some portuguese pipes again and another one of those weird traditional dances
more and more we share online. we share thoughts, emotions, ideas, photos, friendships. don’t get me wrong, i love sharing. but sharing has always existed in many ways and even online it has gone through some evolution. though i’m young, i’ve been a “netizen” for over a decade now, and i was fortunate enough to go online when it was mostly personally driven: animated gifs, funny personal webpages “this is me”, shitty search engines that forced everyone to spend hours browsing to find anything useful. luckily, this has changed. we now have faster, easier ways to connect to each other. this doesn’t mean they are new ways, since before the internet people made their “social networks” in other ways
one of the main evolutions of the internet has been the change into big business. being online back in the day meant you had a server, or at least some access to a server. universities, companies, allowed people to have their own personal webpages. they didn’t need ads because there were no infrastructure issues. webpages were simple, and people shared what they were passionate about. it was klunky to post, so it was common for articles to be lengthy and for pages to have a lot of very detailed information
but then, money joined and soon there were banner ads and big companies making money off people’s interactions. this was the beginning of the commodification of personal interactions. instead of making and elaborate description, i’ll illustrate with an example
let’s say that today you want to share something with your friends. since calling would cost you money and email would probably take a while, you’ll just post it on facebook. nothing wrong with that, right? it’s easy, fast and everyone (that wants to) gets notified. but as soon as you post, when your friends read it, they will read it with contextual ads. what you posted, no matter how naive or plain, will cause your friends to check it and with it, get ad exposure. whenever you share online, unless you own your website or your server, someone will be monetizing what you’ve done. no matter if it’s personal, deep or shallow. your thoughts are being monetized and your popularity among your peers exploited for profit
some might say that this is fine, the service has to be paid somehow, right? wrong. the internet works so that everyone can run their own server and above all, share with everyone else. fuck, even RSS has made federation easy. so it’s not that we’re stuck with commodification, we’re just lazy to do the extra work or shy about asking someone to help us
i’m not writing today to lecture anyone into anything. i believe people have the right to make their own decisions. what i’m proposing today, instead, is a different way of being online. i’m not the only one that feels a kind of “social network disgust”, as if in some weird way, we know we are being exploited. but i have a simple proposal that i call KItTY: Keep ItTo Yourself. sharing is excellent, if you have something to say. if all you are doing is contributing to the global random noise, then i don’t think sharing is good. a book i recently got, you are not a gadget by jaron lanier, makes a good case about how we’ve become a culture that praises the poorly performed and the amateurish.
i believe that it is important to keep things to ourselves until they mature enough that they are interesting and meaningful. because if we don’t, our contributions to society will become fragmented and disconnected
it is not important to post every picture you took when you traveled. it is important to post what was meaningful for you when you traveled. but one cannot extract meaning from things without building narratives, thinking about things, and above all, keeping most things to oneself. that’s what lets life experiences mature like good wine, that they are corked and not left out in the open. only after they have matured, they become good to our taste
this is my last post in my country, and this serves as a warning too. i don’t plan to make reports of what i do, because i believe in KItTY, keeping it to yourself. if i find something meaningful and interesting, for sure i’ll share it
if you don’t want to be sold out, just learn to KItTY!
despite the song being from galicia, this is a nice video of the northern mask traditions.
even though i’m not from there at all (only if i trace my roots) and didn’t grow up the tradition myself, i decided to prop up my act with a costume.
i’m still not sure about the mask, but this one is just a small sheet i can fold into my bag. i like the wooden ones better but i couldn’t carry them on the (several) planes i’ll be taking.
as many people know i’m leaving the country soon. i decided to take with me what i consider to be some of the most interesting (and exotic) features of our culture, and that in a way ties me to local national legend. to be accurate, bagpipers wouldn’t dress up like this usually, instead wearing more formal clothing. but since i’m just making my own interpretation, i’m not worried
as for the busking act itself, i haven’t been very successful, but also haven’t been practicing much. percussion is essential but i’m usually alone, so i decided on this suit because it also has some cow bells around the waist, which adds to the sound.
there are several big issues when busking with this instrument: it’s too loud, sounds creaky if not played right, and people get annoyed after 15 minutes. this means the show has to be short and dramatic. at least that’s the way i see it, since i don’t have drummers to play with me.
