Constitution Class

…Aaaand there are the bells, so we’re gonna have to get back to business pretty soon, but while we’re still at some liberty…

Let’s talk about everybody’s favourite subject:  Canadian politics!

Yay!

Oh don’t worry, we’re not really going to talk Canadian politics.  Just about one tiny piece of Canadian politics.

The money.

Or — scratch that, I mean the Queen.

A funny old bird, the Queen;  some people like her, and some people hate her, but most Canadians think something about her every so often — la Reine du Canada, in that possibly oddest of all odd military toasts.  So today I was talking to my friend who makes a great show every so often of being a Republican…to which I say, “as if”, because I’ve met some genuine Canadian Republicans (down at the Legion, which is really the only place you’ll find ‘em) and as crotchety a curmudgeon as my friend is he just doesn’t have the right amount of grey hairs and vitamin supplements to qualify for that august brotherhood.  Nowadays we don’t care so much about getting rid of the monarchy, most of us — because the Constitution already got repatriated, and a Prime Minister already invoked the vestigial right of direct appeal to the monarch — these things really work like Charter rights do, you know:  as precedent stands until the Charter is applied to it (just like State law applies until the 14th (?) Amendment is applied to it down in the Benighted States of America) (I kid because I love), so do obsolete constitutional privileges until they are used, whereupon they back out of the House sweeping away their own footprints behind them, editing themselves from Parliamentary praxis — although that editing process is more a matter of tacit democratic agreement rather than legal necessity — and I’m not sure if you can even leapfrog the Supreme Court to the Privy Council anymore.  But in any case the crux of it all is this:  that Canada’s money stays in Canada, and Canadians don’t care anymore about the rest.  We don’t have Dominion Day, and we don’t have to go cap-in-hand on matters constitutional, and that’s where our long colonial story sort of…just peters out gradually, I guess, as most things like that do up here.

And not that there isn’t more to that story…

But we don’t need to get into it here.  All we really need to get into is this:  that for most Canadians, the only change they’d notice from Canada becoming a full-fledged Republic with a UDI and everything is that the money would look different.  And so why bother going that route?  Since it costs money, to change the money…

Well all right.  There is a little bit more to it than that.  Because the Queen (and not just any old Queen, but this Queen), is written into the Constitution itself.  “Monarch” in the Canadian context is technically not a category just any old monarch can fill, and as we all know the Constitution is about nothing but technicalities…as any constitution must be, if it’s really supposed to track down self-evident Truths and hustle them into a legal framework.  Or, as we might more fancifully call it, a cage: a binding-spell made of hierarchical prouncements and conditions, a Solomon’s Seal of philosophical formulae:  and all the chalk lines must be drawn out in full and unbroken, or the demon will escape.  Yes:  the law that governs our governments is the highest form of cybernetic research we’ve got, and like Mr. Suber’s Nomic it is infinitely flexible, a maze of cause and effect and cause descriptively-powerful enough to fall into the border of complexity itself:  there to fight the very Dragon of Undecidability if it isn’t lucky.  But for such immensely serious real-world risks, the compensations are stunning:  for doesn’t Jung say, that to win the Princess is always and only to win one’s own soul?

For polities, democracy is just such a soul — essential and unsubstitutable.  In the core (the heart, of course:  as heartwood) of democracies, there lies always the indissoluble trouble of science itself:  how can we know, really know?  How can our mathematical plots of reality, of Truth, no matter however so close they sail up to it, ever jump the gap of Newtonian evanescence to the firmness of Dry Land?  Well…the short answer is:  they can’t.  (And it suddenly occurs to me that you can blame Andrew for this post, that is if you’re looking for someone to blame…hey, I’m just the messenger, man…)

But again:  compensations.

The Princess, and all that.

But, we weren’t talking about the Princess, were we?  We were talking about the Queen.  And as the Queen, good old Betty (though I never call her that, myself) is the fundamental technical fact of the Canadian Constitution…and so, because of another fundamental (though less technical) fact, which is that THIS IS CANADA AND WE DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY HERE, taking the old jeep-fixer out and putting some other moral widget in her place would be an extremely complicated, not to say vexed, task.  In Canada, you see, we do a lot of pretending:  we do a lot of nodding and smiling and what-we-were-gonna-do-anyway.  I would venture to say, even, that we are the most (constitutionally-speaking, at the very least!) passive-aggressive polity in the English-speaking world.  But even for us, the Queen is a hard prop to kick out, and then plausibly walk away whistling what who me, she did, you don’t say, well well.  I’ve got friends in the UK who want the monarchy bloody well OUT!!, but my true north strong and free hasn’t got anything like that kind of feeling about it, that you could hang a philosophical position on.  And so there’s no way of telling just what would it take, or what would have to be done, to remove the distant figurehead from which our Governor-General ultimately derives authority.  The UK?  Heck, this isn’t even Australia…this is the place where faking it ’til you’re making it was invented, and we are not straightforward people up in here.  Every country, like every family, is weird in its own way:  and our way is that we are just not going to let on what’s on our minds.

Individually, of course…well, I like us.

But corporately…hey, your guess is as good as mine.

Constitutionally-speaking, that is.

But with that said…still, no matter how occulted the matter of dramatic constitutional change might be, the business of what the money would look like would still be the most pressing and critical matter.  I mean, we couldn’t even start talking about removing the (strangely vital) figurehead, until we had that shit sorted out.  Hey, did I ever tell you about the story of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Bank of Edinburgh?  That’s where Jacobite and Whig alike (according to the grandson of our fifteenth Governor-General) recognized that ideological warfare was trumped by the necessity of people having faith in the security of their banking system, and for Canada — whose Constitution doesn’t fool about with such idealistic aspirations as “the pursuit of happiness” but instead concentrates rather dully (with glorious, heroic dullness!) on the even-more-nebulous thing identified as “good government” — and there are a lot of goddamn ex-Scots in this country! — and one day soon I promise to get into all this more fairly and in more detail so no one hates me — for Canada, the same imminently (not to say eminently) practical panic is likewise a top priority.

And so, all that (as I said) said…

Jesus, what d’you think the money would have to look like?

That’s exactly what I asked my faux-Republican friend.  Convince me about the money, I said, and maybe I’ll ride along with your pointless anti-monarchist tough-guy gravy train to a freedom we’ve already got!

And that’s when he said:

“Lester B. Pearson on the twenty.”

So okay, you Canadians out there:  he got my attention with that.  And so let me get your attention with this, a possibly fun game?  Suppose it happened:  we changed the money.

What, in that event, do you think it should be changed to?

We need the facing side of the lesser coins, the facing side of the two major coins, and the facing side of the twenty, and let’s say we bring back the thousand and give it a new facing side as well…and, of course, a back side!  And if you want to go higher, I don’t mind:  after all, if we’re to be Republic-ready, we’re gonna want a whole bunch of patriotic portraits, aren’t we?  Heck, design a whole new series if you want to, I mean I’ve gotta say I miss the landscapes that used to be on the back of the notes.  Go crazy, is what I say…but I only ask that you consider what could make it through Parliament:  so if you want something a little off the beaten path (I think you probably know who I mean), you better make a bit of a convincing speech about it.

I know…

…It’s boring!

But isn’t that part of what being Canadian is all about?

Hold-The-Door

Okay, quick break everybody…!

…While you go and get yourself some of THIS, a truly dandy webcomic that landed in my mailbox a few months ago, and that FOOL THAT I AM I only started reading this week.  So I guess you could say I trade-waited it…which worked out pretty well for me, but I gotta confess I feel a bit guilty about not being there to play cheerleader while it got written.  The gentleman’s name is Dan Goldman, and lucky you he’s got an interview going at The Daily Cross-Hatch, too…and apparently he’s kind of famous already, or something?

Good God, I’m behind the times, eh?  Wait, wait…

…and HOLD THAT DOOR!

Project Blue Box, Part Two

Is it interesting?  Is it overwritten?  Is it all going to hang together, or hang separately?

Your guess is as good as mine, Bloggers;  but here’s some more of it:

***

Mystery Machines: Trash Culture, Cargo Cults, and the Escape from Participation Mystique

Part Two: “Molotov Milk-Bottles”

It’s a big difference, between “apparently subversive” and actually subversive. Fredric Werthem did his best to stop the first, but couldn’t even anticipate the second. Well, not exactly a big surprise, there: since he really couldn’t see just what it was, that was happening right in front of his eyes…

But we did, didn’t we?

