by language and communication -  a product of our brain as its reductively composes models and ideas of sense data and its own operations in order to reproduce more brains.

At this point you are probably wondering where the hell I am going with this and what on this little green planet of clocks (thanks for the fish!) does any of this have to do with economics. Be patient.

The United States of America, an Empire of extra-ordinary power, has been experiencing economic difficulties, difficulties I predicted prior to the crash of September 2008, where, on the energyResources forum on 8 APR 08, I wrote:

If the non-borrowed reserves are reflecting borrowing money from the
TAF , when can they possible get back in the black on the h3 table?

They have no reserves, and they’re borrowing Billions, they need to get
some profits rolling in order to get their Reserves back above zero.
But, if they’re borrowing money to keep afloat, and they’re sinking
because their source of income (debts and debtors) have gone sour and
can’t / won’t pay, then what exactly is the strategy to solvency?

The only thing I can think of is for the TAF to actually become a debt
liquidation instrument, and literally dump billions into the system by
buying all the bad debt and then “burning the certificates”.

And that is EXACTLY what the US government did, they basically developed the TARP from the TAF model and did it to an extent above and beyond the call of duty to the point where the executives of the very corporations that sank the economy were able to walk away with huge cash bonuses.

While billions were supposed to be moved into the toxic accounts where they were to be effectively “burned” and removed from the economy and piled onto the national debt – in a stroke basically externalising the debt out of the banking sector and distributing it to the public – what happened is the debt still sits there, toxic as ever, and the trillions pumped into the system are now sitting there in bank reserves. As of July 18th 2010, the h3 report stated that the total nonborrowed reserves of all financial institutions in the USA stood at $1,027,487,000,000. Yes. Just over 1 trillion dollars. Now compare this to the h3 report in October 2008 when it was NEGATIVE $333,707,000,000.

It sits because of the record high unemployment rate
(the highest sustained since the Great Depression of the 1930s)
depressed housing prices
(that continue to descend in many places)
the enormous debt burden already carried by the average citizen
(also in record territory)
and the preference of people to deleverage themselves out of debt in a precarious job market.
(which is only common sense)

It sits in the banks because the model of stimulus has been to lower interest rates to permit greater lending. When people are up to their eyeballs in debt, they are unlikely to take on more debt, especially when unemployment is high and the sensible thing to do is to get out of debt.

Therefore, the way to give this trillion dollars velocity is to not give it to the banks, but to give people jobs so they will spend it. But this doesn’t jive from the position of the owners of the banks, as it runs counter to their business algorithm (lend > get paid > lend more).

One axial critique would be the obvious: this is simply brutal class warfare, where the ruling elite turns into a kleptocracy and loots the Treasury at the expense of the working classes. Given the evidence, this analysis is true enough as far as it goes, but there is farther to go, as there are other axia to grind here, and the above axial critique (certainly a kind of Marxian approach as one extrema of a Marxism vs. Capitalism axis) doesn’t really go far enough.

So, this is what I think is going on:

The USA is a giant empire flailing about trying to maintain its hegemony through military dominance, much like what Rome did in order to maintain energy flows at a positive rate of acquisition. Rome failed as its ability to acquire resources ran up against the laws of diminishing returns and had to encompass ever larger areas. As a given area requires (x) military presence, and area squares as it doubles, Rome was not able to properly police its borders, and within its realm, the energetic and mineral resources began to stretch thin and fail, given their methods of acquisition.

It’s a good thing they never really figured out coal or petroleum – otherwise we would have had an ecocidal apocalypse 1800 years ago…

So, faced with an inability to expand itself eastward due to the brutal weather in Russia and impoverished locals in the NE and the enormous Parthian empire to the SE, and hemmed in by the Sahara to the south and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, Rome had nowhere to go. It began to dilute (inflate) its currency. At the Empire’s peak in 117ce it was only 110 years from financial collapse.

The USA is in much the same position. It can’t conquer more energy, because:

a. it’s broke
b. global oil extraction is at or very near peak

Because the USA is broke, it can’t really buy its way out of trouble and because of the peaking of its critical resource, it doesn’t have the wherewithal to produce itself out of trouble.

The monetarists might argue – nonsense – just go into debt.

And what exactly is debt? Debt is a claim on future labour.

