The Biggest News Story of 2013 (Canada Edition)

It seems only most natural that in the year 2013, the Information Age of humans, that the most important news story got a mere passing blurb, a thoughtful microponder before being buried underneath the drag-it-out-to-the-middle-of-a-field-and-beat-it-with-a-bat story that is the Senate scandal or human accident Rob Ford.  This story distinguishes it self from the others as being a story with no build, no foreshadowing, no deadly political repercussions, and no lives lost (even if those lives would have been only military personnel).

The story I'm referring to lasted about a week in October, when the country of Brazil made allegations that Canadian security officials (specifically, CSEC, a Canadian establishment controlled by the Ministry of Defense) were not only spying on Brazil's energy and mining ministry, but they were also giving that information over to private energy (aka oil mining and gas) companies in Canada.  When questioned, Ministry of Defense spokesperson Jean Paul Duval said "It is standard practice for security agencies to discuss issues with Canadian industry in order to protect lives and sensitive infrastructure from terrorism and other threats".  Not an at all relevant statement when you are talking about commiting industrial espionage.

This is a big deal.  This is not the Cold War.  We are not spying on "The Enemy" with opposing political and social ideologies (although 20 years later we still have only the haziest of ideas of what the Cold War was actually all about).  Brazil is supposed to be an ally and trading partner, the capital letter B in the BRICS, a buzzword to describe countries playing catch up to the advantages held by first world countries in Europe and North America.  Our leaders, under better circumstances, would tell us that Brazil is trying to imitate us in a most flattering way, to climb up out of poverty and catch up to first world countries technologically and economically.  So by stealing their secrets regarding energy prospects, could this be seen as a snub to Brazil, taking what advantage we can from them before kicking them back down from where they surfaced?  CSECs Canadian brand of spying is actually part of the larger five-eyes network that includes the US, Britain, Australia, New Zealand.  None of the articles I read implicate involvement of the other member countries, but it is reasonable to presume at the least they aren't going to say no to free information.

Five eyes aside, handing over sensitive information that CSEC agents knew could damage relations between our countries if it was found out is both telling and at least a bit disturbing.  Not only are they giving particular companies an advantage with that information, but we don't know what, if any, limits there are for what information they giving away.  We only know about Brazil because the Brazillian government caught them and blew the whistle.  This information sharing from public organizations to very particular private interests has no real limits, because you and I have little way of knowing what is going on.

On top of all of that, CSEC is a Canadian Government operation paid for with Canadian tax dollars.  We are paying for an oil company to extract information from our allied trading partner, ruining our countries reputation, so that this particular company can get some sort of advantage, to the obvious end that they don't have enough money.  Can not some argument be made that since CSEC gave that information outside of government operations that it needs to be made public domain, or that it needs to stop happening, full stop?  And do not the media (ie the CBC) need to push harder to find out what is going on and what else is being used with this misappropriation of spy funds?  I don't expect any accountability or transparency from our government, but when nobody else seems to care, even the media who I would think would be looking to expand news stories out of their self-interest, what other options are available?

Tampa the book

Being the edgy and controversial dude I am, I decided to get ahead of the bandwagon and read Tampa by Alissa Nutting.  Before I go on and tell you any details about it I have to get two things out of the way: One, I hate fiction.  DEPLORE it.  I enjoy sharp dialogue and well written, clever passages that make me laugh out loud with how clever they are.  Raymond Chandler is the standard that I hold all fiction to.  Because this tittilation happens so few and far between (but does happen)I find it very discouraging to read any fiction, and I generally regard it as an almost assured waste of my time. 

Second thing is, I primarily wanted to read this book for the sex scenes, to see if a 26 year old "hot" schoolteacher having sex with a 14 year old borderline (giving that one to Alissa, hmm? - Ed) prepubescent boy could be erotic and turn me on.  Turns out she really can't, or maybe she didn't want to, in which case she totally dropped the ball on that one.  This is just the first of a wave of 50-Shades-of-Grey-with-a-Shamalan-twist clones that printing presses and electronic publishing software will churn out for our generation.  Something to look forward to. 

