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POET PIRATE NETBOT:
Ruminations on the Undertaking of Excess Information by Kedrick James
To introduce these concepts, and reference a few writers speaking to the broader discussion of how authoring has changed in recent years, you may visit a powerpoint presentation shown at the 2008 Congress of the Humanities conference held in the same University out of which this research was conducted. In this presentation I've laid out some basic points about navigational styles, aesthetic choices, technological author-functions, the cultural commons and intellectual property. I am working my way through an analogy, that navigational styles are to information what learning styles are to knowledge. Moreover, it's not one or the other; instead, this analogy suggests a paradigm shift from knowledge-based acquisition to information-based sharing, and the changing roles that producers and consumers of information are compelled to play. Human populations have witnessed unprecedented automation of communications systems, altering the exchange value of texts and the social and cultural spheres they influence through the plasmatic screen. As the information base runs deeper and denser, it supports power, privilege, control and surveillance, and the transmission of our lives in code. It also harbours visions of ourselves in and of the world we are creating. It's time to find out what kind of a world that is. Welcome to the post-person, the automated twitter tweaking, squawking, texting the void, suppliant of that improbable superiority voiced by AT&T's Crystal, homogenized omnicaster of ubiquitous scripts, quirky—or is that qwerty' with her accidental chirps? Post the personal world of the writer and reader, the self-admitting and admiring ego, subsumed in excess. No choice but to sink or swim, says Gitlin (2007), surfing the rapids of the media torrent. Then watch as the personal world is reconstructed from the detritus of the infosphere, composited in navigational behaviours that leave residual traces upon the death bed of signification, in data bases and memory banks through which Alph the polluted electronic river runs in our multicellular circuitries measureless to pre-automated man. If digital plenty be the food of thought and panacea to the post-modern paroxysms of meaning, there is a layer of excrescences upon it's surface, obliterating our world of knowledge and the certainty of authorship, legitimacy, epistemology, catalogues of the known. Texts, whether visual, typographic or sonic, are so plentiful we may struggle to find the valuable information in which to plant our ideas, where we may intelligently roam and busy ourselves with learning. Were it not for the ability to obliterate texts from conscious attention, we would find ourselves buried. Luckily, humans appear to be adapting quickly, and with our acquisition of basic literacies, we acquire a new skill that I have chosen to refer to as obliteracy—that is, the ability to make the apparent texts transparent to varying degrees. We disregard more assiduously than we attend to the bulk of everyday discourse. It's no longer a choice.
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...sustainability of the information environment is dependent on practices that convert waste into cognitive nutrient, to replenish the information environment too, to turn the information soil, to sample, cut up, remix... and otherwise recode the digital com/post.
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Sustainability: an overused word, a bell (weather) ringing us from the current zeitgeist. It is for slick-politic talk of environments, albeit physical environments exclusively. But sustainability also uncomfortably maps onto the infosphere under guise of literacy practices; again, it is about how we humans use, dispose of, and waste resources. And rather than a politics of preservation we witness a poetics of what language does best—regeneration. Thus sustainability of the information environment is process oriented—it is byte-sized praxis. A healthy infosphere, like its biotic corollary, supports diversity. It is also highly dependent on DECAY!, on degenerative cycles (to invoke alchemical wisdom) for fecundity of expression and cultural life. (Notice how online images never age? What does that mean for cultural psychels?) As with any natural phenomenon, the infosphere is vulnerable: we have reason to fear, with modern surveillance and automated text industries, the global heating of our information environment, and GMO (General Modus Operandi) monocrop acculturation, where all diversity is made scarce under the deluge toxic industrial media waste (e.g. unsolicited, commercially motivated textual excess); And here sustainability of the information environment is dependent on practices that convert waste into cognitive nutrient, to replenish the information environment too, to turn the information soil, to sample, cut up, remix, mash, extrapolate, mutate, and otherwise recode the digital com/post. If we wish to nurture this infosphere, we must liberate, even inculcate, activities that bring about informational regeneration, produce experimental strains of text, hardy and resilient meaning-engines that are recombinant, fertile, that can utilize the wasted resources that debilitate attention, com/posting information strewn in cyberspace like so much detritus in the wayward garden of public expression. The condition of the information environment and the effect of bulk dumping of informational waste in systems of personal communications have far reaching implications for the literate being. As such, the entire monstrosity of contemporary education is implicated, not only learning but also teaching styles across curriculum of life. As a teacher educator, I am intrigued to know how digital generations will perceive and participate in their textual environments, to what degree the conductors of their thinking will commiserate with poets or profits. How is such a world to be made sustainable? In contrast to sustainable environments of digital communication, we find cyberspace filled with junk, spam, digital weaponry, identity theft and copyrights and the ever-elusive automated perpetrators of cybercrime. How do we anchor our work as learners, writers, artists and teachers within this environment, so crucial now from a public point of view, the evolution of digital literacies from clandestine activity to mainstream habit and habitat. Excess information articulates with distracting force at the hinge of sense. It is infrequently given conscious attention. Certainly no scholarly research addresses the topic. The pirate and the netbot are personified functions within the practices of navigating information. These functions are aesthetic and play a key role in the economy of attention that regulates our cultural currency. Paying attention to background information as a way of rapidly assessing the value of current foreground information, i.e. navigational style, is a complex, tacit survival function within contemporary, information saturated virtual life. I hold that all information carries with it a catalytic energy, no matter how insignificant it seems at the time. The residue of excess information, its reverberations if you will, add character to the gleaning of meaning. It offsets importance.