Even for the capitalist. The Capitalist borrows money and builds a factory. The money borrowed is paid back by the labour of the factory workers who create the wealth.

Even for the ordinary citizen. I want a car. I take out a loan. I work and pay back the loan. In essence, the loan is a claim on a portion of my labour.

Debt is a claim on future labour.

Labour is work plus resources. The resources are reducing. Combined with the fact that energy is the ability to perform work, and that energy production is basically flat, even though population continues to grow, the ability for the USA to do the work to produce the labour at a rate that can pay back the debt at interest is looking increasingly poor over time.

Therefore, the USA gov’t has a limited set of options:

1. dilute the currency through a significant but controlled inflation, making the debt “payable” with worth-less money.
2.expand employment through government work systems – employed people spend money, and there is PLENTY of crap that needs to be done (alternative energy systems, electrify the railway system, radically expand the electric railway system, bulldoze dead cities, massively insulate private homes and businesses, etc.)
3. radically restructure the financial engine of the country AND the gov’t.
4. Paper over the holes and hope something good happens.
5. Conquest.
6. Some combination of  all of the above.

Very shortly the next debt tsunami is going to hit: commercial real estate notes who bought into the funky mortgage instruments is going to come due, and the Republicans, just as they did in 1936, are bleating about the debt. The disaster in the gulf is going to screw North American oil production for a good while. Right now there is a lot of oil simply being stored because the crappy economy has created demand destruction and reduced pressure on production. However, the summer sees increased demand for fuel. That will reduce the slack, and increase the demand, and when winter hits – the price will rise.

However, the price will not get stratospheric, or if it does, not for long. There’s a great article explaing why Here. In short, because oil is so strategic, the USA will sooner cajole / arm twist / invade the Middle East or Iran than let it hit $500 a barrel. The only problem with that is the USA is broke and can’t afford military adventures, and everything in the Middle East is so precarious thanks to the foolishness of the neocons and the Bush Junta, that any such action there would have catastrophic results – and it’s hardly the legacy the Obama administration would want to leave. Moreover, military action won’t increase the flow rate, or the total number of gigajoules of energy. At that point, like Rome, the USA will face the law of diminishing returns, and will have to do one of several things:

1. (My preferred solution) Renounce its Empire and focus on transitioning to a postcarbon future in a more mature, responsible, and adult manner.
2. (a very possible and likely solution) Hold onto its Empire resulting in a variety of easily predictable ranges of behaviour – all leading to a final collapse-
a. (a less likely, but very undesireable possibility) break into smaller states, many of them fascist, all of them a kind of neofeudalist economics.
b. (a much more likely and rather nasty outcome) hold the nation together but with a severe curtailment of traditional negative “freedoms” and immiseration of an expanded and poorer working class.
c. (and the old standby…) increase military adventures resulting in political and economic bankruptcy, leading to b.

Which do you think is likely? Which is preferred?

What do I see?

The Obama administration chickening out, again, and repeating the mistake of Roosevelt in 1936 and rolling on federal debt reduction. This will result in another recession on top of the one the USA is already in and culminate in what I call a spastic economy – as resources deplete, basics (food, energy) will increase in price – spurring inflation – but those things that are more subject to financialisation (mortgages) or economies of scale (consumer items) will drop in price – spurring deflation. This creates a spastic and sputtering economy, where by Xmas, we could see $4 for a loaf of bread and $3.50 a gallon of gas, but a former $400k McMansion auctioning for $100k…

Spastic.

And every day, another 80 million barrels of oil are extracted and blown into the atmosphere.

Now, what does this have to do with granularities? It’s the granularities that create the asymmetries. The asymmetries create localised scarcities, and these scarcities are what propel capitalism, as one can only realise profits on scarcity – ubiquity is non-economic.

A granularity can be seen in Grain – only so much is grown in a year, and this was a bad year. Per capita grain production has been falling for years, and with global warming parching traditional grainaries like Russia, this has had a bad effect on prices for grain when such a staple is exposed to the vagaries of the marketplace.

Another granularity is how much debt a human being can carry. The actual amount of debt is not important – that value is arbitrarily large – it could be in the trillions per capita in 2010 dollars – the question is how a person can meet the monthly payment. The grain is that payment. Again, this is adjustable, but not infinitely so. This is the kind of game the USA gov’t has been playing since the disastrous Reagan Administration.