To her credit she does lift some ideas from American Psycho, she does not steal enough to make her novel entertaining, and does attempt to put us in to the mind of a beautiful 26 year old psychopathic pedophile.  She masturbates while thinking a lot about boys, which I'm sure most people have done, but then takes the next logical step and plans her entire life and career around molesting boys.    Everyone else around her are just inconvenient tools whom she is incapable of having any feelings for.  Maybe there are mental illnesses that make people that way.  As Bret Easton Ellis showed us, reading about people with mental illnesses is pretty fascinating because they have bizarre, very particular personality qualities that usually make them interesting to read about, such as WesleyWillis or Phineas Gage.  However, Alissa decided to pick the most excruciatingly boring of psychopathologies, and proceed to write almost two hundred and fifty pages about her. 

If you enjoy similes that involve the words like and as you should definitely read Tampa. 

I'm going to tell you another reason you should read the book:  there is an idea in it that is fantastic.  Part way through the book she wants to get rid of the boy she had spent the first half of the book seducing.  She goes on to seduce another boy, but the implications of her reasoning why she loses feelings for the first kid is interesting.  She finds him unpleasant to be around, he becomes less intimate and rougher and emotionally distant.  All of these are because of, the result of, the ideas she gives to him and the experiences she subjects him to.  She at no point dwells on this, that she has made him in to a person she is incapable of tolerating, the same way she regards her husband and possibly also other adult men.  I think she is talking about male female relationships in general.  When we are young to the dating scene the first few people we have intimate contact with form a very lasting impression.  It is very easy for people to become frigid because of early relationships when sex was not good, and have poor future relationships, spreading that negativity to others who may have been impressionable or new to the experience.  We are capable of shaping our future experience and be willing to make another attempt by keeping an open mind, instead of perpetuating an endless cycle of misdirected revenge or confusion of our own animalistic tendencies. 

In the end, or at no point whatsoever do we find out anything about the main pretty lady person's past because the writer thought it was probably a bad idea to give them any sort of empathy, explanation her behavior or anything that would accidentally develop her "character". 

Century of the Self and Simulacrum

In my last entry I discussed how Adam Curtis' observations in his insightful documentary series Century of the Self could be used to interpret political situations throughout the 2010's in America, and how a world was created where the average person's priorities were misdirected based on irrational, unconscious emotions centred around consumerism.  This world is promoted and reiterated by Big Media to maintain a passive population.  As it turns out, the basis of these theories are based on classic theory of social analysis, deep thinker and sociologist turned philosopher Jean Baudrillard.  Writing on the relationship between people and objects in the late 60's, consumerism in 1970 and politics and culture throughout the rest of his career, Baudrillard's most famous work was a book in 1981, Simulations and Simulacra, writings that served as inspiration for the Matrix movies.

Humans relationships to objects have changed as the roles and functions of objects have evolved alongside us, serving as limbs, sensory objects, or changing how we in turn interact with a third object.  Objects originally bought for a primary function begin to serve a secondary function, and suddenly the secondary qualities becomes the object's primary purpose.  Baudrillard uses the example of a refrigerator, where all old fridges used to be white, once they introduced fridges in different colors, suddenly you must select a fridge based on the color scheme of the rest of the kitchen.  The fridge becomes an accessory to the kitchen's ensemble, and by proximity becomes a statement made by the people who live there.  A person can express themselves by the arrangement and relative colors mixing about the kitchen. 

This analysis continues in The Consumer Society and Simulations, where personal expression is solely done through the purchasing of items in the full spectrum of imagination, and this is but one component of the Simulacrum, where we live in a "hyperreality" where mass production and consumption has created a fakeness or series of reproducible clones.  This ubiquity of copies of objects changes the way we think about objects, believing in the reproducibility of everything and so attributing a disposability and temporariness of everything around us.  A striking example he uses is Disneyland, a hyperreal fantasy that we (as a society) not only use to escape the "reality" that normally surrounds us for a while, but also reaffirms in our minds that the reality we normally inhabit is not a simulation.  This conviction that we are living in a more "real" reality is what allows us to continue living in it, and not questioning why the things around us have to be the way they are.