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The goal is to learn about how learning is being reinvented by life online.
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The images incorporated here were generated using a research method that combines these poetic, piratical, and automated functions to assess residual composite energies. A key method applied in this research is poetic cut-up, an analytic process that digests the excess in order to refine energetic meaning-potentials of given texts and queries. Selecting the background text of spam messages as a data source, many digital poets have processed text-waste into personalized poems. One can see the same process might be applied not only to words and images, but also to net sounds. Ah, the crashing cache collapsing into art, imploding, giving off patters of heart, patinas of revelation, provoking pattern's incipient sense. One part of my research works entirely with how excess also affects sonic cultural practices. My sonic research has for the past three years been conducted with Donald Klassen, at Clarke Drive Studios in Vancouver, and is covered in more detail at disciplineofchaos.com. Using text, image, and sound, I attempt to apply the practice of information recycling and waste management. The goal is to learn about how learning is being reinvented by life online. Here's another image I've created using this method. All these images compress between 60-243 images, searched for by a bot, stolen by a pirate, obliterated, arranged and composited by a poet.
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If we hone these practices, and make them stable traditions, we can protect these information environments, and enhance them to the benefit and learning of all.
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The visuals, audio tracks, and poems are worthy of putting foreground as far as my research goes, partly because they belong to the commons. I author or co-author them only with the help of others, who will never know. So I put them back out, take freely, don't use as is without my permission, but by all means, create your own, conduct you own studies. This is at the basis of the commons, as a gift economy, and the cultural, creative commons, as an attention economy. If we hone these practices, and make them stable traditions, we can protect these information environments, and enhance them to the benefit and learning of all. And because the creative commons, on and off line, are so important to all learning, from primary to graduate education, it's time to start taking these kinds of practices seriously. The secret to the learning involved is not only how to glean, but how to register value among the gleaned. Indeed, it is a shadow-play of transparencies and serendipitous registrations of value. For example, consider how much information has already gone by. It's a lot to fit in. So only some portion, that which perhaps comes closest to your interests, sticks with you. As you consider it, some things will change from foreground to background memory. Much like the way the images (or the poems and "songs") work. For some viewers and audience this is frustrating at first. We might find this shifting of meaning potential more offensive in one format or another. Perhaps the images are nice, but the sounds are grating and the poems are confusing. This, I feel, has less to do with aesthetic than learning style. Each sense carries it own tolerances to newness, its own reluctance in the face of unfamiliarity. What is not known often causes revulsion, a very basic and embodied experience. We teachers teach the patterns in information to help our students overcome the retreat from the unknown and encourage them to explore in those realms. Where we go, and get to, has a lot to do with the person we become.
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Sometimes those who have been on Death's threshold say "my life passed before my eyes". What would that look like, all tinged with nostalgia, reminiscence's tonal ideal, or imbued with novel perspective, an witness's otherness?
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Sometimes those who have been on Death's threshold say "my life passed before my eyes". What would that look like, all tinged with nostalgia, reminiscence's tonal ideal, or imbued with novel perspective, an witness's otherness? The experience, one that has been played out many times in movies, could only be described visually. Life cannot pass before the ears, because the ears are forever connected to the present location in space and time. Sounds become meaningless when sped up well past the frequencies recorded. Speeding up sound to the point of a life's worth of listening recurring in a critical moment of existence is utterly unfeasible. It would be well beyond the range of hearing, and one would need X-ray ears. Composite moments into a still life rendition requires transparencies and subtle residues overlayed. These are not silences, which are by and large durational; the fleeting montage of sound advances, the mirage of images retreats, freezes in the grapheme literally, a still life. Vision composites. This idea that life could be so witnessed, compressed into a moment, is an extreme form of aesthetic compression of meaning, and a poem strives to do the same. The stilled-life is no less aesthetic because it was motivated by crisis. Catharsis-provoking crisis strips the normative dimension of contemplation, a dimension that greatly enchanted the aesthetic philosophy of Emanuel Kant, from the act of witnessing one's life in its non-synchronous totality. The penultimate sum of all things learned, in an imploded scope and sequence, the curriculum of a life.
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Is there a way to encode everything of an experience, a life, thus to animate it in digital form? And if there were, would you want it done to you? Just how selective would you be?