A quick peak at The US Debt Clock reveals that the US gov’t is in debt approximately (as of 10.24, 12 AUG 2010) $13,314,341,000,000. For those less familiar wit such large numbers, that is 13 trillion, 314 billion, 341 million dollars. So, lets do a little math, and pretend that the USA will (in the next few minutes) miraculously stop adding to the debt, forever, and will begin paying it down at the rate of 1 million dollars a day. Note: the US gov’t has rarely been able to stop increasing its debt load, and has never been able to actually pay down its debt for any sustained period of time. That aside, let’s figure out how long it will take the US gov’t to pay off its debt in 2010 dollars.

First we take the total debt (which I have rounded off to the nearest billion) of 13.314 trillion dollars, and we divide that by 1 million, because that’s how much we are going to pay per day. We get the result of 13,314,000. That is how many days it will take to pay off the debt. Now, a year consists of quite nearly 365.25 days (the .25 to account for leap year), so let’s divide that in, and we get 36,451.74 years. Now, we do lose a leap day every 100 years, so we will subtract 364 from that number (almost a year right there!) and we come to the number 36,086.74.

So, if we were able to stop the increase in debt this afternoon, and immediately began paying it off at the rate of $1 million a day, it would take 36,086.74 years. From today, that would be May 9th, in the year 38096. So, if personal debt could also be rolled into the future like that, then there would be no real debt problem. There would be a massive currency problem, but debt would cease to be a significant issue. Similar strategies are already on line in places like Japan with their 100 year mortgages. So, if one applies this concept, only stretches out the payment from 100 years to 36,086 years, at zero percent interest, the payment on a million dollar home would go from $833 a month to $2.30 a month. The debt for this would be passed down from generation to generation, but each generation could then do the same – just kick it down the road indefinitely with stupendously long term loan terms.

Who would get hurt in such a bizarre system?

The ruling class who own the banks. They would get nailed because they would see their gross receipts crash by many orders of magnitude.

Who would benefit from such a nonsensical dream?

Pretty much everyone else.

What is the blind spot even in this?

Non-economic granularities. Geologically determined structures, like resources and energy. No amount of debt will put more oil in the ground or make the sun shine brighter or increase the grain harvest or restore extinct species. We cannot repeal the second law of thermodynamics or buy our way around it.

Again, there is no solution: just mitigation.

The recent move by the Federal Reserve to buy treasury notes is a desperate and foolhardy attempt by the banking system to continue pulling money out of the working class. What they fail to understand is that you can’t get money from the working class if the working class isn’t working. If they want to reignite the consumer engine, they need to give people disposable income and a sense of job security. When people have a steady energy inflow they will naturally engage in behaviour to expend the excess. They will get fat, drive huge trucks, put men on Mars, entertain themselves into imbecility, declare war for the fun of it, build cities in the desert, vacation in the Antarctic or the Moon, etc. all depending on how much excess they have and how secure they feel about it.

People can feel secure as can be, but if they have almost no excess, you still get stagnation. People can have gobs of excess, but if they feel insecure, they’re still dodging bullets and not taking much advantage of the excess. With the peaking of resource extraction, the per capita excess can only reduce. The only solutions are to reduce need (conservation down to granularity), reduce per capita (which is a very sticky subject, worthy of its own post) or some conbination of both.

So, in conclusion I would suggest that the best route would be what I called for almost a year and a half ago. Either that or give everyone the same deal the government has and given them 36,000 years to pay off any and all debts.

updated 12 AUG 2010

This afternoon, I saw Avatar, directed by James Cameron. I saw it at a gigantic multiplex in Greenwood Indiana, in 3D in an IMAX format. I had an excellent seat – sixth row centre. The 3D glasses were large and comfortable.

My point is not to describe my experience of the film, although it is an important part of Avatar, and will play into some of my discussion of the film. I am not a film reviewer, nor am I much of a film theorist, but I feel this film requires my attention and focus for a variety of reasons that will come clear.

