The End of Repose

To be in a state of repose is to be awake, and at a balance point between action and inaction.

Relaxed enough to consider alternatives effectively, and with one's full, undivided resources of reasoning and perception.

Without: various urgencies, perceived or not, clutching, pulling and pushing, causing anxiety, preventing true and worthwhile discussion and contemplation.


Hey - - - -

Why don't they teach kids to develop their own abilities to enter a state of repose in grade school? Forget about "learning to learn" - we're not qualified even to discuss it. First we need the state of repose to set up the possibility of learning. Then we can learn to learn.

In one of my first posts above, I mentioned that, "we keep getting sold devices that tie us up more and more immediately and securely to the Internet." That's only part of a certain story that is building up for all of us.

Each of us, as an individual person, is a terminus or end point for many, many pointers and information trends. For those who deploy multiple personas (whether as prosaic additional online names, or as exotic "avatars"), those personas are simply the many paths back to you! While it may be, as Krishnamurti says, that "truth is a pathless country," the fact is that the paths to your identity are many, and growing.

The early paths to your identity were things like your SS #, your name and street address, your drivers license, etc. But they don't enable realtime access to your life, for the most part. Then came things like EZ-pass for car tolls, and Metrocard for mass transit (and their non-NYC counterparts around the world), which do permit realtime access, especially when they are paid for with your credit card or ATM card.

But all of those methods and devices only permit half-a-relationship they only enable marketing types and surveillance types to monitor you (for the other half, see below). Why do I say "only", when battles over privacy rights are raging fast and furious? Here's why:

- The battles are a shadow play. The game is over, and the hidden surveillors have won.
- The public battles over personal privacy - such as big companies getting a slap on the hand from the FTC for lax security procedures permitting private information of thousands of customers to be released, or the just-occurred Congressional withholding of funding to prevent gov't. spies from the right to openly conduct highly intrusive surveillance - are basically designed to make it look as if there are real battles going on with our privacy at stake, and that those battles are see-sawing back and forth.
- The public is given the impression there are public advocates looking out for us, battling to preserve our freedom. But there is nothing to preserve in this regard. The battles are merely establishing the etiquette acceptable to the public at the very surface of the public spectacle. They're more like trial balloons, testing public attitudes to gather information on how the public will view surveillors who get caught publicly.

Now . . . . for the other half: we are moving from not simply being "watched", but actually being contacted by them (the marketing or surveillance types), and engaged by them with our foreground attention. All these jazzy new car telematics devices, and devices that connect us more and more directly to the Internet per se (as opposed to, and in addition to, the PEOPLE that we are accustomed to being on the phone with) while we are on foot, and out and about in town or country, can CALL US, and impose on our attention, and not merely watch us. For those "privacy nuts" of you out there who are already maddened by the idea that "someone is watching you", how will you feel when THEY start calling you?

And it's not as if you'll get the satisfaction of talking with your watchers about their watching - not at all. They'll call to keep you busy! Keep you on track! Make sure you're "with the program", without ever getting told what that "program" actually is. Your personal time will disappear! Who are we to think we are entitled to "personal time?" There's a country to run and protect, a country to keep secure! We gotta keep on buying, and keep on looking out for "the wrong kind" of spies - however one does that.

The early forms of running your life from the Internet will be things like innocuous marketing messages, announcements of sales of consumer goods, perhaps endless machine-voice-conducted surveys, that sort of thing. After we're acclimated to that, who knows how bold the watcher-callers will get? And if individuals among them get a little drunk with power, exceed the bounds they were trained to respect? Woo-hoo!

And don't waste your valuable personal time contenting yourself with the notion that there isn't enough manpower out there to pinion everyone to the Internet this way. At this point, we are far beyond the need for manpower. The Internet itself will call you, via servers and software designed and programmed to do so. When they call you to keep you busy, it may start with real people calling you, but soon enough it will all be done by machine. A person will push a button somewhere, and 5 million people will be kept busy for 24 hours. Forget the manpower angle - move on to today's economics.

THAT, my friends, is "the end of repose." We can function if we are simply being unintrusively watched; even if we sense we're being watched, we can push it out of our minds, and live fairly normal, not overly eventful, lives. But once they start running our lives via beeps, rings, and dings, learning how to make us each turn on a dime with the least effort on their part, how many of us will be able to flourish?

And also, when that starts happening, the civil rights discussion will move from not wanting to be watched, to not wanting to be intruded upon. We'll forget about our personal privacy from snooping altogether, just to get away from all the demands on our attention.

The forerunner of these new, upcoming faux,"public image" battles is - that's right - the current fights over spam. The watchers are likely carefully analyzing how the spam battles go, again as a sort of "trial balloon" for the far more intrusive and compelling Internet-based calls to come. At this point, the spam wars are at a standstill, as several years into it, the needs of "direct mail marketers" - many, many huge consumer businesses, especially as all the traditional big offline merchants have by now flocked online - to keep spam legal have been presented to the public, and the public is coming inevitably to accept this need.

In fact, doesn't it seem at times that our attention is redirected by the news media toward spam battles even after we don't care that much any more? Hasn't your spam level increased? The watching intruders, either consciously or unconsciously (or some combo of both), are keeping the spam wars trial balloon going as far as they can, perhaps even artificially beyond the real spam that would occur if the whole agenda to perform far more invasive, realtime intrusions on our lives was not on (or at least under) the table. The currently increasing levels of spam are themselves a trial balloon, seeing how far normal decent folk can tolerate more and more stupid spam messages.