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There are methods of looking into the residue of meaning crystallized from life's experiences. Literature and the arts have long served this basic cultural purpose of condensing experience into imbued expression. New technologies have made possible the increased participation of the public in mediated life, both as consumers and producers of culture. Some have taken to living in the data-stream, whether through blogging daily life, putting a web cam in one's domestic space, creating homebrewed TV series on YouTube, or at the upper echelons of Microsoft corporations, the technoprophets contend that it might be possible to record and store the record of one's entire existence. The idea that we might live on, through the animation of our life's data, has obsessed many writers, and while these narratives are still the stuff of science fiction, humans will not stop from trying. What would you code? Is there a way to encode everything of an experience, a life, thus to animate it in digital form? And if there were, would you want it done to you? Just how selective would you be? While I hold with skeptics on the viability of uploading one's person to botdom, I do think these questions are worth asking. Underneath the questions is a deeper question, one to do with the concept and function of the author. We must write our data. How to do so? Is the technology of recording so fantastic as to be transparent, and have no say of its own? There are risks and pleasures of becoming self-authoring. There are two great challenges. The first is what to put in, and in what style (shall we say format?) to put it in? The other is what to leave out of the narrative? Life writing implies both: that which is encoded, and that which is not. But is the un-encoded not present, as the obliterated context of codified information and the hidden metanarrative behind decisions and choices made, regarding what is encoded? Is the metadata meaningless, even if it appears insignificant? Codes, and therefore data, also have genres, structural constraints, impositions. As virtual persons, we might also have styles of navigating and interacting with other virtual life forms. And what if that virtual environment, now experienced as pure data, free from the debilitations of user interfaces, were so polluted and filled with harmful viruses and aggressive scripts that virtual life were constantly threatened and under attack, decomposition, corruption, even zombied control by automatons? The botnets on the web today are capable of doing this with PC computers, so why not with PC persons?
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...a narrative curriculum of self knowledge, presented not on the axis of sequence, but on the axis of combination.... This is the same axis on which the poetic functions of language are encountered...
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It is not a disembodied set of principles that passes before the eyes, but rather the moments of causative ephemera that over time settle into the background information that governs identity and self in the world, a narrative curriculum of self knowledge, presented not on the axis of sequence, but on the axis of combination, to borrow these terms from Roman Jakobson (1981). This is the same axis on which the poetic functions of language are encountered, those that directly access the residual meaning potential embedded in language or other codified systems. These residual experiences inform tacit attitudes and comprehension, inform what is given information, and what is new. They energize meaning-potential. In order to reach this height of compression of information, much that at one time ranked as significant to the individual must now be obliterated in favor of aesthetic selection mid crisis, a process governed by the heightened residual life-charge of certain data-caches over others. This line of questioning poses yet another series of questions about who or what reads our life data. Are there secrets in the land of pure data? Who keeps them? Are they hidden in the program code, so as to appear like innocuous anomalies, as hackers do to hide their portals to a user's information and computing resources? Is there an inherent privacy to data, or can data only achieve vitality through the event of being read? What does reader response mean in a purely virtual existence? Would the virtual person appear to contradict the 'reader's' perception. In other words, do virtual beings exist by constantly renewing and authoring their scripts, as the most sophisticated net bots are known to do? Surely, an expert systems model of such complexity would require systems of self-regulation and feedback capable of both controlling the homogeneity of, and relations between their component data-parts, and adapting to changing conditions (software/hardware/wetware/malware/and so on) of their virtual environments. To meet the criterion of autopoesis, that condition of living entities proposed by Maturana and Varela (1980), there would need to be a coherency, as well as accident-toward-reconfiguration possible within the interoperativity of data-writers and readers. A researcher would have to know something not only of the processes and selective functions of data authoring, but also of data transmission, interpretation, interpolation, and the host of contextual information that would be encoded along with it, enabling the exchange. Would these last, additional features not function similarly to the background features that influence social interactions, such as personal habits, dress, smell, mental and physical state of individuals in the moment (hunger causing inattention, stress causing emotive reactions, and so on)? Such contextual features are largely overlooked in social research on literate transactions, but would these contextual features not become just as determining if a sudden code-blockage were to influence the health of the person and their social interactions in virtual space?
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The process of recording phenomena always represents a point of view/placement within events...
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The process of recording phenomena always represents a point of view/placement within events; it also includes a exclusion from its frame of other positions and perspectives. This positioning, so clearly tied to orientation and perspective, are ingredients of embodied power relations having become mediated as the emotion content of form and style, and are the conversion of organic hegemonies among our data-fields. We are left with foreground and background data within an exclusive frame or array. Doubtless this exclusivity is merely a composite overlaid among other frames, just as when several programs are open on a computer's screen at the same time, and the computer sits among books and papers, and somewhere a TV is on, playing music. Data-fields are complex, governed not only by arrays, branching trees in which information is distributed in its codified form, but also by the relations underlying visible, sonic, textual and programmatic features. Meaning is not only constructed, it is distributed among such subtle distinctions of content as only a competent attentional practice can endure. A competent attentional practice in this sense could only be described in oblique terms, as the ability to de-articulate unnecessary or undesirable components within the complex array of data.