First off, people will ask “So what did you think of Avatar?” and “Did you like it?” These two things are not necessarily linked, and what Avatar is and does is very complex, and points directly at a number of critical issues in contemporary civilisation. What struck me on viewing the film, in terms of images, what I saw was a large number of references to films I very much like – and these references were seductive and interesting.

In the Home Tree, I saw the Camphor Tree in My Neighbour Totoro. This is where Mei discovers the nest of King Totoro. Totoro is a wood spirit and lives in the Camphor Tree – the Na’vi live in the Home Tree. The Tree is an ancient symbol of biblical proportions and esoteric meaning.

The general reference to Dances With Wolves is also obvious – a soldier who leaves European ways behind and goes to live with Native Americans. However, I see that actually as relatively uninteresting due to its obviousness, although that theme is something I will come back to.

The planet has floating mountains, which remind me of album covers for the Yes group by Roger Dean – covers like Close to the Edge

Close to the Edge: floating worlds...

and other images by Roger Dean from that period, such as flying dragons – looks a lot like a Banshee, no?:

Jungles floating in the air:

Alien landscapes:

Floating pastoral worlds:

And floating trees and rocks:

I could go on, but now, look at this preliminary concept art from Avatar:

and this still from the film:

and it is pretty clear that Dean’s playful organic fantasy artwork must have had some influence, which is fine by me. Dean is no Da Vinci, but his artwork reminds me of happy times in my adolescence, spent listening to music by Yes with my friends and arguing over the lyrics with precision I can best describe as Jesuitical. It was what teenage fans of ProgRock would often do in the mid 70s… When I was young, the floating jungles and weird landscapes of Dean were a fantasy space I would sometimes imagine myself inhabiting, especially the floating world of Close To The Edge. Seeing this realised in Avatar struck a comforting cord in me.

Another fond memory Avatar brought back with the Floating Mountains was that of Castles in the Sky, by Miyazaki. I have always enjoyed Miyazaki’s work – beautiful, lyrical, gentle and unalterably peculiar.

In these ways, the imaging was something I was immediately comfortable with and inclined to have “good feelings” about; they formed a seductive landscape.

The design of the extended starship in Avatar reminded me of the ships in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Silent Running.

Silent Running is a story that occurs before Avatar – In Silent Running, the “wild” world has been sent offworld into ships for its own protection. Of course, as soon as it became economically burdensome, the wild world bottled up in these ships is disposed of like so much useless baggage. Avatar talks about how the world the humans come from isn’t green – how it is dead and grey. That would be the world after Silent Running, and like Silent Running, whose name reminds me of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, both films are warnings about the predations of industrial civilisation. Silent Running shows the imprisonment of the wild world, and its execution at the hands of capital. Avatar shows the pillaging of nature to feed the industrial war machine, as symbolised by the RDA corp. and the military goons it has brought along. In this way, I think Avatar is much more direct and accurate – Silent Running is a despairing work with a poignant ending of doom: a small robot must take care of the last remaining forest. In Avatar, direct action on the part of the Pandorans changes things and even defeats the industrial war machine (IWM).

In Avatar, the industrial war machine is only defeated when two things occur: the Na’Vi collectively band together and take up violent resistance to the IWM, and when knowledge of the Other is communicated and integrated into the world data system of the living Pandora planet. This idea of Pandora as a living planet reminded me of the film Solaris, first by Tarkovsky and then by Soderburg as produced by Cameron – only without the tedious psychology of the films or the book. Communication is a critical point in this film, and it is also important in my view of this film as an object in society.

This brings me to the essential contradiction of Avatar. The film is an extremely expensive, complicated, ultra-high technology story whose very existence is predicated on the industrial extraction and processing of resources that are, for all practical purposes, irreplaceable.  The story it tells is how a society based on such principles is, by even a cursory analysis, inherently evil and self-destructive. Evil, in that it practices direct violence upon those who stand between the IWM and the resources it requires. Self-destructive, as discussed earlier: the planet Earth in the year setting of the film (2154)  is a grey and dying place. Also, the system is logically self-destructive: such systems require continuous exponential growth; growth that is simply impossible on a finite planet in a materially finite universe.