Step up to the doorway of the Seventies, and notice the breeze blowing through it: that’s the fresh air of rebellion, my friends. Young punks raised on this trash culture stuff, who know its codes, are getting ready to trashify it still more. The magical stuff, the wish-fulfillment whose microcosmic logic forms an intersection with the real world, that’s what they’re experts in…and somewhat removed from the older storytellers’ desire to inculcate, or perhaps incubate, the technosocial worldview, they are instead ready to crash that storytelling mode together with its opposite, and see what comes out. This is where my tinkertoy-model of alternative logic was formed, so I know it well: the champion of rationality gets undermined. The schoolboy knowledge stops working, even though the schoolboy metaphors continue. Well, and they don’t just continue…

…So much as they take on a life of their own. Werthem would’ve been horrified, if he’d even been able to make heads or tails of it: because the official process of education will take decades yet to overcome even the smallest part of its own inertia, but the alter-pedagogy has already begun to shift with the times. Television cartoons may continue to reinforce the orthodoxy of scientific context until another generation of creators has come and gone (with a few early exceptions, of course), but comic books have already dropped the scientific context in favour of literary context: suddenly it isn’t ninth-grade chemistry that serves as the key to understanding the ethical dimension of superhero punch-outs, nor even eleventh-grade civics, but it’s all a mishmash of Melville and Malzberg, Socrates and Salinger, Camus and Chandler, Arendt and Asimov. Leibniz and Lovecraft, if you will.

Kant and Kurtzman?

Anyway it’s a mess, whatever it is, as the quick bright things of the Forties come to confusion in the Sixties. We are still taking the bridge to adult thinking from the shores of participation mystique, but it’s a different landing we’re making — a different kind of participation we’re learning to escape from. Trash culture: in which it’s no longer such a priority to make fine discriminations between what is real and false, but instead the thing to do, the competency to master, is how to preserve one’s ability to act even when such fine discriminations can’t be made — when the very notion that they can be made may itself smack of absurdity and lead to delusion. Derrida and Dick? Kirby and Lee and Ditko didn’t know what they’d started, or more properly what they’d jumped onto, in the early Sixties at Marvel: “pop art”, indeed! Those college-age readers of which Stan was so proud were attracted by something, sure enough, and if it wasn’t the flashy costumes it seems fair to say it just may’ve been the greater engagement with the text, which he himself went to great lengths to encourage as an editor-in-chief. Well, Marvel’s comics never taught grade nine chemistry either, as it happens: Green Lantern’s ring was a magical agency that allowed the lessons of the classroom to conquer the universe, but Reed Richards’ crazy machines were all things that used the “idea” of science as an excuse — an excuse for impressionistic psychodrama that couldn’t be staged in a world of mere rockets and rules, because it relied heavily on the species of science-fictional cautionary tale that pits man against his own growing technical capacity: Man vs. Future, if you like. So when two essentially-magical powers clashed in this mode, it wasn’t to show the superiority of rational thought to symbolic assertion, but to show Man caught in the middle of different kinds of symbolic assertions, and the conflicting implications that his own rational powers carried with them…e.g., once the lessons of the classroom are finally in charge, how will they rule? And how can their rule be restrained, or at least ameliorated? In other words, this was less Scooby-Doo and more Star Trek…which is to say, again, that it was less superhero comic and more monster comic, less DC and more EC, in its moral construction. What Will Man Become? It’s a pretty central question: how many hyperevolved humans or terrifyingly-advanced aliens left Earth for space or other spacelike dimension, back in the early Marvel days? In the Seventies and through the Eighties, “leaving the enclosure” because one was too big for it became something like a fetish of the company’s creative culture, and the Boddhisatva Space-Being became such an anchor-point for superhero drama that it actually lost its force through becoming a cliched convention. Likewise the unique problem of Marvel supervillains, always becoming overloaded by power, or reaching that most thrillingly evocative state of comic-book science, “critical mass”. The tinkertoy logic-model goes awry, here, as all its metaphors escape from their cages — Julie Schwartz, in his Campbellian way, would never have permitted “critical mass” to be about anything but nuclear reactors, just as nefarious wielders of power were to be overcome by heroic fists in his scheme, rather than monkey’s paws. Because “what will Man become” was never the question at hand, for him…

…But over at his competitor’s place, it was always at hand, somewhat in the manner of the apocalypse. It’s funny to think now of Stan Lee’s story, how he called up Jack Kirby one day and said “what if the FF fought God?”, only to have Jack produce Galactus…because what were the Marvel heroes ever fighting but gods? Terrifying powers from the Outer Dark (and the Inner Space!) molested the poor bastards day and night, and to beat them they had to employ somewhat…ah, questionable tactics. When the Skrulls arrive on Earth in FF #2, it isn’t the invincible laws of optics that beat them, but it’s comic-book pages…but then comic books are Mystery Machines too, aren’t they? Reed Richards never builds a Cube so Radical that it can encompass a genuine principle of science, instead only building up cranky edifices of adamantly comic-booky science, science that operates beyond the ken of the classroom physics lesson in the same way Timely/Atlas’ monsters operated beyond the ken of the biology or indeed even geography lesson. Things Man Was Not Meant To Know never was such a vexed matter as in Marvel’s flagship title: because sometimes Man was okay if he wanted to know them, but sometimes He wasn’t, and it took a guide as coercively authoritative as Reed Richards to specify where that line really was. In other words it all came down to interpretation, and then the interpretation all came down to a somewhat confusing “scientific morality”…which was the exact joint where Marvel’s tinkertoy-logic did its real-world-intersecting, in that parsing of fine differences: what was to be taken as real vs. what was to be taken as false, or what was to be taken as hubristic vs. what was to be taken as humble. What was to be taken as dangerous, and what was to be taken as adventuresome. “Real” science would’ve only gotten in the way of all that, of course…!

Nevetheless, “all that” was still playing by the basic alter-pedagogic rules of engagement, at that point: in that it was still technosocially instructive in a conventional way. Because Reed Richards was a trustworthy arbiter of where acceptable science left off, and unacceptable science began, that lesson he gave (oh, again and again he gave it!) was of tremendous preparatory value. Learn your lessons one by one and diligently; respect your teachers and heed their advice; a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It didn’t have to be about the overall “context of science” in terms of physical relationships; moving a little off the centre of the target, it was still in the gold so long as it was about the context of science in terms of moral relationships.

Except: moving off the centre once, implies that you can move off it again…and so whether they wanted to or not, whether they could possibly have intended to or not, by finding a slightly more challenging way to be “apparently” subversive, Marvel eventually invited a genuine subversiveness into its trashy storytelling business. And that’s what made them; that’s the train they jumped onto. All those college-age readers they gained…

What made them so darn interested in the FF, or the Hulk, or Spider-Man?

Only the changing times, perhaps. Hey, when Dennis Hopper puts Captain America into Easy Rider, you know you’ve somehow gone anti-Establishment on yourself, don’t you? Though you might never have planned it; but then, that’s the power of engagement with text. Sooner or later, they must’ve figured out what they’d done. Myself, I think Stan probably didn’t think about it all that carefully, just loved riding that wave; but I think Kirby saw it all the way, and liked it for what it was. And Ditko plainly thought it needed a corrective — A-is-bloody-A! — so we might assume he saw it too. But seeing is one thing.

And being is quite another. So when the Quick Bright Things who had grown up on the alter-pedadogical trash-culture products of the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties made it in through the door of Marvel Comics in particular (and if one were to list even just those, this article would end up being a good deal longer than it is), they might’ve begun by being off-centre but they moved quickly to redefining where the centre was…and got in the habit of taking it with them wherever they went. For them, “scientific morality” was a poor use of the tools at hand: the heroes with the feet of clay and the cosmic or moral forces that beset them, and the Mystery Machines too (if indeed a difference can be made out, there), were such perfect vehicles for expressing doubt, uncertainty, and controversy that to leave the champions of rationality un-undermined seemed an impossible thing to justify — an excellent way to chase an irrelevance that was in exact philosophical opposition to what drew you to the field in the first place. Thus, the message of the Seventies: science is just a bunch of guys with suede elbow-patches telling you what to do, so they don’t have to realize they don’t know what to do. But science is not the only hierarchy; and indeed, what is one supposed to do if one doesn’t fit in to that hierarchy? One can only find another, insist on another…introduce another. On a base level, of course, license is given to the individual-psychology-based use of the superheroic forms prevalent at this time only on the grounds that we gotta make money — if The Exorcist is big, we’ll make a superhero who does exorcisms, if Six Million Dollar Man is big then we should do a cyborg as a superhero — hey, we’ll try anything — but these excursions into fleetingly-popular genres, like Marvel’s invocations of the “idea” of science, were only excuses for what their new talent really wanted to do. Which was: trouble the characters.

Trouble the “universe”.

Trouble the society?