this volume has been a great challenge for me, since i can’t play in a way it doesn’t damage my ears and the ears of people around me if i’m indoors. since it’s so loud, people can’t come close which constrains the busking to open spaces.
the repertoire choice is also a challenge, since most people won’t recognize any song at all. hell, even the locals don’t recognize songs. i’ve been trying to see which songs people enjoy the most, but i’m trying to expand my repertoire to songs outside the standard piping traditions. one of the things i’m enjoying is exploring modal shifts with the minor as a baseline. in regular jazz we take the major as the baseline, but with a minor-tuned instrument, it’s interesting to explore which modes are easier and harder. anyway, the philosopher bagpiper, coming soon to london and sydney
india also has bagpipes (the mashak), and had them before the arrival of the british. they then incorporated the more advanced scottish bagpipe into their traditional music. here is an old recording of it.
preface
i’ve been writing online for a long time, and every now and then i’d mention “exuberantism” without really explaining what it is. i’ve also been defining a lot of abstract arbitrary models for things in order to provide some background to how the concepts i will use. these months have been a set up, because now there will be a jump from the objective to the subjective. we will take the ideas developed previously and apply them on a biased principle framework.
so far, all that i wrote was pretty much vague, but overall somewhat objective. it was about measurable quantities, organizing features of the world around us, and how things themselves appear to be structured. but there is a fundamental part missing here, and that is what principles guide these texts, or better, why are models and metrics being defined versus being defined for the sake of themselves. this is my move from a scientific way of dealing with concepts to a political way of dealing with concepts. first i will explain why, and then explain what these principles really are.
for the whole time i’ve done science, worked in technical fields and so on, there seems to be a kind of hidden hypocrisy in the scientific and technical activity in general. the power structures around us are corrupt and use technically skilled people like me to advance their agenda. the examples of this are everywhere, and science has been overwhelmingly successful at developing weaponry, surveilance techniques, mind control and brainwashing techniques and so on. it’s not that all of the scientists and technicians involved wanted this exploitation, but in my opinion, they were naive to believe they were doing a good thing by researching under the wrong power structure. my criticism is broader than this. i believe it’s time to end the idea that knowledge can’t be biased by anything so it can’t make any claims of principles. it’s not that i’m arguing for knowledge to advance according to its own goals (that would violate the principles of the scientific method). i’m arguing that it’s time we abandon the idea that knowledge is something good regardless of whose hands it is in.
it is my belief that no scientist should be doing research under private, patent protected or corporately owned frameworks whose only goal is to profit. no technically skilled professional should be an accomplice to mass corporate and state murderers. it is not acceptable to promote free and critical thinking while selling your own work for it to be used exactly against those principles.
i’m talking about software engineers that break privacy and sell personal information, about engineers that design to fail, about technicians that refuse to repair, about teachers that submit to flawed economicist school policies. i’m talking about discoveries locked in corporate patents and laws that could otherwise benefit us all, and instead are used as a domination weapon for the sake of profit.
but as it might be obvious by now, that makes me biased. i do not believe research should be done for the sake of research. that is cowardice on the part of the researcher. anyone who worked at the manhattan project surely knew bombs were made to kill people and to exert oppression. yet for the sake of the advancement of “science”, they were bullied into providing states with overwhelming destructive capabilities. just like wernher von braun, the guy that made nazi rockets and then made rockets for nasa, technically skilled individuals seem to believe their work is above moral judgment, which in turn makes them directly exploitable. this is a naive view of knowledge and rational inquiry and especially, a very naive notion of politics and society. knowledge is not above the power structures that own it.
but forcing everyone to change that would require great courage from all the bullied technical staff of all these companies, many of which do not share my view. in fact, today there are fully trained engineers and scientists that are religious fundamentalists or plain bigots. white hat hackers that are offsetting black hat ops. the technical abilities are a tool of oppression and the technically literate are beginning to become part of the oppressing class. consider google or facebook with their guru like internet knowledge. consider the world bank, the imf or the federal reserve with their guru like knowledge of finance. the technically able, though pawns of a power structure that directs them, are directly responsible for much of the current issues we face. be it combustion engines, factories, farming, extraction, you name it. some engineer designed those machines, some scientist demonstrated how to process the materials. some highly educated human being accepted that the knowledge s/he developed would be used for the ultimate destruction of the biosphere.