So, here we are faced with a film, a commodity, that points directly at the industrial system that spawned it. It says that collective action can stop the unrelenting madness of the IWM, even as it is a product of the very same system. Just as the Na’Vi will never leave the Home Tree voluntarily, the IWM will no surrender peacefully. The IWM must simply be destroyed, which brings us to some rather interesting conclusions. The film takes place on Pandora. The story of Pandora is well known, so I will simply note that the result of Pandora’s foolishness was that while she unleashed all manner of madness upon the world, we still retain Hope.

Derrick Jensen’s essay in the book The Future of Nature (Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis. 2007.), titled “Beyond Hope”, he directly attacks the notion of hope in our present circumstances:

Hope, the story goes, was the only good the casket held  among many evils, and it remains to this day mankind’s sole comfort in mis fortune. No mention here of action being a comfort in misfortune, or of actually doing something to alleviate or eliminate one’s misfortune.

The more I understand hope, the more I realize all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power ssurely as a belief in some distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more thana secular way of keeping us in line.

Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane.

… hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

His is one particular angle on hope, one vision of Pandora. He accurately critiques the common notion of hope, one I frequently hear from students when they say “give me some hope.” Counter to both my students and Jensen, I prefer the idea of hope as articulated by James Howard Kunstler:

“and a lot of time, college kids say ‘can’t you give me some hope?’ Can’t you give me some hope. Well, here’s the deal. I’m not a hope dispenser, OK? You have to generate the hope. It’s got to come from you. And the way you generate it is by proving to yourself that you’re competent people, that you can deal successfully with the circumstances and the changes that reality is sending to you. That you’re successfully negotiating your living arrangement and your reality. And that you’re paying attention to the tasks that need to be done in your society. And you’re not just relying on wishful thinking and waiting to win the lottery, or sitting around thinking you’re going to get something for nothing, or wishing upon a star. People who are generating hope are the people who understand the difference between wishing for stuff and making stuff happen.”

I agree with Kunstler more than Jansen, in that Kunstler is re-defining hope for the age we are in, and giving us a process for creating hope. And it is that sense of hope that is demonstrated in Avatar. The Na’Vi band together and DO SOMETHING. Their cause is hopeless – they cannot successfully fight the blitzkrieg of the IWM, and their casualties are huge. The Na’Vi are only saved when the “Cavalry Arrives” in an inversion of the Cowboys and Indians.

Here, the indigenous Na’Vi (the “Indians”) are fighting the Cowboys. Normally, in the Western Genre, the Cowboys are faced by a brutal and implacable enemy in the Indians, and are saved at the last minute by the U.S. Military  – the Cavalry comes to save the day. In Avatar, the cavalry is the biosphere itself coming to the aid of the Indians, and the Cowboys, the IWM, are the implacable and brutal enemy. This inversion is underlined in the casting of Sigourney Weaver as Dr. Grace Augustine. She is a human – a member of the invasion force. An Alien. But she is an Alien who cares about those she has invaded, unlike Weaver’s foe in the film, Alien (dir. Ridley Scott. 1979.), which was an implacable and brutal enemy. In both films she is employed by an interstellar corporation. In both films she is an invader of an alien world. In Alien, we are asked to sympathise with her and her invading team sent there to mine ore. In Avatar, we are asked to sympathise with her as she attempts to help the Na’Vi, while despising her “team”, the RDA corporation who sent them to Pandora to mine ore.

The success of the Na’Vi is predicated on the arrival of the Cavalry – the giant and ferocious animals that are commanded to come to the aid of the Na’Vi by Eywa, the Mother Goddess of the Na’Vi. Eywa was informed of the peril of the situation by Jake Sully in his Avatar form. Dr Augustine’s character had died and her memories absorbed into a kind of spiritual database in the The Tree of Souls. Examining Augustine’s mind and her memories of the devastated Earth and the brutality of the IWM, allowed Eywa to understand how desperate the situation was. The war was won through information that allowed for the  amassing of forces significant enough to repel the invasion.

So what message does this film have for us, today?

1. The destruction of the IWM can only be accomplished through direct action.
2. Key to this is the acquisition of substantial forces, which is accomplished through communication.
3. Hope (Pandora’s gift) is possible, however, it requires an enormous amount of work.

From Kunstler, we understand that it is precisely this work that creates the hope most needed in these desperate times, as civilisation faces the greatest transition and crisis it has ever faced in 10,000 years of indoor living, and humanity faces its greatest challenge to its very survival in 70,000 years.