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..."one person's garbage is another's treasure". Knowledge is played on the hegemonica. It is shored up through institutions, privatized and protected. Information, on the other hand, comes with no guarantees.
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This is, after all, the bot's greatest accomplishment. It's no surprise that Google, along with other automated search and sharing functions, should be dominant institutions in the current marketplace. More than ever we cannot do without automated services that, to quote John Willinsky, "gain competitive advantage by turning data into knowledge" (1999, p. 112) . He continues with a more particular view point on knowledge discovery in databases, to point out that "recycling data-waste into knowledge-profit does pose a danger," a danger of "data dredging". He exemplifies this by hunting for statistical significance in his own dissertation research data, which he finally accepts may only contain statistical coincidence. And yet this is certainly reflective of learning and how we come to distinguish between coincidence and significance is aligned with the aesthetic practices that guide all knowledge acquisition. But what if we are faced with information that bears no clear relevance and does not have a computational measuring stick to run our automated functions and algorithms upon? It is a tip of the hat to Willinsky as a friend and band mate that his influence came to me in this round about fashion. For I had to ask myself this question: why not recycle data-waste? Can we create a sustainable informational commons without doing so? Is this not now the popular mode of navigation and engagement in the ocean of information? Is it only knowledge that should be resourced and turned to social and cultural, even economic, knowledge-profit? My work owes him a debt, in so far as we share common interests, but have very different approaches. His, toward access to knowledge, mine toward excess of information. This work, therefore, is a counter proposal, not so much to the human sciences, as to the post-human humanities, the post-public cultural studies, and to post-curriculum education. It is an attempt to begin to map the background activities that underpin knowledge structures and catalyze the transformation of information into not so much knowledge, as socially-significant, culturally revitalizing forms of expression. This posits that the resources of meaning are among background, or discarded data, and its contextual significance. To find an adequate data source, therefore, I was compelled to find a source that was definitive of informational waste, when that term "waste" is so heavily loaded with deprecatory arbitrariness. This arbitrariness can be summed up in the saying "one person's garbage is another's treasure". Knowledge is played on the hegemonica. It is shored up through institutions, privatized and protected. Information, on the other hand, comes with no guarantees. It could just as easily turn out to be the wrong information, either by mistake, error, or intentional deception. Knowledge is transferable across situations in a way that information is not. Information is more constrained and subjective as to how it becomes meaningful. But this ought not to impose a necessarily utilitarian interpretation of information. Information serves purposes that are not governed exclusively by use values, but rather by a sensuous pleasure of being enveloped in a stimulating environment, whether virtual or otherwise.
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...[Bataille] writes, and then deletes, this line: "All communication among men is rich with garbage." He tells his would-be spiritual explorers to get used to filth. And states that "a foul smell marks the presence of life."
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In this condition of inflow data-ponics, the fast exchange and personal engagement of a constant datastream, virtual friendships and networks develop—mutual understandings and cycles of representational exchange take place via literacies of text, image, and sound. The commons thrives and culture is invigorated by nothing more than turning post culture compost when it starts to stink. And the stench goes sky-high, the gag of Lady Gaga. Thus recycling informational waste can be healthy for the information ecology and the vital cultural wealth it supports. The negative value we place on waste products of all kinds leaves an important meaning resource not only un-mined, but in many instances it has been removed from the informational commons through intellectual property law and the embargoes of the cultural industries. What we know so far is that information is a kind of top soil, full of shit, silt, and windblown seed, thought-burrs from which knowledge takes root. Below this is raw data. From data comes knowledge, min/e/d, processed into "information", a processing that includes giving it form, shape, relevance, each stage of which include principles of selection and reduction and what the educators of competency call comprehension. The process of selection is key to any kind of research. Significance is only valid to particular aspects and angles on data, the part that is meaningful in the light of a given context and provocation, from the perspective of a research question and theoretical framework, at which point it becomes information, with its particular, specified relevance. Knowledge exists at a further remove. One, we might add, that most information does not conform to. Yet this waste information is not, therefore, inherently useless. In fact, it may create the proper conditions that other information requires for conversion to knowledge, and for its a priori identification as knowledge-worthy during the extraction of data. This background of non-knowledge (unclassified information) on which knowledge is selectively discerned was of particular fascination to the French cultural theorist Georges Bataille. He liked to cross out portions of his texts, and in the opening essay collected in The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge (2001), he writes, and then deletes, this line: "All communication among men is rich with garbage." He tells his would-be spiritual explorers to get used to filth. And states that "a foul smell marks the presence of life." And thus it cannot be ignored. But what is this unattended mass of nonknowledge? To find out, Bataille points us on the path of ecstasies, of being outside static, stable form. The ecstatic path—the journey through excess—leads not to knowledge, but to wisdom, according to the visionary Romantic poet William Blake. In the "Proverbs of Hell" he writes "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom". But what is excess, and waste, among information? Can waste information not become valuable knowledge under the correct circumstances? I may for example purchase a book, and leave it on my shelf unread for years. One day I discover that it concerns something of immediate necessity? How did I foretell its usefulness? Did it, or I, or unknown forces create the conditions by which my attention (and cash) would be duly rewarded? So what appears now to be background, insignificant nonknowledge does not preclude a later attentional shift. Neither knowledge nor information can be considered static characteristics. So here is the problem of sustainability: how to address condition in the information environment when such conditions are uncertainly founded on values that are by and large coincidental. I needed something that symbolized excessive wasteful communication. Something that social practices treated routinely and fundamentally as garbage. This is why I took up the notion of working with spam email.