I mean, it seems grandiose when I say it like that. But, what was supposed to happen here, really? Here we have a clutch of extremely talented and well-educated youngsters working in the field they grew up on and loved, a low field with few barriers to entry, but still a field that had been built up into quasi-respectability by their own heroes of writing and cartooning, and what’s perhaps better than that built up into a state of vitality and relevance and social efficacy. Alter-pedagogy? It took off like a rocket sled under the various pens of these young turks, and we weren’t doing electronics anymore…as I said, I remember it well. It got Fortean, sometimes. But the really interesting thing about it, was that it finally did take on the demimondean aspect that Werthem had so feared…while in the same moment it achieved what even he probably thought was a pretty far-out goal, in that it normalized the demi-monde by situating an ordinary person in it, and inviting them to adapt to it, engage with it, consider how they sat with it. And never mind that this “ordinary person” dressed up like a gooney-bird at night and fought crime; well in fact that classic superheroic character-as-action convention served only to raise existential questions in the mind of the reader, as they did in the mind of the character. Am I so different? the crazy person with the nylon tailfeathers asks himself…and then by virtue of our identification with him, we at home wonder the same. Even if we ourselves are the people we’re wondering about.

So…

Gone is the perspectival certainty of Robin the Boy Wonder!

Gone forever, one must think, and perhaps must hope. No longer the simplistically aspirational worldview-totem he once was, Robin has fallen into your engagement-with-text too, and must deal with you more authentically as a subject. And poor deluded Werthem would never have seen this, but…Robin must then struggle not to be broken by this new understanding, you see?

And therein, of course…lies an entirely new course of instruction for the reader.

One which continued far past the Seventies, and even the Eighties. Even the Nineties.

In fact we are just coming up to our final paper now.

Hope you studied, Reader!

Up Jumps The Devil

Perspective, Bloggers;  that’s what it’s all about.

Perspective.

So here we are at sixty-five years after the Great Break, known to you and me as the Second World War.  It’s not even a single human lifetime, just birth to retirement age…and yet we let it perplex us, so obsessed are we with the minutiae of daily life and daily orientation.  Trends and opinions, theories of history both recent and unrecent, and whatever the idiots I used to tutor are saying in the newspapers this week, it all serves to produce a sense of place and participation…but the problem is, in a world of mass-media exposure that vital sense of being and doing and belonging gets politicized, until we cannot see the forest, we cannot see the trees, we are just plainly and simply facing the wrong way ’round.  In the 19th century English-speaking world everybody who was anybody wrote a History at some point, because it was simply de rigeur to explore how we got Here from There…”Here” meaning everything since the Dark Ages, and “There” meaning everything that came before.  Yeah, the Roman Empire — they considered it to be relevant.

Meanwhile we consider everything before 1990 to be Stonehenge-Land.  It seems.  Sometimes.

And can this fail to be depressing?

Stop and back up:  if you’re like me, you’re probably wondering how in the world Jonathan Lethem got Phil Dick’s 8,000 pages of Exegesis down to a mere 800, and how justified those cuts were.  I don’t have an axe to grind against Lethem, I’m not suspicious, but it sure is a monumental whittling-down (heh), and it makes me nervous that I might not see enough in it of the “real” Phil Dick, whose detailed literary exploration of his own madness I think the world desperately needs.  It’s not often, after all (anymore!), that we send down a writer of his caliber and stripe into those depths, and actually permit ourselves to listen in on the hydrophone to what he has to say about the experience.  And yet madness is close to us all, chillingly close, just a half-word away — we are involved with madness, all of us, but we don’t know how to pop the question without popping the bubble.  We don’t know what’s in madness…

But we should know that there is something in it.  Our friend the horse-lover once described the modern world as a Biblical illusion, something created by the Devil to manufacture conceptual distance between the reality we live in, and the reality we perceive.  There we are in 30 A.D. or something, going about our lives, connected, integral…but then up he jumps! And puts a gulf of time between ourselves and ourselves, that doesn’t, that can’t, really exist.  Two millenia, man.  Now that’s a really long con…

But let me, perhaps, explain.

So here we are in a rather suspicious state, wherein either we are irreversibly on the verge of an ecological catastrophe…or we aren’t.  This is just our starting-point, mind you, this is just our example.  But consider the something-less-than-threescore-and-ten that lies between us and what Archie Bunker used to call “The Big One”:  and how either it was all done long before then, like LONG before…like, irreversibly all done in the early fifteenth century, or something…or it was all still salvageable until just a little while ago.

Okay?

Now, let’s take a look:  Silent Spring came out in the early Sixties, I believe?  (And FYI, The Second Sex came out in the early Fifties — not so much as an eyeblink of time between ‘em as far as the 19th century historians would’ve been concerned)  And now it’s fifty years later and you’ve got to say we’ve made some progress in raising consciousness about it.  You may say we haven’t made much progress at all, but I don’t think you’re considering the obstacles we’ve had to overcome!  Surely you don’t think Ronald Reagan wanted a recycling box in every household?  And yet we have ‘em, don’t we.  So who made that happen.

Obviously, it was us.

Think about it.  In the last thirty years, my country’s seen nothing less than a sweeping nutritional revolution:  what people eat is completely different from what it was when I was a child.  And yet what it is now, is not so different from what it was when my grandmothers and grandfathers were children.  More olive oil, certainly.  More affordable apricots.  But in the basics it’s not so different.  Now go back another thirty years from them:  we’re at the American Civil War.  In terms of food choices, it’s not so long.  But to us it’s ancient history.

Except it isn’t ancient, that’s just the devil jumping up.  When Barack Obama was elected, I read an article about it written by a man who’d watched the acceptance speech with a woman who was born a slave.

Born a slave.

Born a slave.

And I thought:  “wow, isn’t that amazing!” And then I slapped myself.  Because it isn’t amazing, damn it.  It isn’t amazing AT ALL.  These are eyeblinks, these are specks, these are things that are practically happening now, for the love of God they’re not distant, they’re not ancient…!

But we think they are, don’t we?

One human lifetime since slaves were kept in the Americas by European settlers, and it was common practice, it was normal.  Birth to retirement age since a dumb white guy with syphilis who got millions of people onside with Just Killing Jews topped himself in a bunker.  Nuclear power, the oil economy, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the end of the Piston Era, spaceflight, the Great Leap Forward, the great leap back.  A Coca-Cola on every corner, a Manchurian Candidate in every pot.  Health care.  Fiberglass.  Sci-Fi.  Punk rock.  How very quickly we do forget.

It might as well all be happening right now.

Until, that is…the devil jumps up.

So think about this:  that deniability always rests on nearness as much as it rests on distance.  If a huge ecological catastrophe was made inevitable five hundred, five thousand, or five hundred thousand years ago…or five million, for that matter!…then there’s nothing to deny.  It isn’t our fault.  We didn’t know, and couldn’t have known, and twenty generations lie between us and blame, as surely as twenty generations lie between us and the ability to act on the danger we’re in.  So in that event, from that perspective, it makes very little sense for us to even care — we might as well do just what we please.  This is Calvinism except you know the answer of salvation in advance:  this is smash-the-state territory.  Booze up and riot.  If the science is inarguable and the conclusion foreordained, then no one’s privileges can possibly be protected or maintained — the revolution’s here, because there is absolutely no reason under the sun for it not to be.  We don’t even have to be polite about it.  The fate of the world’s got nothing to do with us — the only thing there is to think about is the inequity we see around us every day, and what we feel like doing about it.

On the other hand, if this isn’t millenial anti-Calvinism…then something might be done now, and all those who are not doing it are shutting the door on the future.  Inevitably.  Thus we are all in the deadliest danger this minute, and so once again the revolution is here.  Because there’s no reason for it not to be.  Therefore it can’t not be.  And everyone must be involved.

But obviously we do not really believe either of those things.  What we believe (and by “we” I mean everyone who is the least bit interested in truth-values, whether I think their theories wrong or right) is that, broadly speaking, either the point’s just been passed, or it is just ahead.  Either it is just by this much that we have missed the chance to act, or we are acting in the exactly appropriate measure, at the exactly appropriate time, in the lead-up to a crisis that we will neatly avert because we are perfectly prepared for it…even if we don’t yet know how we are prepared.  In the former case, though we’re doomed we can still point fingers:  at people who knew, who were told, but who just didn’t listen or just didn’t care.  In other words:  not the full revolution, not yet, but rather the seeking of redress through the machinery of political culture and society that preserves us from the revolution and its costs.  A trial, a judgement, a sentence;  maybe even a Hail Mary pass afterwards, if someone can think of one.  But because the moment of a failure close to present, still contains all the advantages of a present moment…then this is all very personal, still.