so what is my proposal? as a technically literate human being, i too have been a tool of companies. i feel a bit hypocritical writing all this since i have done corporate espionage myself, and developed tracking software that gets people fired and violates their privacy. but i am tired. i am tired of seeing open source software being used for goals that violate its principles, of seeing beautiful discoveries of science and engineering being immediately thrown into the next generation weapon.
my proposal comes in many levels, and exuberantism is the name i give this holistic view for the advancement of our species saving my own ass and not feel like a hypocrite. obviously, since i am no longer following the scientific method, the base principle i will present must therefore be taken on the basis of faith. accepting it on faith will be the most irrational thing this proposal will ask of anyone. everything else i put to scrutiny to the scientific method.
the guiding principle of exuberantism
the guiding principle of exuberantism is simple.
to maximize through work the exuberance of a system
let’s define these terms clearly.
exuberance
exuberance is a quantity measured to the degree of uncertainty available to whoever is doing the calculation. the metric for exuberance of a system is the total information of that system, measured in bits, as it was previously discussed. this might sound shocking to all the non-tech types, so i’ll illustrate. what is the difference between a blank canvas and a painted canvas? the second has more information in it, measured by quantifying all the local arrangements of the matter in it. considering the canvas+paint has more mass than just the canvas, the system has more information because the particles are more numerous and therefore, their specific arrangement is less likely than just the canvas. this is not intuitive, you can’t see it clearly at first, and i will not try to explain it any further. i’m still studying this subject to make it even simpler, but so far, i think this is somewhat straightforward: the more unlikely/surprising something is, the more exuberant it is. it is important to draw the right boundary for the math, that is clarified in the next item. a counter intuitive consequence of this is that depending on the boundary, the above example might be a good or bad one (for example, if we extend the boundary and consider the production of paint, the wood for the tools, and so on)
definition of system
a system is an arbitrary boundary drawn around a contiguous portion of spacetime which will be used to measure the exchanges of exuberance in it and with other systems. this definition is compatible with general thermodynamics boundaries, but it is generalized to bigger systems. since the boundary is arbitrary, one must always make sure the boundary is not drawn to prove one’s own opinion, but it is drawn according to the highest rational justification found by whoever is doing the math. this might involve debates, which is fine. evidence of unscientific reasoning in drawing these boundaries should be discouraged, since this undermines the definitions used.
maximization
a maximization means that through whatever means chosen the system will be in a positive gradient of exuberance. this does not mean it should be so at all times, because optimization using time means local minimums might cause bigger future maximums. this means that greedy techniques should be avoided, and careful rational examination of the possible outcomes should be preferred. this also means that it is acceptable to sacrifice present exuberance for future exuberance, but never on false premises and especially not unless it is ground on solid evidence
work
work is the expression of energy that causes changes in the exuberance of a system. like the work done by the painter on the canvas, work is a necessary part of this definition. in rigor, it is useful work that is encouraged, work that increases e (i will use e for exuberance from now on). therefore, work can be done by humans, plants, animals, stars or even planets. all work is treated equally and quantitatively. there are no distinctions between work done by machines, humans or geological events. work is treated in its purest physical definition
to summarize and put it succinctly, an exuberantist is someone who believes they should maximize exuberance in their system. i encourage people to consider their boundaries the most effective one to avoid impossible problems and to avoid falling back to individualism. but obviously, since the metric is e, there is no requirement to follow any of these
properties of max(e)
one of the main properties of this ideology (it is an ideology after all), is that even though it has a guiding principle, its guiding principle is by definition relativistic. a painted canvas, no matter the color or shape, is better than an empty one. it doesn’t matter if it is a religious figure, a pretty portrait or an ugly post modern blob. what matters is that there is an effort (work done) by something to increase e in their system.
this means that there is no way of objectively distinguishing two human beings based on their physical attributes: they are roughly the same value of e. they can only be distinguished by their work, which can be seen under the light of this metric. people with a high entropic tendency (to break shit, to kill, etc) have a very low or even negative e gradient. their activity should be contained. but since there is intrinsic value (e) in every thing, they should not be destroyed (which would decrease e). instead, the effort should be to direct, contain, educate in order to allow for a mutual coexistence of these two systems.
this is also valid for bigger systems like cities, countries and so on. vast systems are not distinguishable qualitatively because the quantity e is quality agnostic. exuberance is only concerned with the unlikelihood of the arrangements, not the particular arrangements themselves.
this is the core of the moral and ethical consequences of exuberantism, which i will explore. i will also explore exuberantism in all its levels, from the basic every day life to the broad way groups and societies could organize themselves.
this is a work in progress, and the metric is still being worked on since it is the most sensitive part of this model. for now, i think it’s a lot to read. i am an exuberantist, and luckily i’m not trying to convert anyone, since it is part of the exuberantist ideology to avoid its own expansion, in order to avoid intellectual monochromatism.
this is my answer to the “valueless” life as an educated individual. a life according to a rationally defined, but not easily exploitable, moral framework. this is meant to give peace of mind when avoiding the every day cowardice. the idea that we are part of a local/global effort to make our life/home/city/world a more exuberant place.
to the people that know my work, this probably makes a lot of sense and might even “click” certain unanswered “why”s. the documentary on SPCC is a good example of some ideas of exuberantism in practice (in the end even i failed at some of these principles for personal cowardice). i hope to continue providing good examples of it.
some boha from southern france. i’ve been having a lot of discussions on individualism, so i thought i would write a bit about it.
previously i provided a geometrical way of looking at minds. this is a very coarse way of looking at it, and it merely shows that my training has highly influenced the way i see things and i’m not trying to establish any theory of everything. but as a tool to analyze individuals and groups, it is excellent in the sense that it frees us from categorization and lets us loose in a multidimensional personal landscape. this personal landscape can be seen as a multidimensional halo streaming out of someone: one paragraph describing each dimension, streaming out and curling itself around that person as if it were long hair, with each strand being that paragraph spelled out. i wish i was a better illustrator. maybe some day i’ll put this into pictures
what i want to explore today is not the personal landscape, but the collective landscape. using the tools of information theory, one can predict that collectives have somewhat unintuitive properties. let’s start with a simple collective of two. if the two individuals share no mutual information, the collective will not be able to surpass the individual capacities, and is equivalent to each one working independently. this is very hard to find, since the laws of nature apply to everything, so at least that would be mutual information. we then have the case where there is some mutual information and equal information. equal information is impossible unless each individual is an exact copy of the other, which is impossible by every current standard (even clones or twins have different environments around them which change their vocabulary). this leaves the in between situation where some vocabulary is common and some isn’t. this shared information is no more than each individual’s vocabulary projected onto each other. for example, individual A has vocabulary { v1, v2, v3 } and individual B has vocabulary { v2, v3, v4 }, if we project the spaces onto each other, we obtain { v2, v3 }, and identify { v1 , v4 } as the information entropy. now, we can look at these two sets as waves interfering. the shared information gets reinforced for the simple fact that it is equal. so one would expect from this that groups will have the common vocabulary reinforced, creating a group trend stronger than the individual trend. but we also have to analyze how the edges (the entropy) interacts. if v1 and v4 are contradictory, they cancel each other out, turning the group into a reinforced version of the already existing individuals but removing any extra information that would allow for constructive development. this would mean that these individuals were better off by themselves rather than trying to compatibilize beliefs, since they can both use v2 and v3 together with their own different sets of information. together, but independently, their picture is richer than together and working as one. but this argument works the other way around too: if their entropy interferes constructively, then the group will be able to represent much more than before (remember that we consider these dimensions as bases for spaces, not spaces themselves). the same way a square is infinitely richer than a line, so is a cube or a hypercube. dimensionality, when interference is constructive, not only increases the capacity of the group but actually multiplies it. by what number i don’t know, but it wouldn’t be too hard to explore how this fits with reality.
but we don’t need to formalize things this way to understand that this already takes place everywhere. we, as a collective human enterprise, already work as i referred. it is impossible for a single human being to build any of the millions of artifacts we have, even simple things like a ballpoint pen. this is not because they are impossible to build, but because they are built collectively, expanding the individual capacity for creativity by combining all these dimensions with each other and creating a collective entity that can represent a richer space than any of its individuals alone. if we go with the ball point pen we can dissect it in several layers and it will feel like a never ending rabbit hole. the obvious question is who designed it. whoever designed it took for granted that paint, metal and plastic are real and available. but where did they come from? it is unlikely that the designer mined the metal and pigments, forged the parts, drilled the oil and so on. what i argue is that due to the limits on each individuals intellectual and physical capacity, it is impossible to build a ballpoint pen as an individual: it would require extensive knowledge in extraction, production and so on. this is obvious, but this hints at the fact that individuality is somewhat of an illusion. i’ll get to this later. what makes the rabbit hole even deeper is that there would be no need for a pen if there wasn’t a need for writing, which in turn expresses a human need to record knowledge. the invention of writing and paper must be included in the total knowledge necessary. but this time, it comes not from other individuals in the chain of production, but from the very social heritage that the designer himself is sunk in. if a culture has only an oral tradition, there there would be no need for a ballpoint pen and for the whole chain for its development. in this sense, the human collective extends not only in the present spacetime (the other individuals that are part of a chain), but also the past spacetime (the cultural heritage that gave the present its information context). in this sense, even a yogi in the middle of nowhere is not alone: he is part of a collective that extends to his own past, with him as a kind of isolated leaf of a giant tree.
this is not accounted for by most systematic analysis, but the framework i describe accounts for it by the simple fact that we are sunk in our own culture, and from it, we collect much of our most important information. for example, we might be a highly innovative poet, but the language and alphabet we write with is the same as the language of the lullabies sung to us as babies, and some words are even the same as the ones sang thousands of years ago. this transmission not between present entities, but also past entities, is one of the main reasons why the individual is little more than a specific rearrangement of the collective vocabulary. in this sense, i do not believe there even is something as an individual in the broad sense (though i do believe in individuals in the physical sense, like walking talking people).
this ties in with my criticism of modern individualism as proposed by some philosophers and economists of the 20th century, such as ayn rand. there is no such thing as an individual without a collective, and there is certainly no such thing as an übermensch without the übermenschen before him (to use the nietzschean term).
take anyone promoting a libertarian ideology (the right wing north american libertarian, not the left wing european ideology with the same name). it is impossible to find anyone standing for that ideology that has ever gone to any real world difficulty (starvation, poverty, etc, not white people problems like having no credit on their cellphone). i argue that this is a consequence of the very socioeconomic environment in which these ideologies occur: they always emerge when the individual is capable of satisfying all his needs and maybe most of his wants without knowing the process that fulfilled these needs and wants. we go to the supermarket, buy dozens of goods, most of which we have no idea where they came from, how they were made or who worked to make them, pay with an entirely anonymous object called money to someone that we don’t perceive as being in any way connected to what we just bought, effectively rendering us (the one with the money) as the origin of the goods themselves. it allows us to confuse our own individual short piece of labor (going shopping) with the incredible collective journey of all those goods (extraction, production, distribution, all of which have at least one face to them, when not hundreds). this broken empathy link is what then creates the isolated, narcissistic modern homo-economicus.
to this day, i challenge any libertarian individualist to live according to their ideology to its ultimate consequences: without any assistance of anyone else. not a distributor, not a salesman, a farmer or a worker. they would certainly starve to death if let loose on this planet. and even ayn rand ended up enjoying her social security benefits. how’s that for philosophical consistency?
here’s a small playlist of some of the songs played. there were many other songs and i don’t have a good one of the 1st year, but generally it was a great show, we had a great time and the pipes were sounding great. i’m just not a big fan of the place: the acoustics, the lecture and the fascist nationalist books all over the place. i guess being a traditional instrument, it always attracts these governmental types. needless to say, here most folk music was distorted by fascism, and the music we’re playing was recovered by a lot of left wing activists trying to bring back “the voice of the people”. this might sound confusing, but in some countries in europe, folk has fused not with right wing extremism, but left wing groups that struggle for self-determination.