This leads to the Necessary Contradiction of Avatar, and it is an instance of the Necessary Contradiction of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), as Avatar is simply an instance of ICT.

Per a Fox spokesman in an article by David Patten, Avatar was officially budgeted at $237 million and an estimated $150 million for marketing, for a total of $387 million. To illustrate the size of that sum, For FY 2009, the budget for the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts was only $155 million. To fund this film, directly out of pocket, every man woman and child in the USA would have to pay $1.27. Obviously, this endeavor is something that American society deems to be of some importance, as it is willing to invest such significant sums in its development. Its development is that of a media commodity, one with significant and rapid profitability potential.

Media commodities exist in a commodity culture – the devices and systems that the media commodity is made on and distributed through are also commodities. These commodities are only possible through industrial production means and methods,and the resources that go into these systems are subject to thermodynamic losses and material dispersion. These systems, as commodities, exist in a system predicated on continuous growth. Any continuous growth operates by exponential mathematics and can be called exponential growth. Exponential growth, as it requires continuous exponential resource acquisition, is simply unsustainable on a finite planet.

In Avatar, the Earth of 2154 was unable to acquire a critical resource, comically named “unobtainium“. It is the exploitation of unobtainium – valued at $20 million a kilo – that has brought RDA corporation to Pandora, and put RDA and the IWM it is part of in opposition to the interests of the Na’Vi.

Science Fiction is often not about any actual future – it is usually a commentary on the present, and Avatar is no exception. As much as it is a classic tale of imperialism, restating the theme of “Dances with Wolves”, given the contemporary crises of peak oil, the impending peak of phosphorus and other critical materials, and the continuing growth of the human population creating a perilous condition of overshoot, films that engage the issues of peak oil, the disaster that is suburbia, the unsustainability of civilisation, or, if the film asks, “If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air, and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?”

Then we need to look at them differently, as all entertainment (ICT) systems are intimately connected to some of the most rapacious and destructive resource acquisition systems on earth, as well as being directly a creature and critical path creator of contemporary globalist economic systems. It is important to connect entertainment and ICT. Since the digitalisation of culture all such devices require electronic components and computational facilities, and these components and facilities are made from materials all over the globe, and the co-ordination of the production of these materials, their processing, and final manufacture into ICT commodities require the movement of digital data via ICT, we can only see ICT as both creature / creation of the global industrial war machine and its critical path creator, as without ICT, the co-ordination and manufacture of these globalised ICT systems would simply be impossible. As these systems are identical in both nature and function (a computer is a computer is a computer) we can only see our contemporary entertainment networks as creations of the IWM. The linkages between the I and the WM are well detailed by other theorists (viz. Virilio, Hardt, Negri, DeLanda, Jensen, Zerzan, and many others) and I don’t think it necessary to detail that here.

From this, ICT – as a critical path component of the IWM – brings this weight to any content it provides. So, a film, such as Avatar, that is critical of this relation, is then subjected to charges of hypocrisy. I do not agree with such charges. In fact, I stand opposed to such charges, and have put them into what I mentioned earlier: the Necessary Contradiction of ICT. It is not that  ICT embodies this contradiction (which it does, but not my point) as much as that it is necessary that we maintain ICT, even as ICT is such a destructive system to the earth and is part and parcel of the IWM. So, even as we decry the ongoing ecocide, we use ICT to decry the ecocide at the same time ICT is central to the ongoing ecocide.

Now, this is nothing new – above are links to media critical of the IWM, and you are presently reading some.

This leads to other ideas I have about the future of ICT and its relationship to society, but that is beyond this particular writing. All societies communicate with the systems they have at hand. Our system is predicated on the IWM, therefore, our communications are complicit to the actions of the IWM, even if they are inimical to the interests of the IWM. Avatar brings an anti-industrial message in the most advanced industrial method possible: large scale 3D digital cinema. Avatar is a product of the IWM, even as it satirises the IWM. This contestation leads to complex results: Avatar could be seen as Hollywood greenwashing, or the first blockbuster film celebrating the end of Industrial Civilisation, or, and this is very likely true: it is both.