Meanwhile in the latter case, where the moment of crisis has not yet arrived, the science may be right but we do not have to act on it even if it is.  Mere knowing doesn’t necessitate action in this view as it does in all the others — if thinking it has either just happened or that it may be happening at this instant makes inaction unethical at best and impossible at worst — can there be something as conveniently neutral as “inaction” during a crisis or its immediate aftermath? — the wu-wei view of climate change simply maintains that it isn’t rational to put all pressure on a moment that is not the moment.  Which is very very convenient, isn’t it?  To maintain that if there is any critical moment in question, the one moment it can’t be is this one right here?

Well, they’re both convenient views, actually.  And perhaps unsurprisingly:  since they each argue the same point, only from different ends.  It’s just happened, or is happening as we speak in such a way that the odds are going against us like those damn deflector shields in those damn Star Trek shows, only effective until challenged and then always weakened, weakened, weakened unto death…each moment leaving less urgency, less responsibility, in our hands…subtracting away how much blame we ourselves will eventually deserve, as the present slips into something more comfortable.  After all where does the past begin, as old Isaac once asked?  It begins in the present, it begins now….

OR.  It has not happened before and is not happening now…because the present begins the future, too, and it’s the future we have to think about:  and acting for the moment, well that’s just silly.  After all, what can we do in a moment?  Nothing at all;  therefore if there’s anything least necessary for us to do about anything, it’s that.

And if you think all that just sounds like it’s straight out of Xeno and his paradoxes, I think you’d be right, dear reader:  I mean, what a load of crap.  To argue the devaluation of the present in both cases;  and yet to insist that the critical moment for action cannot be far from the present.  Because if it’s too far in the past, then there’s no point questioning the science anymore:  we did it thirty-five decades ago, it’s done.  It’s outside the boundaries of the thing called wiggle-room, it’s already long past debating.  But if it’s far in the future still, then there is similarly no reason to call the science into question:  this will happen, and we all agree it will happen.  So then we get to ask:  hey people in charge, what are you planning to do about it in the short and long term?  And then if the answer is “not a damn thing until it’s on top of us”…well, there’s no wiggle-room there either, is there?  Because the excuse is the same.

From a certain perspective, it’s a terrible excuse for an excuse.  What are the odds, after all, that in “climatic time” if not geological time the fulcrum moment would be located so precisely and so flatteringly?  An eyeblink;  a speck.  It’s less than both of those.  Barely birth to retirement age, and not even that:  more like a chunk inside it where the leaves of the calendar mark time by changes in fashion, by what’s hot and what’s not, a span of time subject to such generational dilation that slavery seems like ancient history from within it…and yet even inside that span it still must be anywhere but here that the world is saved or damned, and anyone but us who determines it.  So the only perspective that allows environmentalists to say “I told you so” and industrialists to say “dope-smoking hippies are such woolly-headed alarmists”, is this one.  Any other perspective, and both positions not only stop being anything like firmly-entrenched, but they fall completely to pieces.  Two human lifetimes, and they both look just as silly as they are.

Which is to say:  one looks a fuck of a lot sillier than the other…but then that’s no excuse for apathy either, eh?  From the perspective of two human lifetimes, to try to use the other guy’s arguments against him, just to prove he’s a hypocrite and no more, and thus ignore the arguments that have to do with what is real, is a shameful abdication of responsibility.  It isn’t even attractive when comics nerds argue about “good stories”, for heaven’s sake.  And the more you scale up the importance of the conversation, the uglier it is to see anyone try to win it by gaming it.

And I hope you remember that I said this was all just preamble, eh?  Because that’s what it was.  That’s what you just read:  the opening remarks.  Yeah…yeah, I know, but…

…Gotta be me, eh?

But not too much:  and so probably I should now step briskly to the point.  Up jumps the devil from the bright blue sea, to rob us of initiative by robbing us of perspective…but sometimes initiative is not the only thing we have going for us.  Sometimes we have necessity, too.

And it all comes down to this:  one day soon, someone will need a bigger telescope.  I mean forget the coming mineral shortages:  forget zinc, forget palladium, forget even phosphorus…

…Although we use phosphorus to make fertilizer, and so when it’s gone so is the global food-production machinery the twentieth century relied on and made its big money on…and forget that when people are starving that’s when revolutions really come along…I mean forget Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite!, the slogan of the 1917 Revolution was “Bread, Peace, Land!“  Hey, in the span of a human lifetime we have never seen mass galvanization of government resources more than once…it was called “The Big One:  WWII”…but just let people not get enough wheat or rice or taro root to fucking live another four weeks and you’ll see it again!  I guarantee you will see it!  I mean what did Lenin starve twenty million for, if not to show the superiority of his method of totalitarian fuckery?  He wanted to show that he could break the equation between famine and revolt, and he did…but man, they tried a lot of crazy shit back in the twentieth century, and most of it was kinda one-use-only, you know?  I again guarantee you, there will never be any more times in which famine can be domesticated by a moral monster, and made a proof of some theory.  I mean that was some pretty radical shit, but:  one use only.  And if hunger comes again, in our time, the world will change — it’ll change fast.  Because people will shed their politeness to power, and shred their illusions about power…and it will be, in fact, as though it was suddenly understood that the science is rock-solid and that the question was all answered in the early fifteenth century.  The governments will fairly leap into action, if they see any way to act at all!  At a certain point minerals are indistinguishable from foodstuffs in the flowchart.  Sulfur’s wheat, and palladium’s cinnamon, and coal is spelt is gasoline is wind and water power, whales, salmon, tuna, eggs, Samoans, semiconductors, surfboards…at a certain point we’d all riot for any of it, because it’s all connected.  And so someday really soon, something is going to happen, and then the governments will react…

And will react…

And they’ll amaze us all in an instant.  Believe me when I say:  they will.  Let’s take some perspective on this:  we are going to fucking RUN OUT of palladium!  You know what I mean…?

But, wait.  I did say:  “let’s leave all that aside”, didn’t I?  Because I was talking, instead, I believe, about the telescope.

It won’t come down to famine, Bloggers.

Because anyone who’s ever worked with their hands knows that machines are great, but there will always be something they can’t do.  Human beings are great at building machines because they’re smart;  but what’s “smart”?  Well, smart is about a million years of evolution on the Homo tree, another four million on the Pan tree…on and on, and back and back, ’til you hit a number like four billion years of R+D.  And I mean, don’t get me wrong, we’re smart…! But some of our smartest moves include enlisting natural processes (like evolution) to make our technology better.  And that…well…

…Is also sort of an admission, isn’t it?

That chance designs better than intelligence does?

Mind you, I’m a big fan of intelligence.  I love intelligence to death.  Look at what intelligence has given us!  Why for one thing, it’s given us…

…The telescope.

So forget all the minerals.  Suppose one day an astronomer walks into, oh I don’t know, the U.S. Congress and says:

“I need a bigger telescope.  Build it for me.”

…

Can they say “no”?

Well, they can;  but that would be a lot like saying “in the United States Of America we are okay with science, but there is a maximum build-out of advancement of instruments!”

And even in just one country that won’t work.  I mean we don’t need revolutionaries.  We don’t need political martyrs.  This isn’t C-20 anymore, we’re not doing passion plays of The Crucible, these are just a bunch of brass tacks, and it all comes down to this:  the guy wants a bigger telescope.  Because he wants to look through it.  Sure, you can put him off for a year.  You can put him off for ten years.  But put him off for fifty years and your country will be Amish.  In fact “more” than Amish, which is to say far less than the Amish people!  You will be fairy sprites worshipping a tree.  You will be a scientific and technological society that has capped science and technology.  Like I said, it won’t need rebels:  just astronomers.  One day an astronomer will enter the Congress and it’ll be Road Warrior Time.  And that is why…

…You will give the guy his telescope.  And if it needs to be on the moon, you will put it on the moon.  And if it needs fast-reacting mammal-robot humans to run it instead of spider-robots made at MIT, you will use the humans.  Pay for the oxygen.  Figure it out about the cosmic-ray shielding.  You’ll do all that.

Because from the perspective of two human lifetimes, it’s simply necessary.  It’s stupid to dither, and it’s stupid to delay.  Anyone who works with their hands knows it:  there will always be tasks conceived by humans, that creations of humans can’t do.  And so you sigh, and put on the rubber gloves and the rubber boots.  You want to just go home and go to bed, but instead you have to go to the MOON…!  Recently the guy who was the last British Astronomer Royal said, in response to the question “what about going to the moon?”…he said…

“Been there, done that.”