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The ecstatic path—the journey through excess—leads not to knowledge, but to wisdom, according to the visionary Romantic poet William Blake. In the "Proverbs of Hell" he writes "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom". But what is excess, and waste, among information?
I would boldly assert the spam texts used to foil spam filters are poetic in nature and taken as a totality...it is the largest cut-up poem ever created, and the most multi-authored work of literature in the English language.
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Spam represents quintessential digital waste. Few would deny that. And although it hasn't been in existence for very long, it has certainly gained notoriety as a scourge of the internet and online existence. It transgresses our systems of private correspondence not only with unsolicited advertising and bulk, generic communications that waste time and attention, but it also has a dark side. It is used to trick innocent users into giving over their private information by directing them to fraudulent web sites. It is a contributor to identity theft, pyramid schemes and scams, placebo pills, penny stock rackets, and a range of pornographic content on the web. Spammers frequently take over dormant blogs and wikis and other social networks sites and fill them with message-template data, often with pornographic pictures and so on. Others, not knowing this was done by spammers, might take away a negative impression of the person whose blog has been invaded, falsely attributing the content to the author, rather than to a bot. Furthermore, spam is used to transfer viruses and worms, such as Trojans, that can incapacitate the computer, or worse, make it a zombie serving to spam others. It gets into inboxes, copying addresses of personal friends and then spams them, making it appear to be from a trusted friend, none of which aids in developing secure online social networks. It is big surprise the first time you receive spam email from yourself! Spam is also used to jam communications channels with so much information that normal correspondence can no longer take place. There is a fairly famous example of a large botnet, known as the Storm botnet, which at its peak was capable of shutting down government online communications of the Estonian nation for a month in 2007. I have also been the unfortunate victim of what is known in email jargon as a DDoS attack, which stands for Distributed Denial of Service, in which case one receives so many messages that it fills one's mail server to capacity and makes it no longer useful. For a week in April 2008 my primary communication medium no longer worked, in the midst of many professional correspondence obligations. It was an object lesson in why spammers are so hated by the general public and by server administrators the world over. Mind you, it couldn't have happened to a spammier guy! I received in the space of a week more data for my research than I'd accumulated over 9 months of collecting spam from spam traps set up all over the web. But there is another side to spam, one that I am particularly fascinated by. This is what spam contributes to language, and in particular, to the evolution of online discourse. It may come as a surprise, but I would boldly assert the spam texts used to foil spam filters are poetic in nature and taken as a totality (and herein we'd need to recognize that billions of messages are sent every day) it is the largest cut-up poem ever created, and the most multi-authored work of literature in the English language. Positing spam as a literary genre is sure to wake hecklers, especially if one holds onto habits of regarding print-authorship as the standard vehicle and qualification of poetry. However, among online literary communities such a claim would not seem as surprising or new. Now some ten years old, a subgenre of poetry called "spoetry" and offshoots such as "flarf" have attracted hundreds of cyber poets and reading into the literary flock. A simple search on YouTube for example will show hundreds of readings and media performances from spam texts. In addition small presses in Canada, Europe and Scandinavia have been publishing print versions of spam-generated texts. This is a fascinating cycle through the media, integrating a peculiar new form of poetry in which humans and bots are equal participants, into contemporary literary culture. Spoetry is an offshoot of found poetry that has existed, in a variety of media, since the early 20th Century, with the work of Dada artists, Marcel Duchamp, and surrealists, using found objects and texts in their artistic productions. A further exploration of found and procedural poetry is contained in my paper entitled "Cut-up consciousness
and talking trash: Poetic inquiry and the Spambot’s
text" in The Handbook on Poetic Inquiry (2009) edited by fellow poetic researchers Carl Leggo, Monica Pendergast and Pauline Sameshima. However, the found texts in the case of spam poems are not just selected from the world of published textual artifacts. The texts that are discovered by these spoets are already found poems, harvested and cut up by web-crawlers, bots that collect text that matches a users own lexicon and language use, in order to fool Bayesian filtering algorithms into thinking that the spam message is ham (legitimate correspondence), and, in the more extreme case, when training filters to eliminate this kind of falsified message, these body texts that enigmatically accompany the spammer's pitch, can cause the filter to over-perform, resulting in false positives, i.e. the rejection of desired correspondence on the basis that it uses language associated with spam emails.
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In economic terms, spam is big business both for spammers violating fair use agreements to pollute systems with unsolicited, often bogus, ads and for those engaged in protecting individuals and businesses against this onslaught of unwanted correspondence.
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The presence of spam in the information environment brings about two concurrent events: a shifting sense of authorship, of text as intellectual property, and of artificial creativity, along with informational wars, waged over the global inboxes, using the arsenal of bots and filter scripts to combat each one another. While the positive side of spam's presence garners little more than amusement and tens of thousands of haiku using the word SPAM, the negative side of spam has produced a multibillion-dollar industry. In economic terms, spam is big business both for spammers violating fair use agreements to pollute systems with unsolicited, often bogus, ads and for those engaged in protecting individuals and businesses against this onslaught of unwanted correspondence. Some online pundits have questioned whether anyone involved in the fight against spam actually wants to win, as this would suddenly put an end to the anti-spam & anti-virus industries. In 2003, Bill Gates notoriously predicted that the problem of spam would be vanquished in two years. By his estimation, these problems can only exist as long as users enjoy free electronic mail services packaged with their Internet service provider accounts. Gates, and others, set forth proposals for fee-mail, emulating the Pennyblack postage stamp introduced by Rowland Hill, the famed British postal reformer, in 1840. However, resistance to this idea has been very strong indeed, often from businesses that use email to legitimately market products and obey the unsubscribe link protocols that were mandated when the CANSPAM act, passed by the United States as the first Federal Anti-Spam legislation on January 01, 2004, came into effect. Other user-end costs have been considered as well, some of which involve using the sender's computer to perform time-consuming calculations which on a one-off basis are not particularly significant, but would add up to hours of delay for a spammer sending millions of emails. Why have these proposals not been accepted, when so many innovative measures have been put forth, using digital signatures, special codes, challenge-response mechanisms, fee-mail, and so on? The answer is no doubt rooted in the general anarchic democracy that typifies the web and has since its inception surrounded it in the aura of promise, progress, opportunity even though developed by the U.S. Department of Defense funded DARPA (precursor of ARPANET, itself the precursor of the Internet), yet created in the heady 1960s, largely by computer science graduate students at University of California, Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This rebellious, communal spirit of the popular computing ethos was epitomized in the creation of Internet protocols that used an open forum for dialogue about how such intermachine communications ought to take place. These were created under the heading RFCs, which stood for "request for comments" rather than military orders and commands (the command line was already written in!). This public spirit driving the interconnectedness of humans through digital technologies has remained to this day, and any attempt to impose outside regulations is hotly disputed and contested. In addition, it is generally recognized that whoever becomes the global electronic post-office holds not only an unjust monopoly, but also an ability to wield enormous power by control and censorship of electronic correspondences, a fear that is not ungrounded. Already email is some of the most easily intercepted of forms of personal correspondence because, in reaching its destination, email passes through many vulnerable relays ...
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How does one come to researching waste, to seeing in that vulnerability a stronger resilience?
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The vulnerability of the relay, as vulnerable as virtual selves exposed to the cyber-nautic wilds, to loss and dislocation as was Derrida's Postcard self to textual dismemberment, suggests the nightmarish vista of the road to data-waste, to the land of the dead letter. How does one come to researching waste, to seeing in that vulnerability a stronger resilience? I suppose there's a logic and a fetish quality to it. In "Old Forgotten Children’s Books" (1924), Walter Benjamin observes that:
The draw of something which is the useless excess of industry and production has charms that inspire children's minds just as the cottage industry, spoken of by Benjamin, does. Across North America there are not-for-profit organizations that collect up donations of off-cuts and excess, the waste and overproduction, and use these items with school children, structured into a wide variety of curricular activities, from science to visual art. They especially aid poorer schools, only charging a fee to those districts that can afford it. These bits of waste turn into valuable lessons not only in recycling and its effects on the imagination, but also in innovative uses for what is deemed junk. The imagination comes to life when a small world of useless things are given a new significance, a significance that is born into it through the act of reusing what has no other value, thus becoming value-added. Thus a non-prescribed value is authored and this has a lasting relationship with the notion of what gets called garbage. Don't turn your nose up at its romantic resurrection, its mash-up rebirth. In 1985 my brother and I began a business, called unimaginatively K & G Site Service. We bought a one-ton truck and offered our service to construction site managers to collect their garbage and take it to the dump on a routine basis during the period of construction. It was not hard to find willing customers because waste is costly in construction and a hassle for companies that don't produce large enough amounts to warrant renting large bins. So every day we would go to construction sites, load up the waste and head off to the municipal landfill. At that time, there was less caution at the landfills. You paid by vehicle size, drove in, dumped your waste and left. Every so often we would take a pause during our day to adventure around the landfill, and inevitably we'd find some unlikely useful treasure, a brand new leather tool belt, an unopened box of records, an answering machine with all the tapes in it, a chandelier, and on and on. Below is a curious photo I took of my brother at the landfill, against a backdrop of what was a 10 meter high cliff of garbage, while he rests in that summer's hot afternoon sun.
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In this photo I often imagine the figure of my twin as Humanity, ignoring the gigantic garbage wake that we produce in the course of consumerist lifestyles rising up just behind us.
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 Garbage represents the past. Even when something has never been used, to throw it out means to project it from the present, to historicize it, and separate it from the purpose, practicality, and utility. In this photo, I often imagine the figure of my twin as Humanity, ignoring the gigantic garbage wake that we produce in the course of consumerist lifestyles rising up just behind us. We are caught focusing entirely on the present and do not notice the environment we are leaving behind. The irony is that we encounter this past life of objét refusé in the future, our children's children will have to deal with it, as it revisits us in the form of environmental degradation–as it is already doing. This landfill is closed now, and the land sealed off from further use. The municipality's new dumping grounds have also been filled to brimming and are ready to be capped. The garbage is slated to be shipped to the United States, not that our neighbors don't produce enough of their own. They won't accept it. Now we have nowhere to discard waste. Next our discards become more valuable and costly too. I suppose it's the same instinctual drive that motivates me which motivates the search for buried treasure, or motivates bargain and antique hunters and collectors of all things curious and collectable, each with its own systematizations, its aficionados, its average-Ebay-asking-price becoming the standard purchase value. However, Each said pastime/obsession condenses, disaggregate, fertilizes with curiosity and attention, an aspect of the known world. Each committee of interest resurfaces value while interring non-knowledge through the celebration of the rare and one-of-a-kind item. This acts as necessary churning off the intellectual landfill just as much as the material cultural effluence. Waste has been a problem for millennia; strictly speaking, it entered civilization with the development of cities around the same time written language and counting systems did. Yet we've experienced an unprecedented historical period of wasteful abundance. No doubt this will impact both environments—material and intellectual—but we have no strict measure of how it impacts the information environments. We need a new fairy tale. A fetish for garbage is not new, take for example the eighteenth-century Parisian flaneur, a rag-picker finding linen for turning into paper before wood pulp replaced it—and for Benjamin (1999) the champion gleaner, Baudelaire, drawing from the filthy public streets the essence of an age. In contemporary North America, second-hand and consignment stores, flea markets, swap meets, yard and garage sales, street markets, institutional fundraisers. The gleaners, the treasure-hunters, the aficionados and automated sorters descend: Every domain of post-cultural production has its avid attendees, those who scour the excess for value. It would be amiss not to mention, as importantly, used book and record stores, coin and stamp dealerships, collectors conventions, auctions, and the myriad points of highly specialized exchange, each with its special language, it's lexicon of minutiae that distinguish collections. And collection worth its salt combines those items that were purchased as a regular fan might with those that were specialty purchased, those traded for, and those magical ones that were found in the effluence, a nugget in a gold pan. Those same nuggets often get collections started, initiate the interest that when nourished and systematized, became expertise. The point at which the seemingly mundane or even valueless object transforms into a precious and coveted object requires an appointment of imagination; curiosity drives the navigator to explore the unknown, the unpredictable territory extending beyond the mindmap. Navigating the ocean of information is not a passive form of discovery; the Internet is filled with gems—but they are hard to find, and often sharing—that richest of textual practices—is criminalized. The reward for the collector is the point of absorption in the object, or text, the re-evaluation that, once performed, echoes over a lifetime. The collector, as Baudrillard (1999) presents this phenomenon, requires a valorization of that which eschews utility and participates instead in the non-functional system of objects. This system ritually sanctifies the object as resistant to time, and worthy of absorption, the attention value required for a fetish. Baudrillard reads this as a point of authorship and authority in the world of objects. Benjamin, on the other hand, resuscitated the informational dump to uncover the cultural history, the energetic past, of 19th Century Paris. In this way, Benjamin is the more fetishistic, but also able, therefore, to position waste within the concern about specialization, in knowledge as a form of collection, the repo man, Benjamin worked to recover the informational past for the cultural present through pursuing, gleaning, codifying and synthesizing. He tolerated informational detritus, and discovered the joy of autopoesis on the journey. I am just "sorting it out" as the saying goes. Yet I sense the evolution of a new learning style in these processes of navigating excess. It's even apparent in the appreciation of automated digital art where cumulative moments, the urgent element of discovery, of rare treasures, significant glitches in the processing of information, translate between the hoary cells and silicon circuits. Here I am brazenly defending the romantic spirit, arising from the muck of existence—poet, pirate, and netbot, charmed outcasts, vital to culture’s continual relevance, to the painful joy of believing in magical synchronicity, in fortuitous pursuits of data dredging. I would go further askew, summoning nostalgia for lost relevancies, not the big answer but an infinite number of small meanings, tremendously powerful, like fairytale mice. And so we may wonder what is to be done, or is being done, to counter the situation where the detritus of a society saturated with information becomes biggest problem, a problem impacting our ability to use communication to build community, a problem challenging our basic literacies and foundations of knowledge and authorship. The first step is to make affordances and allowance to digital creativity, readings that process and processes that read, and in processing create resources for writings that advance new ways of rendering the info-waste into a a self-sustaining infosphere. As well, to protect the individual rights to productive use of the cultural commons as something loved, cherished, maintained for future re-generations, for the freedom to explore, to share, to reinvent. In such fashion we allow a bottom-up approach to revaluing cultural resources. Such whole-scale changes must begin with education, a curriculum that draws straight from the world around it. Nothing new there—if one accepts the agenda put forward by the famous American educationalist John Dewey in Experience and Education (1938)—to derive a localized meaning from a globalizing phenomenon. But localized meaning in a virtual sense is personalized meaning. The strange discovery of self-imagings among waste, the quasi-random self-witnessing available only when foreground values decay, when the polarizing focal point is obliterated, when only the background is brought to life, as it layers, decays to residual traces of meaning, where the gaze penetrates to the interior, as with a diamond, seeing into the image as an aggregate of vanishing transparencies washing over attention and tinting experience. A cosmic light only found in meditation flickers, the flowering time-lapse archetypes. Glimpsed within, informational debris compresses, heats, reveals values that did not before exist, and offers a mode of seeing past temporal vision to the lasting conditions in the state of the mind—cumulative, gelling awareness.
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...we will be called toward a digital praxis that accommodates transfiguration, mutation, aesthetic discovery as much as it does the managerial pragmatics of structured arrays and databases.
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To promote the enhancement of our navigational strategies so that they may be regenerative beyond the greatest hits list-making of search engines, we will be called toward a digital praxis that accommodates transfiguration, mutation, aesthetic discovery as much as it does the managerial pragmatics of structured arrays and databases. To do so we must forge a connection with the ambivalence of the bot—call it a mutual appreciation club. The bot lives on information as we do food. The code provides the bot with its destiny but information—input/output—is its fare. The bot can provide us with the means to make our horde of information valuable, viable compost for the knowledge vine as much as the for the data string. By intelligent software bots render, map, select, visualize the bitmap mass of texts, images, sounds. But we cannot leave teaching to bots, except that they already teach one another. As society grows, education addresses itself to what is as yet undetermined—the future world. We need to instill a profound awareness of how to deal with not only reception and production of knowledge, but post-producer/consumer information, the excess where our greater humanity lies hidden. Turning the soil, the soul germinates and our learned offspring will require that inspiration if they are to find their way.
Bibliography Bataille, G. (2001). The unfinished system of nonknowledge. Edited and translated by S. Kendall. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press. Baudrillard, J. (1999). Revenge of the crystal: Selected writings on the modern object and its destiny, 1968-1983 (P. Foss & J. Pefanis, Trans.). London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press. Benjamin, W. (1924/2004). Walter Benjamin: Selected writings (Vol. 1, 1913-1926). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, W. (1999). The Arcades Project (H. Eiland & K. McLaughlin, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. (CAN-SPAM) Controlling the assault of non-solicited pornography and marketing act of 2003, 15 USC 7701-7713 (2003). Dewey, J. (1938/1997). Experience and Education. New York: Macmillan. Gitlin, T. (2002). Media unlimited: How the torrent of images and sounds overwhelms our lives. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Jakobson, R. (1981). Closing statement: Poetics and linguistics. In S. Rudy (Ed.), Selected writings: Poetry of grammar and grammar of poetry (Vol. III, pp. 18-51). The Hague: Mouton. James, K. (2009). Cut-up consciousness and talking trash: Poetic inquiry and the Spambot’s text. In M. Prendergast, C. Leggo & P. Sameshima (Eds.), Poetic inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social sciences. Rotterdam: Sense publishers. Maturana, H.R., and Varela, F. J. (1980). Autopoesis and cognition. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel. Weber, T. (2004, January 24). Gates forecasts victory over spam. BBC News. Retrieved January 06, 2008, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3426367.stm Willinky, J. (1999). Technologies of knowing: A proposal for the human sciences. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. |
unded doctoral research on exploring cultural conditions in contemporary online information environments. This research approaches the topic of digital writing by focusing specifically on spam email to understand the broad implications of high volumes of unsolicited commercial and bulk information in the channels of personal literate communications. While touching on several areas of significance, my research is rooted in a need to understand how, from a perspective of education, we might educate with sustainable textual practices that are in tune with contemporary digital culture. 