Stuart Hall discussed these negotiated relationships people have with media, but this was largely around issues of content. Now we are faced with a radicalised McLuhanism, where the medium IS the message, and the medium is part and parcel, creature and creator, of the problem itself. Organised Networks rely on the technology developed by the IWM for their existence. At the Internet as Playground And Factory Conference in November 09, Christian Fuchs talked about a communist ICT infastructure. While an admirable goal, I don’t think it is either possible (politically or materially) or likely (due to the exigencies of resource extraction). This is a longer discussion that looks into an inherent weakness in Leftist theory and praxis, but the important point is to get the conversations started.

Avatar, a piece of blockbuster entertainment that brandishes a theme of anti-industrialism, and prescribes violent and bloody opposition to the IWM is, at root, entertainment. A fun story. However, given the crises we face, and the gathering storms of catastrophe on the horizon, its ecological message needs to be amplified and brought into public awareness. We, as a society, must make plans for a very different sort of existence in the next few decades, and use this huge transition as an opportunity to create a better, more humane and caring society. The easy road is one we have seen before in Rome, Central America, and Easter Island, and that road is a very sad and lonely Road. Avatar is deeply flawed in many respects (the reliance on Joseph Campbell formulae, the music was awful, the acting was wooden, and the story was predictable) but it stands in opposition to many other great Science Fiction Films. In 1984, the people are victims. In Blade Runner, the people are victims, even or especially when they’re artificial people. In 2001, Bowman is basically on a big ride – he has little agency. In Alien, we empathise with a crew who went someplace they had no business being. In Slient Running agency proves futile, and the biosphere is left in the hands of a small robot. In the Andromeda Strain, people are just disease vectors and victims. In Stalker, the Room in the Zone is all powerful, and personal agency is used against the agent. In Avatar, the people,as symbolised by the Na’Vi, rise up and smash the invading Industrial War Machine.

That they only succeed through the intercession of a “goddess” brings it to an interesting point, as the “goddess” is actually a material fact – it’s an organic data base held by the biosphere itself. It is the biosphere, the moon of Pandora istelf tht destroys the IWM on Pandora, and it is the biosphere on earth that wil smash the IWM on Earth, as we hit the wall of Peak Everything, and civilisation transitions to its next phase. Luckily we have had the luxury of the Golden Age of petroleum,  and we have seen glimpses of fairness and justice, and we need to preserve these ideas through the transition and build a better society on the other side. It may well prove to be a neolithic society, but the lives lived in it need not be nasty, brutish, and short.

My daughter, like every other North American 12 year old, is caught up in the “Twilight” film and book series. And when she was younger it was Pirates.

I am considering this: that the present day fascination with pirates and vampires is because we live in a piratical and vampiric society, and this is a way to project our own self-disgust into a social spectacle that not only exalts these creatures, but is more a way for us to render evil fashionable, so we don’t see the vileness of the global and environmental results of our own common actions.

Pirates were considered vile creatures – we would hang them at the entrance to harbours, as a warning to all. Vampires, while fictional, were always loathsome creatures – just watch Nosferatu and see how creepy and disgusting they were considered. but now, we humanise and venerate these parasites, these vile corrupt murderous undead beings.

What could be a more appropos symbol of capitalism than an undead parasite that lives off the blood of his lessers?

What could be a more appropos symbol of capitalism than the pirate?

These are not people to admire – these are people to abhor. The pirate is not about finding new methods of helping rid society of disease and crime and violence – the pirate is all about aggrandising the self at the expense of society through crime and violence. The pirate doesn’t fight disease – the pirate is disease. The pirate is all about the gang, not the polity; the benefit and glory of the gang leader, not the common wealth.

The vampire is of another nature for as material and sadistic is the pirate, the vampire is metaphysical and seductive. The pirate operates through theft and actual murder. The vampire, being a creature of fiction, operates through parasitism and symbolic death. The vampire lives off of “precious bodily fluids” within the imagination of the audient. Previous media representations of vampires range from the bleak shabby elegance of Dracula to the ghoulish Nosferatu. With Ann Rice’s mythology of vampirism, the vampire, while still a wicked undead beast, was portrayed in much more humanistic terms – ,a href=”http://a.abcnews.com/images/GMA/sipa_Interview_Vampire_090325_ssh.jpg”>child vampires,, ancient vampires who could barely move, romantic and handsome vampires drawn into a disaster not of their own making.