What a fucking wanker.  I mean how truly embarrassing.  Every new look we take at anything, including the sainted moon, tells us more about it.  Our knowledge is always expanding.  It’s expanding by leaps and bounds made by seven-league boots.  Every time we look anew, we learn something.

Our learning comes thick and fast, these days.

From a certain perspective, that’s a problem.  I mean how can any outdated narrative survive, when necessity speaks against it?  We live in a time when all appears to be trends, opinions, theories of history both recent and non-recent…and it all weighs itself heavier than it is, doesn’t it?

It begs for belief, eh?

But…the silly thing about it is…

…That there will be a Moonbase Alpha.  Because necessity says there must be.  The guy who wants the telescope:  says there must be.

Of course it is up to us if we want to fill it with go-go girls.  And I pray we will be equal to that task.

But it is GOING TO HAPPEN.

…

Thanks so much for listening.  I think I lost my point.

Maybe I’ll try again?

Now The Story Can Be Told…

…Although this isn’t where it ends.  Although it does end.

But this is where it begins, instead.

Bloggers, my wish has been granted:  “Panther’s Rage”, analyzed and appreciated in tag-team format by a couple of our most passionate online readers.  When I started this blog’s first iteration up, I felt like I was going outside everybody’s comfort zone by mentioning Howard The Duck.  But now — right now! — Tucker and David are attacking the very most naive purple-prosed heart of the corpus of mainstream comics I grew up with, and finding all kinds of charm in it, like a really earnest Christmas pudding.

And so at last it is not just me saying it was worth reading.

Just time for a quick smoke;  then let’s all hustle inside to hear the exegesis of the epilogue, eh?

Very highly recommended stuff.

Rocket Racer Super Saver

So…

I was going to say I hadn’t seen a good “superhero” character made since Milligan and McCarthy made Paradax.  “Everythin’ okay?” I still ask that of people.  They still take from it, what I took from it then.  Because of those words, I’m a superhero each and every day.

So here, now that the pyramid of posts has been nicely set up, is that MEME thing my buddy Matthew was asking about.  Oh Lordy.  I think I told you folks before about my crazy attempts to invent a “super-team” back when I was a kid…the thought that led to the extremely enlightening contest of who could think up the WORST super-team…

Well now it’s characters.

I thought up some lousy characters, when I was a kid.  Mind you, eventually Ed and I thought of some (I think) great superhero characters…

But then that’s what this all ought to be about, oughtn’t it?

Where does that idea of great lie, how is it informed, in what context does it operate, what is the bar and how does one get over or under it.  I actually believe it is rather a high bar.  Though high jumps, in this metaphor, can be achieved by anyone.  But it…won’t do you no good if…

…You can’t find the bar?

So it’s a murder mystery, only without a body.  Or a crime.  Okay.  Let’s do THIS…!

My guy (invented before Ditko made “Speedball”) is a mutant who can’t get along with the X-Men.  Oh, he tries.  But he just can’t do it.  And in the end, he’s the first mutant to be kicked out of the School For Gifted Youngsters.

His code-name is “Nex”.  His superpower is shifting kinetic energy around.  He can fall from three miles up, shift his kinetic energy to the ground below him:  an earthquake results, but he’s okay.  He’s the spare term in the calculation of the conservation of energy:  if a falling meteor touches his skin, a crater opens up under his feet, and the now-stationary big rock next to his shoulder just sort of topples somewhere other than where he is  His power “level” seems to be topless. but no one can figure out how to make a useful power-set from it.  Like Cyclops and Havok, he can’t turn it off.  It’s always on.  It’s just there.  Everything around him’s moving REALLY SLOWLY.  He can’t walk past a window without it breaking.  A thunderstorm can’t break out around him without the lightning going parabolic, hitting everything that isn’t him.  He’s thankful gravity still works when he’s around.

He can’t go in the Danger Room.  He’ll fuck it up.

So much less can he go to Muir Isle.

Think of him as an Anti-Madrox.

And think of him as a guy Professor X just doesn’t know how to treat.  He doesn’t cause big problems.  Just little problems.  But:  all the time.  The Prof owns a block of apartments way on the outside of town, that no one lives in:  Nex should go there.  There, he and the Prof will commune telepathically, practise meditation skills.  It’ll take a really long time.

So Nex runs away and tries to be Spider-Man.  In other words he’s the one Marvel superhero that’s inspired by Spider-Man.  Because he figures Spidey’s got it easy, so he tries to be him.  I mean, things couldn’t get any worse, right?

Okay, your turn.

The City Of Stilts

“It’s a digital world,” he told me. “It’s going to be a wireless world.”

“Yes,” I replied. “But don’t you think we should tell everybody that their Enterphone isn’t going to have the same functionality anymore, unless they have the right sort of phone contract?”

At which point he made some polite noises, and — to all appearances — stopped caring. Because the right phone contract is the one that everybody already has, of course, and if they don’t have it there’s no justification for not having it: because what else was money made for?

Just a little scene from the inside of my building, Bloggers, where we recently replaced the old Enterphone with a new one — and blithely assumed it would work exactly the same way, which of course it doesn’t — but I run into this sort of thing all the time, actually. As a general rule: mechanisms get replaced with other mechanisms that aren’t the same, that don’t work on the same principles, but no one actually cares about the principles involved, so they just ignore them where they approach inconvenience. You have to pay for something that once was free, for no better reason than someone figured out how to charge for it…but so what? Banks refuse to honour their customer’s cheques, but no one cares to imagine a situation in which that could bite them in the ass…because who has the time? When it might as well be somebody else’s problem. Governmental certifications are mistaken for government-issued certificates (aha!), but no one cares to imagine a better kind of point-of-sale access to their permissions than the one they’re given…because that’s the one they’ve got, and anyway what’s all the fuss about? When having the right stuff, to many people, is identical to having the actual right…because it seems to them that it ought to be the same, otherwise you’re just feeding the lawyers. Trying to get away with something “on a technicality”, as the cop shows read it. And so it’s an increasingly insecure world in terms of individual political liberty, but no one cares about that, because they haven’t been given a reason to value it.

What they do care about, though, is not looking at the insecurity that was always there in the first place…and that’s a pretty instructive sort of not-care caring, as these things go. Down at the bottom of all our bureaucratic obligations and entitlements, the foundation is and always has been sand — the sand of simple trust and cooperation flowing between individuals on their own account, and for their own reasons. But, I can’t provoke any outrage in anyone by talking about the M2 money supply slowly turning into a big bubble; but I can provoke it, I can easily provoke it, by bringing up the hoary old cliche of the cheque written on a scrap of butcher’s paper. Or by bringing up how you can vote somewhere even if you don’t have ID, by bringing a couple of your neighbours into the polling place to vouch for you. I’m perhaps inordinately fond of the story of my mother getting her passport, and how since she didn’t have a birth certificate my grandfather had to go down to a government office and make a declaration that she was born in such-and-such a town on such-and-such a day — a declaration he knew for a fact to be true because he had been there when it happened, but what if his memory had been a little faulty that day? — and maybe I’m more than “just” inordinately fond of that story, because it gives me a little malicious thrill to tell it…

Because a lot of people hit the roof, when they hear it. They don’t like it one bit; they get angry at me personally, when I tell it. It drives ‘em crazy.

Care to guess why?

Names are the funniest of things, I sometimes think; because they are our only truly inalienable possessions, and yet they’re absolutely indispensible as the possessions of a general public as well. Who gets to give a name, who gets to change it, who gets to defend it? One of the attractively weird things about Zen calligraphy. I’ve always thought, is that it’s an artform made of (if you will) both Being and Non-Being…of both real and imaginary components, of both the representational and the non-representational. And to comics fans, perhaps, this is not such a jarring realization as all that — not when we’re so acturely aware of the status of words as drawings, or parts of drawings — but then again maybe even we forget it sometimes, until we see the weird and spooky middle-ground of language, picture, and meaning hovering before our eyes…and a calligraphy exhibition is a darn good place to see it, if we do happen to have forgotten about it: the pictographic character for “mountain” having begun life as a representation of a mountain’s shape, but having long since decayed (or evolved?) into something simultaneously more than that, and less. It’s actually not unlike the way words accrete sensual connotations over time in any language — the seed of poetry being the mystery of how it all sounds like it sounds, the uttermost primal mystery of cognition that is how a word comes to stand for something outside itself at all, instead of merely standing for its own internal meta-associations, a handy summary term for places the mind has already travelled and things it has already seen. The evocative power of words and names, their heft and texture — if you go to the ends of reductionist thinking there’s a reason you hit the wall of the absurdum, and it’s because the mechanism by which the “total” meaning of a word becomes non-arbitrary or non-random eventually becomes so elusive to thought that it slips away entirely. And there’s a reason for it, of course; but it’s not the reason I came here to talk about today.

I’m just here to talk about the world that’s coming.

Although I’ll admit I may not have chosen the best angle of approach, for that. But oh well! Let’s shove it on forward, regardless: and see if we can’t get past the sanctity of the signature, and onto mightier matters. Hmm, although it actually is sort of tough to get past the sanctity of the signature…I mean, going around it is easy enough, but “around” is only easy because “past” is tough, if you see what I mean. The signature props up the entire edifice of Western civilization, after all — the name, and its stylized individual representation. People have been faking signatures for as long as there’s been such a thing as literacy in the first place, and we still made the signature our legal and bureaucratic bedrock, just as we still require it and we are still dependent on it. Because it is, simply, a thing we must believe in: a form of trust and cooperation that holds the rest of our lives up, like a city of stilts above the marshes. Before the antique apparatus of the law, names and signatures and the principles they operate on are the only offerings we can make, the only food we can supply to its furnace — these things are its only punch-cards, its only possible inputs: to be able to swear to something…without a name, you can’t even do it. Without a name, you can’t even lie.

So…time for the Huguenots, maybe? Although I don’t want to go too far afield in my digressions, I always thought the Huguenots were rather interesting, from a legal perspective. You see the problem with them, in the France of a few hundred years ago, was that you couldn’t spot a Huguenot when you were in church. You might be surrounded by them; a hundred heretics pretending to be good Catholics, taking communion falsely while they laughed up their sleeves at you. But if they said all the right things, if they acted the right way, how could you ever winkle them out? And more importantly, what would be the difference, anyway? In science, where you can’t test for a difference you have no cause to suppose a difference — that’s the foundation of every kind of materialism, even the good kinds; it’s why we’ve tossed out most of Descartes and why Stephen Hawking calls Einstein “wrong” on quantum mechanics. In science, ineffable entities are under a general ban, whether they be souls or merely intentions. But in culture and morality as in law, ineffable entities matter: the “why” of human behaviour is paramount in interpreting the hard facts, the “math” if you will, of the offences committed. Just eating the cookie and saying the prayer doesn’t make you a Catholic, outward appearances to the contrary; likewise, just having done something the law forbids doesn’t make you a criminal. And you can’t necessarily blame it all on the Huguenots — not by any means, can you blame it all on them! — but you can sure say they sharpened it up, in post-Reformation Europe. And so without them, we might not have been quite us…

Which is to say: people for whom the complex of namedness and swearing is awfully important, and therefore also, at the same time, awfully vexed on occasion — because the city we’ve built from it all fills us with desire, but the stilts of its necessity fill us with dread. Trust: now there’s something we don’t care for, and would much rather do without…

And yet not all trust is of the same stripe.

Because: intentions. If only we could be free of ‘em, free of their tiresomely backward needfulness! Another story I like to relate, if I can just slip another past you here, is the one about the Toronto lawyer who routinely disobeys posted No Parking signs downtown…and always gets ticketed, and always goes to court, and always wins, because what the sign says differs from what the law says. Because obviously the sign isn’t the law; therefore if the sign and the law disagree, then it’s the sign that must give way. And this really makes people mad, this story, especially when I get to the punchline: which is that Toronto’s City Council, rather than change all the incorrectly-posted signs, tried (or is trying, it’s been a while since I saw the report on TV) to change all the laws to bring them into alignment with the signs.

Nobody laughs at that one; they seem to think I’m some kind of radical revolutionary, even for finding it funny. Of course it is not me who’s the revolutionary here, but it’s them instead. They just don’t see it. To eliminate the most vexing constituent of an undesirable state of insecurity, that constituent we’d call “trust”, they’ve turned to its only possible solvent: trust that’s pointed in the other direction. Of course we’ve seen this before, in the history of the radical revolutionary: once upon a time, the one sort of trust was trust in people, and the other sort was trust in institutional authority, but that’s all hopelessly twentieth-century thinking, now. And if in fact we can cast our minds back through the mist of time to those long-ago millenial days, we can see how that pushme-pullyou dynamic of trust began to be made irrelevant…

…Back in the days of the Information Haves and the Information Have-Nots. Remember all that stuff, folks? How anyone caught without a computer was going to become a permanent underclass to the posthumans with the dial-up accounts, and how the Internet was going to be an invisible hand that brought democracy everywhere, to the farthest reaches of the world? It seems funny now, to me. Not just because it didn’t happen — not just because the world’s poor found their Internet access, or at least what form of it they really needed — but because what we thought it was going to be good for was so very off-base, that our ideas about what kind of access there would be to it proved off-base as well. It was just too, well, global a technology for us to reckon with; how could we add up what its value would be, when we were only ever going to be a small fraction of the number of people who would use it? Chomsky was right, of course, to point out that most of the world is in far more urgent need of lightbulbs than laptops — but be that as it may it’s still true, perhaps it’s even true for the very same reason, that the Internet didn’t end up dividing haves from have-nots after all. Because even though it didn’t cause the little flowers of democracy to spring up wherever it put its graceful foot, it did offer a cheaper and easier global communications channel, and most importantly it did put “information-having” much closer to many more people than had ever enjoyed it before. Despite the pop-cultural doomsaying, the Internet was never a small enough technology, in that it was never exclusive enough by its nature, to create any classes that weren’t already there before. The goat-herders of Djibouti still loops their arms through poles, and still lie down behind their low stone walls in the heat of the day…but the nearest uplink is still nearer than it once was, and if we “have” anything that they don’t — and of course we do, we do — it is still nothing more than we didn’t already have, and actually it is probably, at least, a bit less than we already had.

Meanwhile back in the Fortunate Lands, there ended up not being any significant new Information Class either — though there were absolutely more infrastructure specialists and home-repair people, more millionaires and more pirates too, it was still the average joe whose access to info-haveness drove that big economic machine. And if there are people who don’t use their Internet access in a very rich or complex way, if there are still people who don’t use it in a very informed or understanding way, still they have the access, and they could get better at using it very easily if they wanted to, and evil programmers didn’t take over the world like supervillains with their magical powers, they just did “ordinary” evil, perhaps, and nothing much changed. In the end, being an “info-have” was a lot like being someone with a high-school education. In other words, it was sorted: it was not a science-fiction-type scenario. Just having access to the Internet, that never became the barrier some had imagined. You can get Internet access for the price of a cup of herbal tea, where that access even exists. And laptops, as it turns out, can be come by — at least, access to physical machines that are capable of granting access to the Internet: that’s getting easier every day.

But as it turns out, while access to “machines that can bring you the Internet” in general is easy to come by, not all machines that can bring you the Internet are the same. And some of those don’t work the same in all countries. Come on, people, it’s twenty-first century time here, and something’s happening. There’s a new mega-industry on the horizon, and it’s shaping everything, and people don’t really want to see it, but it’s there. The Wireless World: surely you’ve noticed that people talk about it now like they talked about the almighty The Year 2000 for about twenty-five years back in old C-20. But the difference there is, that by the time The Year 2000 came along we’d all already lived through the years 1990-1999, so there was no leap, no vacuous jump, it actually did not take us by surprise, in fact we were absolutely ready for it…and so it was just a year like any other, in the end. But this won’t be like that…because the wireless world just isn’t that far away. And we actually do not know what the wireless world will look like.

Hey, if you liked Apple vs. Microsoft…then stay tuned, y’know? If you liked movies from the 90s about computers and hackers and virtual reality and all that stuff…then turn up the volume and sit back and prepare to drink it all in. We’re gonna be there in about ten minutes, and it’s gonna be bloody. It’s gonna be Scarface, I’m telling you.

Because: trust. It could be your enemy, here. In the wireless world, things are going to start moving fast, and trust will ensure that no one tells you what’s what, because they don’t see any reason to know. I’ve written before about the reluctance of cellphone-users to consider the future…and the present…but don’t think I’m a cellphone hater. I’m going to have to get one, too. We’re all going to have to get one. And we’re going to have to pay whatever it costs for their use, because we won’t have any choice. Enter the Haves and the Have-Nots, finally, after all this time: as there get to be more and more special capabilities associated with “phones”, than there ever were with “computers”. If you don’t have one, there will be more things you can’t do, than just book cheap airline tickets or write C-grade term papers. There are, in fact, more of these capabilities arising every day, than anybody can total up in the morning paper. Your phone can already function as a key to your house; your phone is already a trading account on the Minutes Market in the Philippines. You just don’t know it yet. I’m not saying this technology is the Devil…although since I’ve equipped my house with rotary-dial phones in beautiful black Bakelite, to me it sort of is, because one day very soon I will try to place an outgoing call and it won’t work…

…But in the overwhelming majority of cases it is not the Devil at all, it’s just an ever-increasing and therefore ever-more-unknown functionality. And it could make one a Have-Not, as the Internet never did. A revolutionary? Hell, I’m not one…but when the wireless world finally Comes, then someone will have been one, and that’s for sure. Okay, it’s a little bit the Devil: no one is taking any steps to mitigate the damaging effects of these little telegizmos, and you can already mound them up and make islands out of them, build a toxic tower up to Heaven with them if you like, and surely the idea that it’s a bunch of wild talk to say it’s probably not a good idea to staple a microwave transmitter to your head is a transparent example of wilful sandbag-stacking…and the driving issues, and all the rest of it…but all these problems could be fixed if the wrong kind of trust didn’t get in the way, and probably they will be…I mean, I hope they will be, I hope it doesn’t turn out to be another Minamata, another Gulf Of Mexico, but very likely it’ll be reasonably okay by the time we all get another ten years under our belts. So: the Devil? No, not the Devil. The Wild West, yeah; but in all likelihood not the Devil.

HOWEVER.

Do not imagine you know how these things all work, or what will come of them, or how they will end up being used. As I’ve said before, this is the new Oil Economy, this is a HUGE technology and it’s really just starting to ramp up. I’m not joking about the Minutes Market, either; and even more importantly I’m not joking about my Enterphone. It works in a completely different way, now, and do you know that no one in my building realizes it? No one really has a sense of it, no one grasps it. Because even the most progressive ones among them, yea even the prophets of the Wireless World That’s Coming themselves, are hopelessly imprisoned by twentieth-century thinking. The only reason I myself know anything about it is that I had to figure out what happened when all my phone equipment suddenly, dramatically, went obsolete one day last month…but if I didn’t have the rotary-dial phone I would never have known how the mechanism had changed, rather than simply having been “replaced”. Because nobody thought about it for a second, they just all trusted it. How many changes does “it’s going to be a wireless world” cover, after all! No one yet living can write that history, nor draw that roadmap…so we just don’t know. No one knows. The technology is coming to life before our eyes, blossoming into affirmation as it were…but what it will be when it’s finally been what it was, is a very open question indeed.

And I know, I know…you don’t believe me. Why would you? When I told my brother that many of my neighbours can now use their cellphones as keys to the building, he only had one word to say about it: “Cool!” But it isn’t cool, because they don’t yet know they can do it. It wasn’t designed in as a feature, it just sort of happened.

“Cool!” he said again.

But it isn’t cool at all. Because no one is looking for it, and no one really knows it’s happening. “It’s going to be a wireless world.” Yes, yes it is, it most certainly is…but the wireless world is still an undiscovered country, even to its most fervent patriots. Take digital signatures: right now they’re not capable of replacing actual hand-made signatures in our daily lives, and the attempt to turn hand-scrawlings into data at the point-of-sale is problematic at best. But you see, that’s because the signature, as the prime symbol of intention, is also the prime symbol of identity…and vice versa!…at the same time that this intention/identity matrix cannot be made into a fully digital object. “Electronic” signatures, the kind you do on a screen with a light-pen, are routinely squashed and crunched and otherwise deformed by the unusual physical requirements of light-pen signing — even more than ordinary signatures, they don’t stay the same, they’re not verifiable (i.e. replicable: the two are the same) as a code is, as a string of numbers is. And yet that fact also makes them more secure than any digital object can be…which is a maddening paradox in itself, because (of course!) written signatures don’t stay the same from signing-incident to signing-incident anyway, and this is also precisely what makes them not casually automatable, and therefore more secure. As it makes them tremendously more intentional and particular.

Which is the whole basis for how they get faked, when they do: because no one but the signer could ever swear to a signature being their own rather than an “imperfect” copy…and then of course that’s just what we use signatures for, isn’t it? Swearing.

But the only thing that truly stays the same in any act of swearing is us!

Everything else about it changes!

Screwy, huh?

Of course the human brain — let’s call it a “biological computer” to distinguish it from a digital computer — is exceptionally good at hard recognition problems like determining whether or not a signature looks the same enough, or has changed enough, to be considered authentic. Part of this is down to time-frame, naturally: in the non-digitally-automated way of giving, accepting, and otherwise encountering signatures there are large gaps of human experience that separate such signature-moments, where the private artistic expression crosses the gap to the public world, and so the signature is expected to change in a way digital codes are not. But this time factor only throws the difference in competency between digital and biological computers into starker relief: the biological computer is great at doing things like recognizing people’s faces, lousy at reckoning pi to the 134,000th digit; the digital computer is great at numerical calculation but lousy at recognizing people, and in fact (to borrow a phrase from a lecture I recently attended) if you build a digital computer that is great at faces but lousy at differential equations, you’ve basically built it wrong. The heuristics of facial recognition are still a great problem in psychology, they smack of the non-polynomial if you like, and all the software we write to mimic that ability is actually very poor reverse-engineering: a kludge, even if a sophisticated one. If you work with digital signatures captured with a pad and light-pen, you are probably already applying new heuristics to the change-rate of signatures to determine what kind of new typical variations fall within the realm of “trustworthiness”, and perhaps you even know that you’re doing it, but you still don’t know how…and about the recognition of handwriting there are unproven beliefs that go far beyond simple questions like “does it work on templates” or “does it work on features” — handwriting analysis, for example, may not even work. A fact obvious to some; and yet because it’s about the signature it’s proved a more enduring sort of fortune-telling fiction than its more blatantly phrenological cousins. However, you can see how just holding that belief can have knock-on effects in the world of computer-administered security: all the post-9/11 funding that went to bogus biometrics like gait-analysis programs for airports is essentially no different from the institutional attention-resources some police departments still spend on psychics, but it’s harder to call the former as foolish as the latter, because we know perfectly well that such things as signatures, broadly speaking, do in fact exist. It’s just that we haven’t seen the difference between how we approach them, and how digital machines must approach them. We have never really needed to think about how we accomplish these computationally-bizarre tasks, and so heuristics for evaluating that, at any rate, are still out of our reach. What various factors does our invisible “trust” take in, and how does it process these? The signature is just like the calligraphy, only in reverse: something purely and arbitrarily symbolic at its root, that approaches a representational quality in its expression. To attempt to pin it down by the application of numerical codes is like confusing certifications with certificates — the right always lies elsewhere than with its proof, and even the proof is subject to change…because as they used to say about Java, “the network is the system”.

Which brings us back to the problem of replacing hand-made signatures with digital ID codes. Most of us already have one or two of these in the form of credit-card and PIN numbers…the holy trinity of security being “what you have, what you know, and who you are”, its logic makes it perfectly possible to transform a signature that satisfies the last requirement, into one that satisfies the second. Which leaves us with ID pictures and biometric fingerprints that actually work, to make up the “who you are” stuff. And yet what also happens in this extraction of the signature from the matter of identity, is that the thing that identifies intention becomes just a matter of “what you know”. Which all must sound just a little bit airy-fairy, I suppose?

But consider trust: and how we need more of it to make the essential numbers work for us, when who-you-are becomes what-you-know. Just as the lock on your front door keeps out no one but those who recognize it would be wrong to circumvent it, so where you can’t guard your identity from casual replication you must rely on others not wishing to take it from you. And indeed the security measures surrounding the input of all our secret codes are trivially easy to overcome, and the possession of a numerical identity-mark is no more natural, than the official date of my mother’s birth is “authentic”. It is, in fact, only as authentic as her name — seeing as how both her birthday and her name are ultimately my grandparents’ original inventions.

And so it is with the whole darn thing: we must trust what we can’t control. But when that trust becomes exposed as trust, we get nervous. We feel the ground shaking, and are reminded of the stilts. Every control mechanism put in place to serve as duct tape on the join between the old world and the new attempts to make trust unnecessary, but finds it can’t; so it does the only other thing it can do, which is to vest trust in processes of authentication that belong to someone else, that take trust out of our hands. The only problem being: it never is out of our hands, because the fact of it being there is all that holds the Venice or the Tyre of our social security up out of the water in the first place. The bank issues official cheques, but what empowers them is still the artistic signature, the mark of intention. The government issues official ID, but can’t make the ID itself the very fact of citizenship, residency, legal permission. If the lawyer in Toronto is obeying the law, he can’t be punished for ignoring the signs.

However…

If I listen carefully, I think I can hear you saying, “But what does this have to do with cell phones?” Well thank goodness: I thought you’d never ask.

The answer is: the Wireless World That’s Coming has changed the dynamics of societal trust. Isn’t it curious that back in the Nineties the whole matter of Information Haves and Have-Nots was discussed at such length, but so rarely from any sort of ethical perspective? Did anyone really advance the notion of wiring the whole world, in order to avoid creating greater social and economic equalities? I don’t recall that they did, and in retrospect I think we’ve got to admit that was a pretty shameful example of ideological sandbag-stacking, a real acceptance of the zero-sum game and the “naturalness” of class divisions; but then, fortunately, a whole-world wiring turned out not to be necessary. In the Third World, wire’s just too expensive, and the Internet’s just too immediately, tangibly valuable: so wirelessness became the way for life to go forward. It saves money, and it makes money; it enables governments and people alike to shed infrastructure costs and overleap politically-based access barriers.

But here in the Fortunate Lands, where all the wealth lives and all the infrastructure’s already been built, that isn’t what’s happening. Oh, the Internet is the same…but the machinery isn’t, because it’s operating in a different social context. In the West uniquely (at least right now), it isn’t just what you can do that now depends on what and where you spend…but it’s what you can know about what can be done, that depends on it. It isn’t organized, you see: there are no bulletins being circulated about what’s now possible in the wireless world, that never was even imagined as possible in the wired one. And we are all operating on a kind of trust that’s becoming less and less applicable every day. We’ll take the difference between urban and rural economic capabilities for a start: as where cell phone coverage exists, there is industrialized urbanity, and where it doesn’t there it isn’t. This may seem rather straightforward: to geographers, communications and economic transactions are all a part of the construction of “distance” anyway. But there are relational changes going on that are less visible and more vital, too: because the network is also the system, and you can’t change one without the other. The signature, the personal declaration, witnessing and notarizing, the image and the word and the object are all losing their sanctity, because their sanctity is incompatible with the juggernaut of wireless digital technology…but we need those things so much that if we paid attention to how they were being devalued we would have to turn away from the wireless world, and there is no way we can afford to do that! So we must turn a blind eye to its implications, and learn to trust something else. Not people. Not institutional authority.

What?

A wise man whose name I don’t recall once said that what we were witnessing in the computer age was the gradual addition of a microchip to everything: that this was the content of our new industrial revolution, simply figuring out how to computerize stuff that hadn’t yet been computerized, and that only after we’d done that would we start to see new activities based on what computers could do when they weren’t adapting the efficiency of old technologies. Some areas of human endeavour, even in commerce and science, have had a relatively slow uptake of the possiblities lying dormant in the microchip: libraries got onto the digital path long before real estate agents did, for example, and bioinformatics is a relative latecomer to biology. Stuff like that. But the last one to go will be my pattern of “societal trust”: as the floats inflate under the City, we will finally be able to demolish the stilts — there will be a tremor, and some crockery might be smashed, but nothing that can’t be replaced. Every other sphere of our lives will have gone through it before; it’ll be nothing new. Just the final step.

Well…not quite final.

What do we rely on, if not trust in people’s intentions, or trust in institutional authority that knows better than we do? Where are intention and identity to be located, once signatures and sworn declarations have been ignored? My brother knows the answer, even if he doesn’t know he knows it: money. That’s the only thing left that can be the Network that’s the System: purchases that are functionally identical with permissions, financial fingerprints left in the pattern of payments. In a paperless world there can be no paper trail, but there can still be accounting…and in accounting a name is spelled with letters made of numbers, each debit a loop, each credit a diacritic. And the M2 money supply is going the way of the dinosaur, as it happens — because money that can’t identify the user as he spends it is incompatible with a world where other signatures are obsolete and inadmissable. “Who you are” must become “what you can do”, and “what you know” must become “how you pay”…and “what you have” must just be that you’re anybody at all. If you have what everybody else has, you’re subject to identification. If you don’t, you’re not. That sounds a little bit extreme, perhaps, but consider: it’s not like we’ve never used money for that before.

It’s just that that old poll-tax technology didn’t work so well, without the microchip’s assistance.

Oh, now…I can hear you laughing, don’t think I can’t. But just a minute, did you really think science-fiction was all just supposed to be identical with whistling past a graveyard? No, no…it comes true, you know. And revolutions are happening all the time. It’s just that the SF versions of them are exaggerated and refractive. Well, those fictional revolutions always leap over the constraints that real revolutions must encounter, they scrupulously avoid showing how “here” becomes, by incremental steps, “there”…but it doesn’t mean they’re not showing us anything real, you know? This is not going to be a global phenomenon, this is just for us rich bastards in the West — because we’ve invested more heavily in industrial infrastructure than the rest of the world. Now it has to be replaced. There are going to be tremors. They’re starting now. That’s all I’m saying.

Well…

…Okay, not quite all I’m saying.

Ten pages of preamble, and now here comes the point: the difference between the mechanized existence SF has been warning us about for about a hundred years, and the real world in which we live, is simply that not all of the stilts under the City are capable of being demolished. Think of it as robustness vs. sensitivity, or call it a matter of the universal principle of limitation: to do away with the philosophy of (some especially ardent believers in the Wireless World might call it the cult of) signature that underlies all our Western social contexts, that we’ve sacrificed for and fought for in courts, colleges, and banks, we have to exert the effort it takes to set its value at naught. But the more of it we find we can set aside, the more energy we will find it takes to set the next thing aside…and in the end there will be at least one thing we cannot set aside.

The Huguenots, of course. The law.

The primacy of intention.

Within the next ten years, I confidently predict, if you have a cell phone and I do not you will not only be able to do a whole lot of things I once used to be able to do but now can’t, but you’ll also have so many new abilities I won’t be familiar with that to me it’ll seem like you can read minds and astral-project. As money and prestige was a century ago, so access to the wireless world will be, in places where wealth got concentrated. Open locked doors without keys, make a fortune texting Norway from Sweden, buy things I don’t even know are for sale though we stand in the middle of the same store. Access determining actions determining identity. But the one thing you won’t be able to do…

…Is write your name.

Well, you won’t think you have any reason to.

And so as I’m giving myself a warning about damn well getting off my ass and getting a fancy new phone, a warning to any out there who look forward to the wireless world — and the warning is: you’re right, it’s coming.

But not to the inside of any courtrooms, no matter what the Toronto City Council tries on for size.

And here, just as the ship of my argument is sinking, I think it might be a good idea if I got off of it.

Sorry about that, Bloggers: sometimes you just gotta type something, you know?

So…

As you were, I guess.

Matthew, Jonathan, Kieran…Come On Down…!

…And tell me what you’ve won!

With 10 votes and the preference of our ultimate tiebreaker, it’s Matthew’s Astro-Canadian crowd-pleaser “Phosphorescent Beetles” that takes first prize, close behind him with another 10 votes is Jonathan’s think-piece about kung fu on the Moon “Zerojidu”, and rounding out the top three with 9 votes is Kieran’s acid-drenched throwback to Sixties SF “Mind Traders Of The Milky Way”.  All most excellent offerings, fellows!

And so now, in order, you may each pick one item from List 1:

Hard Boiled, by Frank Miller and Geoff Darrow;  The Spirit:  Vol. I, by Darwyn Cooke, J. Bone, and Dave Stewart

Eighth Annual Edition Of The Worst From MAD, by the Usual Gang Of Idiots (reprint);  National Lampoon Sunday Newspaper Parody (seq. to 1964 Yearbook), by Various

Beanworld:  Book One and Beanworld:  Book Four, by Larry Marder (Beanworld Press);  Hellboy:  The Wild Hunt #8 of 8, by Mike Mignola and Duncan Fegredo;  Sandman:  The Dream Hunters #3, by Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell

The Goon:  Nothin’ But Misery, by Eric Powell;  buncha Panic reissues, by Various

And two items from List 2:

MAD #137 (Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice parody)

MAD #155 (Godfather parody)

MAD #157 (Planet Of The Apes parody)

MAD #159 (A Clockwork Orange parody)

MAD #160 (“horizontal hold”)

MAD #166 (“finger” issue)

MAD #170 (Exorcist parody)

MAD #215 (Apocalypse Now parody)

…And then we’ll just take it from there, okay?

Whoops!

Post in haste, and all that!  Got a couple more things to do before that comes up on the agenda.  ‘Pologies!

Oh Yeah…

I am also in this.

No, not “How To Irritate People”…although…

This thing!

Mine’s called “Sugar Cubes All The Way Down:  Watchmen and the Philosophy of Science”, and its argument is, I will venture to say, not exactly unfamiliar territory for anybody foolish enough to have read around much on this here blog…so if you’ve been this foolish already, be foolish enough to go and buy the thing!

But actually that won’t be very foolish at all…I’m dying to read it, myself.