As to the title of this message: the more the Net attaches to us, no matter where we might travel, the more we are defined and anchored in place in a SINGLE LOGICAL SPOT, back to where all paths connected to us lead. Kind of like a barnacle or a coral. In the past, the collective activities of bees or ants were discussed as models for major activities of human societies. If, as individuals, we become more like coral polyps (or whatever you call an individual coral life form), how does the "coral-model" apply to human society?

Hello everyone! I'm Lance Rose, and this is my first time blogging, so please excuse me (or perhaps titter softly to yourself) while I proceed to do everything wrong before your eyes, hopefully for just the short while it takes me to scrabble up the learning curve.

This blog is here to discuss an idea I first developed about three years ago, with the working title, "The End of Repose." I was going to write a book about it for a while, but never got the personal resources together to do it. I may yet write such a book.

The ideas I seek to explore, with whoever is willing to donate their keystrokin' brainpower to discuss these things with me, are summed up in the following question: as the Internet and modern automated society develop, are we losing something very important to our status as reasoning beings? Namely, the ability to sit back, contemplate our lives' issues and problems on matters both big and small, and make well-reasoned decisions.

If we lose this ability, we may lose something else (I suspect I may catch your attention right here): we may be losing our ability to develop wisdom in our own lives.

Let's start with a definition of the main word of the title of the blog: "repose"

I found this at the American Heritage dictionary: repose means, "1. The act of resting or the state of being at rest. 2. Freedom from worry; peace of mind." That's pretty much exactly the way I meant to use the word, so that's not too bad. To see the full American Heritage definition and etymology (such as it is), check out this page.

So, the "end of repose" would mean the end of a way of life where we can contemplate the issues of our lives, and make decisions, from a state of rest.

Why would I worry about such a thing? Here's a few themes that have been running through my mind. I'd like to know what people think of them, and if you have any to add or modify of your own.

- we keep getting sold devices that tie us up more and more immediately and securely to the Internet. It started with things like pagers and cell phones, but we are moving swiftly to portable devices which will enable anyone and anything who can find our address to "ding" us whenever they want. When the entities calling us change increasingly from "people" to things like automated messages from stores, that's when our real direct-to-Internet relationship will start forming. I doubt that automated call-up servers operated by businesses will give two hoots about anyone's "repose".

- analogously, automobiles are being increasingly set up with what is referred to as "telematics." Same deal as above. We can turn off the receiving end when we're driving - for now . . . . But may the conditions of our work, home life and play change, so that we will rarely feel we're able to turn off the receiver, because, (for example) "what if such and such has that 2-hour sale we've been waiting for so we can afford that new sofa we need?"

- generally, as people come to rely on automated systems to automate their communications, once those systems are embedded in place in our lives, they become "optimized." And in the optimization process, they're made more efficient; their calls on our attention become more urgently demanding (or even commanding); and how much did I hear someone say that the need for "repose" of people within such systems will get due consideration during an optimization phase?

- smart appliances; smart houses, etc. If the smart refrigerator simply orders more milk and juice according to the owner's preset parameters, this actually increases repose (remember those old cartoons where all the appliances take life and chase the cartoon characters around the house? I still remember the music from them.) However, what if "communication" becomes a major feature of smart appliances? What a potential hell! . And this is very likely, by the way. Go back to that smart fridge. If it is placed in charge of the family's stored perishables, can we really depend on it to make sure the food doesn't go bad and poisonous? The fridge manufacturer won't, because they don't want to be sued if someone eats food that became poisonous due to improper activities of the smart fridge. So each of these appliances will be designed to place heavy maintenance and supervision obligations for the owner, shifting responsibility for bad food and such to the owner, and resulting in - that's right - demands of a lot of attention on the owner's part.

- there's a another angle here - the increasing speed of networked society. French/Italian philosopher Paul Virilio refers to American society as a speed-based "dromocracy" - those who race the fastest win. The fastest to come to market with the next product; the fastest to capitalize on new ideas; those who utilize the very latest, fastest computers to speed their operations that much more than the next guy, who's only using last month's computers. This is an out-of-control extension of the same natural selection-based activities that we have engaged in for our entire history as a species. In the past, it resulted in humans whom, some would say, are genetically superior to those who could not thrive. But in our current competition-based economy, where the nature of the competition itself has been reduced to the one-dimensional character of a pure race to be the fastest in a more-or-less straight line, the racing and speed levels have overtaken our naturally conferred biological abilities on the "human scale" at which we live. There's no mystery why this has happened - we've added computers to the mix. 24/7 racing machines. In the cybernetic networks we share with computers, they're becoming increasingly powerful, and they're pulling entire networks (remember "optimization") away from the plodding slowness of humans (that is, in regard to the particular kinds of information tasks at which computers are better suited, and typically deployed) toward their own design spec'd pace.

There's lots more to consider, but the above points set forth some of the basic building blocks for discussion.

In reading stuff related to this, my main resource has been Virilio. I'm aware there's a book called "Speed" by James Gleick, but I've had insufficient repose to get to it. I've assumed, without much good reason, that the Gleick book is a pop treatment that wouldn't add much to the discussion -but if someone would like to set me straight here, please do.

If anyone would like to mention other resources bearing on this subject, I would love to hear about them.

# posted by Lance @ 11:31 PM