As alluring and attractive and malleable such a fictive creature can be, they are, simply, parasites.

This is the other side of the capitalist ideology: you too can partake of the riches of this world and live forever – all at the expense of worthless dupes and victims whom you will feed on. You will carry the guilt, but learn to ignore the shame, and eventually revel and thrive in your parasitic madness. And internal to vampirism is the same failure of capitalism: what happens when you run out of victims, when the entire world is populated by vampires? What do you do when the engine of production has exhausted the planet’s resources and there is nothing left to profit on? The answer is the same: collapse and extinction.

This is never a point ever thought through, because of the dominant demands of short term necessity refracted through the lens of industrial destruction and capitalist exploitation. Hence, the mythology of parasitism must be inculcated at as young an age as possible, and so we have 6 year olds dressing as Dracula and Blackbeard and movies for teens like Twilight and Pirates of the Caribbean. The most impatient people, the young, are taught to look upon parasitism as just another and therefore acceptable, part of society. So, when they labour at some job for the rest of their lives, they won’t mind that a small number of parasites at the top are reaping all the rewards at their expense. They won’t mind that they, as members of the crew, make their living stealing from others.

This logic can go forward, and as usual, it is through comedy that this society deals with it most directly: the next example is a vampire pirate. And we have one: in the film “Pirates of the Caribbean” in the form of Jack Sparrow’s father played by Keith Richards. It is well known that Richards is undead and a vampire. This can be said because vampires don’t exist, therefore any attribution to Richards as a vampire is as fictive as the notion of vampire itself. to feed this mythology, he regularly has his blood transfused in order to continue living his vampiric life, where over the years he has increasingly come to resemble Nosferatu, feeding off the ashes of his father.

This, of course, has nothing to do with Keith Richards the person. I have never met him, and I am sure he’s a funny and decent dinner companion. The Keith Richards I am addressing is the fictive and mythological Richards – the media creation of Richards – the only one history will ever really know as it writes the story and mythologies of our times. This Richards is a scary and demented derangement of party animal and cultural parasite – someone who has looted all the blues riffs ever known and sucked them dry of their essence and blasted them together in the form of his playing in the Rolling Stones music ensemble – a band who built their career upon defiance and the hint of revolution and then sold it all for millions of dollars, pillaging music history and sucking their fans dry of money for their records, performances, and ephemera in the process.

There is nothing sustainable about Richards – he is the drug-addled adolescent with half a century of practice under his belt, and looking worse for the wear and tear he has put himself through. The excess he has subjected himself to would have killed weaker men, and for that his persona takes on a character of the undead – the vampire – Nosferatu. due to his age and condition, Richards cannot be the face of acceptable vampirism to a new younger generation – so he is the vampire father of the pirate role model for the younger generation.

And the vampire? In the form of Twilight’s Edward Cullen, he is not some rotting husk – he is a rutting hunk, designed and delivered for the fantasies of teen and tween girls. He makes victimhood seem reasonable, as he and his clan are now “vegetarians” in a vampiric sense: they only drink the blood of animals. A more “sustainable” approach to industrial capitalism. Rather than chop down the forest to power the machines, dig up the coal and oil, and slaughter wild animals wholesale for the vampirism, as it mimics contemporary western food patterns of industrial meat production.

At core, they are still vampires. They are still parasites. They take one’s most precious possession, time, and give only illusions and fantasy in return, flickering page turning revelries of fictive space, making us feel good about being hapless victims of a vampiric system of global piracy.

In the mean time, the rivers are dammed up, the earth continues to warm up, and precious metals are ripped from the dying earth to make a handful of people fabulously wealthy. And we’re all OK with that because we get to watch vampire pirates on the screen.

To quote Brian Eno:

I was just a broken head
I stole the world that others punctured
Now I stumble through the garbage
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble

Beak and claw, remorse reminder
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble
Back and forth and back to nothing
Keep them tidy, keep them humble.

Chop and change to cut the corners
Sharp as razors (shiny razors)
Stranded on a world that’s dying
Never moving, hardly trying.

I was just a broken head
I stole the world that others plundered
Now I stumble through the garbage
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble.