Public AND Private

I have been slumbering around here pretending to write down Hamiltonians and regretting never having given general relativity more than a casual thought while a student. But now I am wide awake after reading this little item at ARS ELECTRONICA titled "Goodbye Privacy". If truth, as stated by McGinn, is the unique property of a proposition from which one can deduce the fact stated by that proposition, then I must wake up!

"A new culture of everyday life is now upon us, bracketed by the angst-inducing scenarios of seamless surveillance and the zest we bring to staging our public personas via digital media. One in which everything seems to be public and nothing’s private anymore. Panopticon or consummate individual freedom of expression?"

Public does not happen at the expense of private, so it is not goodbye privacy! If the organizers of ARS ELECTRONICA picked the title just to activate some of us in our slumber, then they succeeded. However I suspect that here there was more confusion than any intent to wake me up. My take on this has several aspects. First anybody is free to disclose anything that they want on the Web, but then that was already a possibility with the printing press, and the old fashioned pornography industry lost no time with it and has used every technological tool within reach. Duh. Nothing new. Second, even those committing the horrible trespass of TMI while twittering, jaiku-ing or blogging, may or may not be revealing private information. At worse they may be boring an audience, but then, the audience can always zap the channel. It could be that they eventually find themselves screaming out loud into a listening vacuum, but that is besides the point. This could, after all, be a new form of zen meditation... or not. Third, if you are surfing and searching the net unprotected - not anonymously - you are broadcasting your actions, and if nobody else, your ISP and the search engines you use have information that can be used to construct a profile. We all know that technology is hackable, and so it has always been, and you can also have your own bots to create a specific trace for your profile. That is to say, those who care to remain anonymous will, and that for which ever reason. Profiling can be done, its meaning can be debatable and its accuracy widely disputed. Again, the possibility of profiling individuals and organizations delivers fertile grounds, verdant fields, and majestic heap loads of speculative objects for both science fiction writers and the paranoid. Fourth, it is too easy to be light headed about using the the Web as an experimental social interaction field. Especially when very young, it is too easy to compromise one's identity and security and publish information that will turn out to be compromising later on in life. After all, archiving of what has once become public information is still nothing that the author has much control of. I really do not want to go into the debate of what MySpace is or decides. So, how does one navigate authenticity while maintaining the integrity of one's identity and privacy while living in public? Why am I writing about this here? I am following the public debate on how the use of the Web is evolving from the point of view of the interaction between man and technology.

Technorati Tags: ARS ELECTRONICA, McGinn, private, public, public man, theoretical man

Now...

Loads happening right here. Theoretical Man is happening at a rate that I do not quite feel ready for, or so it always is in life. The future always meets me unprepared. Really! I have been served a few whopping surprises in the past few weeks. This is good, very good indeed! I am also at times impossible with my friends and this will range from behaviours that have me telling them to get lost and stay away from me, to being overwhelming in my need to communicate. Mileage always varies with me, steady-state was never quite my domain of endeavour. I am working on the issue of identity. It is one of the tallest orders regardless in which context you decide to pick that one apart. Identity is one of the first issues that any novelist ever tackles. Read James Joyce's Ulysses, read Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, read Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and you will find studies in identity beautifully and critically packed as works of literary art. I was blessed by the gift of identity in a way that has me feeling like I have had unprotected intercourse with it, and am now not only impregnated with its DNA, but also virally infected by it. Identity is another key to the man-theoretical, as knowledge and paradox are its accessories. I have wondered for whom I am writing Theoretical Man, and once again, like with fiction, I find that it too is written for me. I want to understand what it is that I have somehow connected in my mind as being the puzzle of human existence. The only way that I am ever going to understand it, find its flaws, and gain some satisfaction, is if I write it and thus expose my mind's machinations and fantasies. All of this is done in the name of nonfiction, all of this is done in the name of human inquiry in action to use Peter Reason's expression. My inspiration is coming from the digital culture that I am embedded in. That is, inspiration is coming from what I read, from what I have learned, from the interactions, from the relationships, from the conversations and from what I am learning at all loci of my existence. I was surprised to see David's first reactions to what I have been rattling off here. In particular I do like the reality aspects he brings in, and the questions that he is asking. On occasions I do experiment with putting myself in the bin of the transhumanists, but often I prefer to call it trans-humanism. In a sense some of this can be looked as being beyond humanism and I have also played with the expression "Quantum Humanism." And here we are right back to the question of identity. How do we classify this theory? How do we label it? Where does it belong to? How do we transact with it? Still, to be in a place where people firmly believe that life can be artificially enhanced and augmented to the point of immortality, goes against my own tao. My own tao does not believe in much at all, it is a non-believing tao, and that is exactly who is informing my reasoning and writing.

Technorati Tags: danniejost, davidgalipeau, identity, peterreason, public man, tao, theoretical man

On s'amuse, ou pas!

Le féminin est-il l'avenir du masculin?: SEXES. Faut-il remplacer tous les noms masculins d'un texte par le féminin? Peut-on, par souci de parité, dire que la Suisse compte 7 millions de Suissesses? Certaines institutions s'y sont mises. Décodage. © Le Temps SA, 2007

Technorati Tags: le temps, gender, theoretical man

What happened before the Big Bang?

What happened before the Big Bang?: Was the Universe before the Big Bang of classical nature, described well by a smooth space–time? Or was it in a highly fluctuating quantum state? This is one of the most basic questions that we may ask once it is accepted that there was something before the Big Bang. Loop quantum gravity applied to isotropic models has shown that the quantum evolution of a wavefunction extends through the Big Bang. Although a general demonstration is still lacking, this may suggest that calculations, and possibly future indirect observations, may allow us to see the Universe as it was before the Big Bang. Here, we analyse an explicit model with a pre-Big Bang era, indicating limitations that would imply that it is practically impossible to answer some of our questions. Assumptions (or prejudice) will remain necessary for knowing the precise state of the Universe, which cannot be fully justified within science itself.

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Why do I blog this? It ties in rather nicely to what I hinted at in the last paragraph of "social architects and practical visionaries" in tensoriana.org.

Technorati Tags: philosophy, research, science, tensoriana, theoretical man