Theory

one of my favourite aussie artists. the pipes are there too, as to not break the cycle

i change a lot. maybe this post will be more personal than usual, but i just had an interesting realization. over the years i’ve been certain of hundreds or even thousands of things, only to predictably contradict myself a little while later

the easy way out is to claim that self contradiction implies richness of character, but i see that as the usual argument employed by crooks and liars to get away with anything. instead, a great deal of my time is spent trying to improve my understanding of the world around me, to the point of exhaustion. instead of conservatively reaching conclusions that survive the test of time, i constantly jump on the best ideological bandwagon for that moment. going back through the years, i have a succession of comical caricatures of myself, deluded by whichever absolute truth was around then. this succession means i’ve had many lives, if one can call it that: if at a given time i had full purpose, meaning and goals, my life would be entirely shaped around it. for example, while becoming a robotics researcher was the story, so was my entire mind. at the same time, these ideas would co-exist with other ideas and other lives, be it music, arts, or even, for the past years, relationships and communities

one of the side effects of this is that at any given point in time, my blind certainties, passions and drives give any observer the illusion of consistency: that that certainty is set on solid foundations. that has been, i imagine, the key to every situation where my charismatic leadership capacity stood out. it wasn’t that my ideas were necessarily right, but the fervor with which i followed them made it all the more believable. an excellent example of this was one of my past lives as a community organizer, that is to say, someone that rented out a place and would let strangers in, or co-squatted alongside an eclectic team. during that time, and over time, i would provide the passers-by with my “truth of the moment”, my apparent solid theory of everything

fast-forward about 3 or 4 years, and the echoes are coming back, like ghosts of a former self, in the form of these strangers, revisiting me, or contacting me again. but for every echo, i’m faced with a contradiction of myself: as the revisiting stranger mentions ideas i raved about, they no longer feel mine, they feel distant and alien, as if someone else had said them

what allows for this is the fact that i continuously hosted people over more than 4 years, and at every point of the way, i made deep connections with people. but now, whenever an echo hits me, like an aftershock, i’m forced to acknowledge that i’ve changed, wussed out or even flat out lied. that now i live in a rich country, working 9 to 5 and do virtually nothing of what i promised any of these former selves and to those that were listening. i’m forced to acknowledge that i’ve co-opted the dominant anglo-saxon culture for my own benefit, that i rent, pay insurance, save for my retirement, that i’ve treaded the path i loathed. hell, what happened to all these dreams i dazzled people with by the bonfire? they burned out with it, only to come back every now and then through other people’s mouths

as my last encounter went on about how much my ideas were inspirational, i felt a mix of selfish happiness from the feeling that i could change someone’s life, and an incredible feeling of helplessness. i felt i wasn’t on the driver’s seat at all, that i wasn’t in control of my own life. that somehow no matter how strong these ideas were in my past, what determined my future was entirely beyond my control. that somehow, no matter how much thought i had given to how i should live my life according to my ideals, these external forces controlled my every move, while i told myself and others proudly that they didn’t. i realized that preaching is too easy, especially if sugar-coated with some apparent action. i was confronted, yet again, with the blatant hypocrisy of voicing an opinion and not living according to it

i’m yet to turn all these emotions into a proper line of thought, but if anything, i’m coming to terms with the fact that to learn and to grow is to deny the self of any sustainable constancy, other that the process of growth and learning itself. luckily, these echoes do not come with judgement, but with love and friendship, which can be reciprocated beyond the realm of facts and figures. this begs the question: does that mean, then, that consistency is irrelevant, and that the realms of love and friendship exist beyond them, in an inscrutable universe of emotions that reason contributes nothing to?

it should have become clear by now that i’m not in love with australian culture. and while i’m not one to winge too much, it made me reflect on how the narratives created in societies can make basic interactions be so dramatically different between cultures. one of the main issues i have run into, put simply, is that of the winner and the loser.

if one is to promote this idea of winner and loser, that being, an idea that everywhere you are and anything you do is a race to a finish line and you must come on top, i would like to argue that it entails a side effect that is rarely noted and has real effects on what kind of human beings will be created with it.

what are the requirements of a win-lose type situation? someone wins, everyone else loses. to the winner, it is not necessarily clear that those that lose are part of his victory as much as he is of their loss. but most importantly, whoever feels good in a winning position needs to develop their capacity to not empathize with anyone they ever beat. the best analogy is obtained with the following question: what type of human being feels good in a winning position knowing that it requires that many of his fellow human beings lose? in my opinion, a very dangerous type of human. one that would rather climb an artificial ladder than reflect on its artificiality, one that would rather ignore their peers’ emotions than give up the win or the award. the nature of winning and losing, is, obviously, richer, but it is richer insofar as it creates both situations in equal probability. what i am discussing is how this winning narrative creates a distorted personality simply by creating the desire to be a winner more strongly than creating the capacity to be a loser. what it does is create hordes of individuals that become so driven by being winners, that both they lose the capacity to empathize with whoever they have to bully to get ahead (hello any mid manager wanting to get ahead), and they ignore that losing is where learning happens.

and so we’re left with endless isolated winners, each one at the peak of their own self-built mountain, blindly following the narrative their culture imposed on them and failing to see that their condition implies that they are not winners in the sense that they are better, but they are winners in the sense that they are capable of trampling others using skills that should embarrass any human being.

and what about the losers? whoever gives up this race is automatically labeled and pushed aside. but what does it mean to not want to race, to compete, to climb? in my opinion, it mostly means that the race is not relevant, and that accepting a lower position most of the times does not mean one isn’t skilled or talented, but means simply that one is not willing to give up basic human traits for an opportunity at the top of the hill.

this is where i realized i didn’t fit the culture. i am not ruthless and unempathetic and certainly do not recognize the validity of any ladder (be that the employment, career, music scenes, sports, etc). i do not enjoy being bullied, but i do not bully myself. and certainly, if someone pounds their chest in front of me, i will step aside. not because i am afraid, but because it disgusts me to engage at that level. to an observer, this might as well be cowardice. so how can we ever say we know the true motivations of the one that steps away from a fight? clearly competition as a race with winners and losers can’t guarantee that the winner is the most talented or skilled, it can only guarantee that the winner is the most skilled at winning at any cost, whatever the activity may be.

i’d make the analogy with a political campaign. the one who wins is the one that has the best team working to make them win, because the winning itself is what matters. if a politician was to be judged based on talent, they would not need to compete, since their talents would be both comparable and easy to measure between them and their opponents. in my opinion, it follows that any political or organizational system that allows a hierarchy based on anything other than empirically verifiable talents or skills will always promote professional “winners”, people who develop the skill to compete with others and win, irregardless of what they’re competing for.

let’s compare that to a competition between, let’s say, musicians. each one of these musicians will not need to worry about anything more than their own talent. if the jury is capable and impartial, their choice will be unambiguous. but most importantly, whoever would be considered a winner would be also recognized as so by their peers. if the qualities for which winning or losing is defined are empirically testable, then no member of the win-lose group will feel emotionally distressed, since mastery is an opportunity to learn.

the key distinction here is how testable one’s talent is, and to what extent it can be unambiguously defined. even competition breaks down at high levels, when mastery becomes so intertwined with interpretation.

without wanting to dive too deep in this matter, i’d like to come back full circle. here the ladders to climb are the car, the career, the body, the fortune. none of these require any mastery, other than the capacity to make money and get ahead no matter what. and more often than not, when an aussie pounds their chest to assert dominance or supremacy over me, i’ll gladly step aside. what i wonder is if living away from this unidimensional pyramidal way of looking at things is sustainable in the long run as a way to live here. what i’ve found is that if the precedent is set, then there is little to be done, and the chest-pounding horde will just trample through. what ended up being very interesting to me, is how not being involved in these schemes opened up a whole new world of understanding of how things work, and how those who shy away from situations sometimes might end up being the bravest and most interesting after all. and with it, a new found complicity with others that also chose not to play games in their lives, like a newly discovered brotherhood that exists beyond all these false idols of an individualist society.

i decided to break a pattern here and added an audio song instead. fact is i’ve been less time online looking for videos and instead been mostly listening to random songs, so this is one on the uillean pipes, with several traditional songs which i think will be relevant for discussion

in the aftermath of the recent panic about censorship, driven by the big media companies wanting to filter all internet traffic to spot infringement, i feel that not everything is said every time. most arguments are passionate defenses of the ideas of commons (like the traditional song you just heard, which is anyone’s), or the defense of personal privacy as a fundamental right. while i agree with both concerns, the point i’ve been trying to get across is somewhat different

i’ve argued before that any idea of something out of nothing is preposterous, and with it, originality must be recontextualized. nothing is entirely new because everything is made of something that already existed. this works for art, ideas, languages, etc. while we might praise a poet for their highly original work, we certainly do not praise them for using words and ideas that we are capable of understanding. in order for an idea to be transmitted, the receiver needs a compatible set of symbols. in this case, the poet would write using most of the words they got from their cultural baggage. in that sense, all work is incremental, and the idea of “owning” a particular rearrangement of these cultural symbols is highly questionable

but this type of argument has been put forward enough times that i feel it would add nothing to the debate. on the other hand, the big free culture revolution seems to be completely ignored, hence my post on copyleft and copyright

first, a little background on what copyleft is and where it comes from. back when the first personal computers were built in garages by hobbyists, software was just something you’d write to make things work. but companies were also writing code and protecting it as intellectual property using the old copyright laws

soon the near-immateriality of software combined with the lossless copying that computers allowed meant that if you gave your own written software to someone and they changed it, passed it along or sold it, they would be breaching copyright laws

to prevent this from happening, licenses emerged that allowed you to use copyright as a way that would allow for this same incremental change. these licenses play a trick on copyright law, by using copyright law against itself, in a way, hacking laws against themselves. one of my favorites, the gnu gpl, solves this problem by saying: if you copyright this, you are breaching copyright (obviously with much more legalese). it also says that if you copy and change it, you cannot copyright it either. this is basically using copyright against itself, to prevent, in this case, software from being closed up in corporate intellectual property silos

this might seem too specific, but i’ll give a copyleft example that affects us much more. if you scroll down on wikipedia, you’ll find a license statement that says cc-by-sa, a creative commons license, a type of copyleft. what it says about documents is basically what i said above about software. but while coding was restricted to a few people with the skills, reading and writing about any topic you might know something about is not. the strongest point going for wikipedia is that it is free, not in the sense that you don’t pay to use it, but in the sense that you can download it, print it, use it in schools, for personal use and even write a spin off of it

this is the true power of copyleft, the fact that copyright is used as a way to guarantee that in the future, this information and the rights to modify it remain unchanged. i personally believe this is one of the biggest intellectual revolutions in history

copyleft has since expanded, thanks to the initiative of creative commons to simplify the license selection, that brought easy legalese to the average joe. and since then all kinds of artists have been publishing copylefted art. this means that you can copy and change (depending on the terms) the work provided without fears of infringement

now how is this relevant for the current issues regarding copyright and censorship?

i go under fire many times when i say that i don’t care about new laws protecting media companies and filtering personal transmissions. this might seem like i am on the media companies’ side, well, because i am! if an artist has the objectively ridiculous idea that they are entitled to copyrighting whatever work they have produced then they should enjoy that right. and use whichever means to protect it. and if they even go as far as giving their work to a bunch of talentless greedy suits so be it! the right to be an idiot or a sucker means we live in a healthy, pluralist society. it’s wrong to ban copyrighting in my opinion for the same reasons i believe banning extremist political media or religious media is wrong. provided a solid, critical citizenship, these issues become little more than sunday newspaper fait divers

the key issue here is that any artist (or engineer, writer, scientist, etc) that deliberately chooses to make his work protected for motives of fame or fortune should not be supported in the first place on an ethical basis. i don’t care if people get arrested for ripping beyonce or the latest commercial video game. if they are consuming and being brainwashed by that mind numbing shit, then they should be locked away. this will expose the truth behind the coolness and glitter of mass media: a bunch of blood sucking vampires playing with sexy puppets and a society based entirely on vampirizing creativity to feed the suited bourgeoisie

it strikes me as incredibly offensive for the idea of commons that freedom of speech is thrown around in conversations only when we can’t download another stereotype inducing blockbuster from hollywood. never mind wikileaks, never mind media censorship by governments. someone takes my arrested development away and riots ensue! like the london riots, the brainwashing of the masses by media corporations has succeeded in creating in us desire not to improve ourselves and learn, but to indulge in the shallow and barren fruits of mass media culture

so how does copyleft complement this picture? copyleft is the ethical way of producing cultural goods. there are licenses to suit every need, but mainly, the access and mashup rights allow for a speedier dissemination and improvement of things. copyleft artists understand the need for media and intellectual commons, and while the struggle against so called “censorship” to prevent copyright theft might seem like an important cause, we should see this as an opportunity to expand global awareness of the free culture revolution. lets cherish wikipedia, linux, open source hardware and all these new ideas for an open, free culture future

a yes to fighting for an open culture rooted in civilizational commons, a most definite no to using the very same laws that protect these commons to justify one’s own lust for mass consumerism

ironically, though i try to post traditional music (which is public domain for the most part), some of the media on this page is in a “gray area”. but in essence, folk music evolves thanks to the efforts of hundreds of unspoken musicians improving on an existing pool of cultural commons. maybe the answer to these media problems has been around longer than we think

it’s been a long time since i posted, fact of the matter is my computer isn’t working at the moment, plus settling down and what not. despite that, i finally found some time to post here

i hinted at it on my last post. as i noted previously, i’m now living in australia. one of the things i did once i got here was go to the local anarchist book store and visit one of their people’s kitchens.

and truth be told, anarchists everywhere are pretty similar. concerned about gender issues, equality issues, racial issues, etc etc.

but life here is too good. the mining money, which comes basically from pillaging the aboriginal land and sucking out all the resources, makes life too easy. this surplus of money allows for an incredible standards for living. food from all over the world, beaches, sports, access to all kinds of technology, healthcare, education and services. fact of the matter is life is so easy that not even the anarchists find in themselves something to complain about beyond stereotypical catchphrases copied from the latest north american chomsky approved fanzine.

but this is not something exclusive to australia. the real title of this post should be “on the impossibilities of living virtuously while being a citizen of a privileged western society”. big cities are a mecca for activism, for vegans, queers, fixed gear cyclists or generally people who have enough free mind space to reflect and reshape their lives according to a perceived (though most of the times via propaganda) better, more virtuous way of living out their lives. cities are full of clusters of exuberant idiosyncratic ideological niches

but i argue that it is impossible to both enjoy the pleasures of modern western society and have a lifestyle that somehow would offset it. sure, a punk might dumpster dive for food, brew his own, steal and shoplift. but the artifacts that s/he carries, like cellphones, laptops and even clothes, are most of the time, if not all the time, made by exploited workers far away from their own sight. and while caught up in privileged problem debates like gay marriage, the real issues fall into the backdrop, and the hypocrisy of being both an activist for labor rights and owning an iphone completely ignored

one of the most shocking examples for me since i got here is how little is discussed and done about the aboriginal situation in the northern territories. all anarchists and activists i spoke to about this said basically the same thing: “yeah, the aboriginal situation is fucked up.”. full stop. then resumed whatever rant was on about some minor gender / economic situation they might be involved in.

this to me speaks to a deeper truth about most activist movements: bigger issues, bigger ideas, are left for the aging left wing activists that keep waving marx’s capital. the new young activist cares about a million tiny things that no one knows about, and none of the big things everyone cares about. carrying around the iphone while trying to be an activist is the perfect example of the cargo cult activism i’ve been denouncing for quite some time.

but certainly i wouldn’t end on yet another rant about how individualism has eroded virtue in our every day life.

what, in my opinion, makes this cargo cult activism so appealing is that it is intelligible. gay marriage is easy to understand. drug laws are somewhat easy to understand. labor laws? not so much. economy, property laws, native rights, etc, are issues that require a deeper knowledge, a desire to dive deep into what is involved in all these issues. it needs deep thought and reflective critical thinking, if you will. but most of the things around us are unintelligible. it is impossible to fully grasp what an iphone implies as an artifact: the extraction, manufacturing, propaganda, consumerism, externalization of costs, outsourcing of labor, etc. how could something so small that fits on the palm of our hand bring up all these issues? certainly having one wouldn’t be a problem.

but this is where we become complete suckers. if presented with one of these artifacts and a price tag, we accept the price as representing its cost. this is one of the greatest tricks the globalized market has achieved. nowhere in the price is the ecological footprint, the human footprint or the societal footprint. since money has no morals of its own, existing in this supposed aether of value, we gracefully pay from what we earned to support this incredible web of dependencies.

i believe the only way of fully restoring sanity into every day life is to have realistic prices (if we still want to live with currency) that fully reflect the whole chain of production. through lawful action prevent money from obfuscating what we are really buying into.

certainly i could go into a post-capitalism scenario. but today, i chose to take capitalism for granted and explore a possible transition.

ideally, it is my belief that no artifact should ever be both unintelligible and mass produced. it created this schizoid lifestyle where we eat greet but blog about it on blood laptops and smartphones

and above every thing else, i still can’t deal with the punks with iphones. oh how the mighty have fallen (if they were ever mighty).

this is why i am leaning towards exploring ideas like the civilization starter kit, which give us transparency for the whole supply chain. we have enough stuff. now we just need to learn how to use it

though tecnically this isn’t a piping video, it’s contextual and in the background you can hear me playing, i played a whole set of tracks with some musicians there

i haven’t been posting because i have been through many changes in my personal life. i changed jobs, continents, language and even name (since my name is never properly pronounced).

one thing i’ve been realizing while i’m here (in australia) is that the nationalist fervor around home grown produce, which before might have been just a nasty nationalist pride thing, has come full circle and become relevant to the environmental concerns of today

for the little bit i’ve gathered, which might in the end require further investigation, there are “australian owned”, “100% aussie”, “genuine australian” tags everywhere, on stores and food labels. while this comes off as cheesy pride, it actually means that there is a bridge to be built between the local nationalist prickry of the right and the buy local act local trendy leftist mindset. it is in practice irrelevant if the local consumer is buying because he’s a bigot or he’s concerned about the environment if the whole supply chain is already sustainable and local

in this sense, and this is one of the strongest ideas i’ve had of this country so far, is that of its tremendous potential to become an example of sustainable, local and good life. we’re not talking about outsource energy and emissions. we’re talking about fertile land, sun and great food. if we add to it the strong economy, australia is probably one of the best candidates to jump straight to a locally sustained society. obviously there are many issues, such as mining, immigration and the aboriginal community issues. but all that seems small when put in context: a huge, fertile, beautiful country that lacks only the drive to become an example. just this month australia passed its first carbon tax. if anything, i feel parallels with my country, a tremendous potential to elevate a whole nation into moderate local sustainability, the main difference being my country doesn’t have the economy australia does

i’m low on posts here but i hope to bring some new ones. as i’ve settled, the posts might start to flow again