Century of the Self examines Bernays marketing techniques, but otherwise paints a similar picture where social order is based around consumerism, and where objects are given relationships to powerful emotional symbols based on self-expression.  And if you keep stimulating that irrational self you can maintain the relations of power and control the animalistic forces by keeping them engaged.  Bernays pioneered the technique of marketing research, meeting with volunteers and encouraging them to pretend they are consumer products and act out their relationships with the products.   Similarly, political marketers encouraged people to talk about policies and how they felt about them, encouraging them to act out these relationships as well.  This was the creation of the simulacrum that surrounds us presently. 

Not only are people engaged in this hyperreality, they are completely immersed in a reality created by the forces of media, big business and government.  Advertisement campaigns create emotional attachment by conveying unspoken ideas, encouraging self expression and activity through the purchase of products.  Curtis uses the example of the World's Fair, creating a Disneyland-esque atmosphere, while surrounding the visitor with the icons of consumption and self-expression. 

Freud and Mass Media

Recently I've been watching documentaries by loyal BBC employee and all around adept documenter Adam Curtis.  His voice soothes like every story he tells were a bedtime story, and he has the patience of 8000 Terracotta soldiers.  I am amazed at his ability to provide quality factual programming while somehow avoiding censorship. 

His best known work is Century of the Self, a 4 part journey following the effect of psychoanalysis on consumer culture and world politics.  In my next few posts I'm hoping to tie some of the ideas of his documentary with other pieces of things I've found.  What I've been focused on mostly on the role of the media, what it is and what it actually is doing.  Curtis points out very early in the first few minutes Freud's (love him or hate him, this is important) deduction that information was driving human behavior in indirect ways, at an emotional and almost animalistic level.  His nephew Ed Bernays used this information to create market consulting and eventually focus groups, finding out what people's unconscious ideas were relating to objects, and then giving people what they wanted but didn't realize it was what they wanted, in the form of consumer products like cigarettes and cake mix.  The idea is that you play to people's irrational emotions, because they knew what the people they were targeting wanted and presented the product as a means to get what it is they really wanted.  This is important for understanding advertising, to begin with, but related and also important is that the news media plays to irrational emotions, too, and there is no reason they wouldn't use similar tactics. 

But what would be the media's end goal?  To sell more papers?  Print barely exists any more, and although many institutional news sources have complained about steep drop in newspaper revenue, somehow they manage to scrape by and carry on their messages.  I'm used to the media never ever telling me anything critical about the media, because maybe that does not sell as many papers, and so I was surprised when I found this article written by Neil Macdonald on CBC news (June 6, 2013).  As the CBC correspondent in Washington, he wrote an article here discussing his confusion around media coverage in the United States, the fact that the American army sexual assault scandal received little or no coverage, while the IRS scandal is getting constant priority coverage by all the major American media outlets.

Even though the media does enjoy referring to news (as referring to news coverage of the news or the media talking about the media) and sporadically commentating on the effect the media has, in a general way, it is rare that someone talks about what it means in the broader context, let alone as problematic.  In the end, Neil asserts the media does not cover it because American's aren't interested in the story.  He surmises the reason American's are not interested is because it is somehow communicated to their society as a whole not to be interested, not to care, it is embarrassing.  The IRS story is only embarrassing for some people, problems in the military is embarrassing for all Americans.  But is anyone outside of America concerned either?  The American army is huge and has exerted a massive influence as long as the country existed.   Nobody seems to indicate that they care about the news story, nationally or internationally, and I suppose it will be gone rather quickly.

In Century of the Self, Curtis states that the position of democracy in America became one where they want to maintain the current relations of power, and they could do it by stimulating the psychological lives of the public (ie war on communism), that is, stimulating particular emotions, the same "irrational self" that was being used to convince the advertisement-viewing public to buy products they don't need.  Only by this application, the emotions invoked can sell people on the decisions of the president so it can do what it wants to do.

 A faction of Americans want to believe Obama ordered the IRS to destroy his enemies.  I have not been able to see any of the news footage on the military rape charges or the IRS scandal, but if we apply the ideas in Century of the Self, then we can clear Neil Macdonald's confusion through the explanation that the emotions invoked by the media are perhaps apathy while covering the military court coverage, and invoking strong bipartisan emotions like anger for the anti-Obama camp and maybe even some other emotions for people that still like Obama.

Neil ends his articles drawing some poignant conclusions, all the while having no idea why this is being done.  Maybe he is savvy enough to know the answers but not be the one to break kafabe.   "Even the media doesn't believe what they are saying... they don't believe their own claims... Those of us who try to do our job properly are just dupes."  I can't tell if the last statement is a cynical joke or if he honestly believes the existence of pure journalism in mainstream media.  My guess would be he likes his job and wants to keep it.

The Future of Social Networking (Surrogate 2.0)

On the internet, sometimes the most popular people are quite often people who, by consensus, are annoying, stupid, or straight up ridiculous.  This is not constrained just to the internet, nor is it anything new (for reference see: Howard Stern, Alex Jones, or the collective media concept "TMZ").  Like other more easily recognizable forms of consumption, the internet simply facilitates the desire to watch a train wreck from a safe distance.  Of course not only does the internet make it happen, but it happens faster and more effortlessly, so you can fit this entertainment in more easily in between going to work, sleeping and masturbating.

I'm convinced the purpose of Web 2.0, with social networking and sophisticated multimedia integration is to make massive amounts of money and collect personal information and psycho-social profiles from you.  However, a welcome side effect to this is that one can easily find many sources of entertainment, people frantically petitioning your attention in an attempt to validate their online existence, shedding petty, unnecessary human hangups like "dignity" and "introspection" in favor of pushing the post button a few seconds faster.  And while clicking through a particularly funny rant I eventually came across a web site with facebook comments and found a comment sort filter called "facebook rank".

I had never heard this term before, although I am well aware that for however long now fb has been sorting people's news feeds using something called "edgerank".  Without going in to a lot of detail, edgerank basically works like this:

And higher score = higher up on the page and more likely to be there.  If you want to read more about how this works and how to exploit it, you can surf on over to this website.  It is pretty interesting stuff, but not what I'd like to talk about.

The point is, I read through a few sites like this, advice towards marketing departments and aspiring Andy Warhol types who think thousands of likes and upvotes and whatever will help sell their shitty art, or at least draw enough suckers to their website so Adsense will support their lifestyle.  The sites give tips, how to get legit people visiting their site, generating the much desirable buzz that will keep their edgerank bumped toward the top of the pile.  But they also give some other advice, less reputable methods of achieving the same end.  This largely consists of hackers (or any kind of programmer, really) writing program to automatically "bump" existing posts, post other media, and make comments using vaguely human sounding AI.  Not only that, but using google images and some face recognition software, programs that could create new profiles, which could then subsequently make posts, comment, etc.  There has already been a wave of this happening years ago, I'm sure it happened to you too, someone you don't recognize with 1 picture and a bland, generic profile tries to friend you.  Facebook managed to suppress it somehow, to some extent, but it won't happen forever, especially once corporations with big money see value in it.  And as artificial intelligence develops, not only will the bots get smarter and better at evading deletion by posting realistic status updates, photos, etc. but the AIs may themselves start to reproduce via social network.  I'm certain the first real artificial intelligence will aquire millions of followers, and say and post really really really stupid shit.

Values

I got to thinking about the concept of values reading a book called The Mastery of Movement by theatre director Rudolph Laban.  The book is a technical manual on understanding movement for the purposes of acting, miming movements as a method of communicating to an audience ideas action and intent.  In addition to being renowned in theatre, his concepts are also used in Psychology by researchers studying body language, as he has a detailed, codified system of explaining movement that I still don’t comfortably understand.

In context, Laban talks about values as being important to understanding and portraying a character, because people strive after things that have value to them, and so those values create motivations to expend effort and orient their behavior in that direction.  Understanding what that character values affects the movements that person will take, direction, facing, and how they will treat people.  Desire for value also precipitates conflict, either internal conflict within themselves between contradictory values or the values of society, and external conflicts between two or more people.  If you observe the conflicts between two people or groups, that can give you information about what values those people hold, and what their goals are regarding the values they are attempting to achieve or uphold. 

In the context of theatre, values that audience members observe by actor movement and actions can evoke emotion or a partisan perspective in the person viewing.  Sympathy, antipathy or apathy are all possible when the actor communicates his character, but is dependant on whether the observer can relate to the experience based on their own life.  Of course, I think the goal of any art is to evoke any combination of strong emotions in the spectator, and so the audience needs to be taken in to consideration before any kind of presentation, in that they should be able to relate to it in some way.

A personality can change temporarily on the path to advancement towards a value.  For example, a gentleman can be harsh in dealing with a particular difficulty, or a talkative person may become silent around of certain people.  However their personality will eventually revert to their ‘true’ personality as they progress towards their value or the situation changes and they can no longer advance towards the value, or perhaps temporary resolution of the conflict supersedes direct advancement toward the value.

Inner attitudes, based on the values an individual or character holds, are most visible in small areas of the body, sometimes only barely visible, but is especially obvious in the eyes.  People often feel the need to be deceptive so any obvious movements could be disguised or omitted, except in pro deceivers it will still be visible by micro expressions most often in the eyes and face.  A good example of this is a drug addict, one of the most stigmatized stereotypes in our culture.  A junkie may be a good liar, tell you they need money for something else or explain away their looks or behavior as not being caused by addiction but instead some other plausible reason.  However, when presented with their drug of choice, the addict’s eyes will fix on the drug and follow it if it moves around without being aware they are doing it.  This is what the person values, and society is critical of it for being a petty, shallow, self-destructive value compared to more highly held values like power, wealth, fame.  This is also where the seven deadly sins of Christian ethics comes from (gluttony, sex, sloth, etc), because repeated sin is believed to destroy the grace and charity within a person.  The person’s worth in society is relative to how able they are to be useful or beneficial within that society, and the incorporeal ‘body’ of society are the values that are taken for granted by the average person as common knowledge and natural.  People immersed in sin are in a poor position to help others, because that value erodes the value of charity.

This got me thinking about present day examples.  What are the values held by someone who is using their cell phone all the time?  Do they value social contact, or is it a narcissistic appeal that they have more control over the social experience in that it will be more oriented about them or their needs?  Maybe not as overt as the seven sins, narcissism was alluded to in recent interpretation of Psychologist Abraham Maslow theory of the Hierarchy of Needs.  As you proceed higher and higher up the list, that is most of your basic needs fulfilled such as food, shelter, security, being loved, there could be a dark side toward self-actualization, as many physical needs are met people turn inward in a sense, and perhaps they become less motivated.  Maybe not everyone has the tools or the capacity to become self-actualized, and instead they stall out part way up the hierarchy and, having no apparent motivation, fixate on themselves, in a particular way, as the only value that remains in their life.

Apophenia

I find there are very rare chances in my day to day life to meet a really crazy person.  Sure, Victoria is full of the homeless and lots of drug addiction of course, but it’s not the same.  Of course where I work downtown lots of disheveled shuffle past, making random noises or half walking half dancing from the crack rock, but if movies and TV have taught me anything about mental illness it is just not quite the same.  And what makes mental illness even more interesting is the cultural context totally affects how people in that culture interact with them.  In some cultures people who mutter, hear voices, or have other collections of behaviors that set them apart from the average person are revered or treated as touched by divine or supernatural forces, or just generally treated special in some way.  In North American Eurocentric culture however they are treated as having a maladaptive problem that must be dealt with, like back pain or high cholesterol.

Of course this involves drug related treatment, and it seems like our society is at the point where any abnormalities or behaviors that don’t fit the norm need to be medicated, either at doctor direction or desired by the patient themselves.  And let’s be clear, this is the same culture that has normalized people imitating The Jersey Shore.  I guess having excessive over tanned skin and ugly haircuts isn’t enough to have someone committed to a mental hospital.  Ultimately, as with most other illnesses, it is more important that you are socially functional than any other sort of problems, mental or physical.  Being productive, having a job and some sort of friends and family life need to be hindered in some way before anything can be considered problematic.  This is probably why prohibition was revoked, and why many people choose to self-medicate, because as long as you can hold down a job and aren’t beating your wife, nobody cares enough beyond that how well you are doing or how you feel about this life you’ve been thrust in to.  How many functional alcoholics do you know?  There are few fates worse than not being able to fit in or get along with people around you, which is probably why people will do whatever it takes to change themselves, including self-medicating.  Even homeless people value their relationships with their fellow peers, and I’m sure some people who are addicted to hard drugs do them because it makes them feel like they can fit in, or at least participate in their subculture on some level.

The internet probably maintains the best chance for having an interaction with a sincere, down to earth Lovecraft style crazy person, since neither you nor they have to leave the house for this to happen.  And while if you spend a lot of time online you might be lead to think our civilization is at the apex of crazy people, I would guess this isn’t actually so, since people are just more apt to be open about their craziness online.  I’m sure many people have enough intelligence and discipline to confine their personality quirks online, and come across as perfectly normal when face to face. 

Recently though while reading recent Psychology literature on Emotional Intelligence I came across a term I’ve never heard before called Apophenia.  This is a condition in the scientific grey area of crazy-but-not-quite-diagnosis-crazy, studied in the context of the more extreme version as schizophrenia, described as the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.  A good example of this would be conspiracy theorists like 9-11 truthers, or Jim Carry in the movie The Number 23.  Like many constructs of psychology, this can have a wide spectrum of implication, and taken to extremes, can make a person’s lives problematic.  In my mind this seems to relate back to the problem of thinking you are unique, special or especially lucky, such as gamblers who think they can see the pattern in games of chance or finding images of the Virgin Mary in water stains and chicken nuggets.  Taken to a less harmful extreme are people like film students, who (in my personal favorite example) interpret a movie like The Exorcist as being some sort of metaphor for homosexuality, where two male ‘lovers’ exorcise the female from their lives, with the possessed girl being a corrupt, physically ugly being of power trying to confuse and control them.  While this is a fascinating interpretation, neither the writer nor movie director had any intention of making this the underlying theme of the movie. 

There has been some interesting research in apophenia, such as a study by Mintz and Alpert (1972) where they found that 40% of non-clinical participants hear the song “White Christmas” when played white noise and given a simple suggestion, and that those who are prone to hallucinations are more likely to hear it.  Another study using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (basically rubbing powerful electronic magnets across your skull) found that stimulating the left lateral temporal cortex reduced the perception of meaningful information in noise, and since TMS has an inhibitory effect it is thought that this type of thinking originates in this area (Bell et al, 2007). 

Sure, by the strict definition of apophenia, overanalysis of what is going on around you may be a symptom, but I don’t think anyone would argue this is a mental illness…it’s creative thinking.  Creativity itself is just connecting two unrelated ideas, and forms the very basis for progress and new ways of thinking in human existence.  Really, everything we do as humans can be thought of as over interpretation…any other animals just seek food, shelter, mating and relaxation.  We are different in that we are constantly striving over mentally conjured ideals to give us purpose, but is that not just extreme over interpretation of the world around us compared to the lives of the lions and the tigers and the bears?  Apophenia drives us to philosophize a higher meaning and gives rise to more complex forms of humor – such as upping the ante in repetitious humor by making the joke progressively more convoluted and complex, tying in less and less related ideas until the joke does not even resemble itself.  Overthinking things just seems to be a component of creativity, and might just be its very essence.  Seeing things that aren’t there are, depending on the situation, both genius and madness, the very root of paranoid – the only thing that sets them apart is application – applying apophenia to engineering problems such as architecture, energy or food production can make you a wealthy, benevolent savior, but apply it to social relationships, government regulations, secret testing and political intrigue and you become a paranoid schizophrenic.  The difference, I suppose, is between the practical, physical, directly useful, vs. abstract social order and what are they up to and what really happened at this historical moment.  Taking history at face value is almost certainly not what actually happened, as we know that the victors write the history books, but for reasons that aren’t clear to me this is frowned on at large.  Is re-examination of social policy frowned on for some deep rooted genetic level reason, or has the idea just been pounded in to our heads for generations as to be seen as a natural belief of order?

While the treatment of mental illness has many beneficial applications and has been helpful to people…epilepsy comes to mind as a good example, I can’t help but think of how much creativity as a whole we are losing to overmedication and stigmatizing minor mental illness…things like strange art, bizarre new inventions and radical social theory.  While many people feel like the problems they struggle with daily like depression and anxiety strangle and stop them from leading full lives, these problematic states often lead to amazing novel ideas.