Singularitar-WHAT?

After my lastest bout of paper-writing / cold-fighting / food-poisoning hijinks (a vegetarian salad? C'mon, I can accept getting turned inside-out by a salad, but a vegetarian salad?), apparently my resistence has been lowered to the point where I can now be infected by the Singularity meme.

In the fog of a mind overcome with something looking like scattered poetry magnets dancing just outside the Van Allen belts... or in the ionosphere with the aurora... or something... I did about the most dangerous thing I could ever do under the circumstances: go browsing at the bookstore.

How I ended up with Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near is a little beyond me; I wasn't particularly looking for a transhumanist manifesto. Never mind that the very first instructor I faced when I knuckled down and went back to school was Max More.

Sorry, but I just have to digress. I spent two years and change at Ambassador College in east Texas, and based on my experience there (which I would later discover was not all that representative of university-level study) I pretty much gave up on the idea of higher education. So I'm reflecting on how I left off with a very fundamentalist, authoritarian system and picked up again with a junior college class in Philosophy of Religion conducted by a libertarian transhumanist... Well, it makes me chuckle, anyway. I can chuckle because I've recovered from the resulting whiplash.

So, anyway, I'm back home, wiping the sleep from my eyes after a well-deserved noon rising, checking the UCLA website for my grades and looking at this tome I've picked up from the pound. Somehow, the fact that it is a BIG BOOK and that I normally shudder at the idea of reading BIG BOOKS doesn't cross my mind as I start thumbing through. It doesn't take long to get hooked. On several occasions, my husband is prying the book from my leaden sleepy fingers.

It's so... sudden. It's so... eschatalogical. And it's so... neat-o.

I want to be a cyborg.

That having been said, I remind myself as the diligent grad student in literature that any work offering a "straightforward" explanation usually is ignoring or eliding something. So I turn back to my friendly copy of Kate Hayles's How We Became Posthuman - a book that I admit I had trouble getting into at first - and I discover precisely what the trouble is. Namely, have we settled on this issue of embodiment? Granted, this work by Hayles predates TSIN by six years - enough time for significant fin-de-siecle technological changes - and Kurzweil does make a special point of acknowledging issues of embodiment... but does he fully satisfy the criticisms levied in HWBP?

I'm not so sure. But for me, this is thinking directly into the blog, and I require some time to explore this further.

But here are some questions I think of: if the point of converting to non-biological (super)intelligence is meant somehow to optimize the human experience, what does this mean to someone who is culturally Deaf, and who risks not only her deafness but her language in a potentially post-linguistic communication system? What does it mean to a model of "neurodiversity" that looks at differing ways of brain engagement not as pathological deviations from a norm (Miz AD/HD has got to ask this), but as multiforms? Is equating "open free market" with "evolution" a natural induction, or is it naturalized?

Did anyone working on this book stop to read Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto"? Cuz, you know, I personally am getting mixed signals here. There are two voices in the room talking simultaneously, each seemingly oblivious to the other, except for the strident increases in volume coming from both.

I bet the answer is somewhere in the middle. And as the middling person I am, maybe I'll find something. Well, between my assignments. Somewhere between Barnaby Rudge and Angels in America and OMG am I going to have to deal with that pompous ass Wordsworth again??? (Well, with that outburst, chalk one up for materiality.)

And I also bet that superintelligence won't be enough to resolve certain paradoxes of the networked demopublican society, regardless of how many "let's hopes" we plug into this otherwise utopian vision.

Hope everyone is enjoying their holidays. Or break. Or downtime. Please don't feel sorry for me: know that I undertake disturbing intellectual journeys during breaks on purpose, to keep the Boredom that Surpasses All Understanding at bay in the absence of assignments and deadlines. That's what I do.

This is My Brain on Deadline

I'm in the zone... I'm just not sure which zone I'm in.

Now You See Me, Now You Don't

The late morning ritual of rolling over and turning on the news radio is supposed to be mundane. It's supposed to be my one opportunity to lie in a state of relative quiescence and listen to snarled traffic, box scores and stock market averages while I pull together something resembling consciousness.

I'm not supposed to be disturbed by direct threats to my identity.

So I get to wake up in a bad mood and march over to my computer to check for that e-mail from acting Chancellor Abrams (yep, it's there) and go to the official UCLA "We Got Hacked and This Really Sucks" site. Look up some suggestions for additional action. Call a credit reporting agency and put (yet more in a long line of) fraud alerts on my reports.

KFWB offered up a sound bite from a "professor who seems blasé" about the whole thing. Darn, wouldn't you know, it's a voice I recognize, and a voice I have quietly disagreed with so many times before. Regardless of this person's opinion, unless you're a completely naïve mouth-breather who gives out personal information like candy, not every bit of information is equally accessible to everyone. Even someone like me, whose name and picture appear to reveal so much here, takes serious precautions. After all, I know what it's like to experience ID theft. I escaped serious harm, but I'm disappointed now that I listened to my bank's advice way back in the day and said nothing to the police. But I digress.

Here's the way I see it. If UCLA can be hacked, pretty much anyone else I do business can too. Assurances about encryption and login screens that attend to potential sound-recording hacks won't be enough anymore. (Not that they ever were enough, but this is front-and-center now.)

Now, I'm not going to tell you what I specifically intend to do next, but if you're in the same boat as I, I recommend that you go to the UCLA ID theft site and click on the "Protecting Your Credit" link. Take the most protective measure you can live with, not the least. Because the way I see it, anybody who is willing to hack something like the UCLA database (I show generosity to UCLA's security protocols here) must not only have smarts and speed, but also patience.

Someone with patience is willing to wait six months for a fraud alert to fall off a credit report if the money to be made is still good.

Excuse me; before I get back to writing on my papers, I'll need to grab a crash helmet to pull over my aluminum-foil cap.

The Sound of Two Stumps Clapping

Once I traveled with a retinue of journals and diaries, dedicated companions retaining the inscriptions of years of observations, some through coke-bottle filters of theory and emo, others with a fearsome clarity. Now these documents, once the bedrock on which the rest of my work rests, are gone, and I have no one to blame but myself for this crime. Worse yet, part of me has gone missing in the process.

It all started with the decision that I no longer needed these old archives; they did not define my experience, and my living space is chronically undersized, so I opted for the space. Space in which to work, to stretch, to breathe: this was my desire, and these old journals were part of the obstacle. So I chose to have them destroyed.

This was a part of the reorganizational project of this past summer, a way to clear the path for my new life as the Graduate Student - or so I had told myself. I started with Artist's-Way styled "morning pages" written in the mid-1990's, through the journals I had kept through my undergraduate studies at Pasadena and UCLA, even the archives of a blog I had published under another name not so long ago. What I could not erase with the stroke of a key, I loosed from ring binders, slashed from spines, freed from the embraces of manila envelopes and red-rope file pockets. I delivered these sturdier records into boxes and, in turn, to a shredding company, dispatching them with the ritual tapping of dust from my hands and my sandals, and a song in my heart.

It seemed the best thing at the time, an enactment of a psychic "leave no trace" traveling philosophy that I thought the erstwhile undergrad needed to break camp. All this while secretly recognizing its irrelevance for a base camp set up for so many returns, staring at the deep blue nothing beyond the nodding shreds of prayer flags.

So there's no denying the hostility. If I had local laws on my side, I would have taken a match to the whole damn pile. For within this collection was no end of insults and embarassments, burrs of rage and pathos, needles of guilt, resiny secrets that surely would ooze through their rough skins and onto the latex gloves of some disinterested archaeologist. Some collector and cataloguer of my moment's remnants, carefully dusting off, labeling, preparing these artifacts for the historical gaze, uncaring of the pathogenic effect on the tendrils growing in my soil and curling into neighboring trellises.

A commercial shredder certainly seems ecologically friendlier. What the AQMD doesn't know is that it can't write a rule to close this loophole on P.J.'s scorched-earth solution, fueled by shame, low relative humidity and a certain fallacy of periodicity (the periodical fallacy?); offering, perhaps, a sweet savour unto the LORD, but from here, reeking of all the charm of the exhaust from an engine down one cylinder. Even more damning is odorless carbon monoxide within. Moreover, among evolution's cruel jokes is the idiocy of the hemoglobin that prefers the CO to oxygen. Does god have a nose for CO, and if it does, how must it smell, as these smoke signals rise and evaporate, late signifiers of a pile of ashes itself swirling into fresh breezes?

The remains of the heart within this heap might suggest to the credulous yet more evidence of spontaneous human combustion. Heart is there, yes, it was on every last page, but I still feel a pulse in my chest. My head is splitting and I want to puke. Yet the pulse remains.

What I appear to have lost in the blaze, though, are my hands.

Hands which held pen and pad, drawing the words that looped and meandered the width of the page and the length of my thoughts. Or which rested at a keyboard, at frenzied moments beating a tattoo of tiny keys tinged with a bassoon's deep, reedy tone, serenading to a screen challenging my wits with its blank stare; conquering it with a flurry of notations within staves of darkness in a neat one-inch-wide frame; polishing the results, trimming the goofs and dead spots, reducing the noise, adding an occasional effect for shits and giggles.

Among all these mixed metaphors rests the fact of my hands - tools with a prior survival function, just like my lungs, my larynx, my teeth - another embodiment of my language, my best survival mechanism. I could tell stories of the too-small palms betraying the otherwise too-long fingers; the callus built up over decades around the ever-present pen; the scar defining a fingertip and its bone underneath reminding me of its presence as it presses into the fretboard of my guitar.

I could tell these stories - if I had my hands. The hands which I must have lopped off in my slash-and-burn project. Hands which I too late discover adhere to the words of my hands, the pages, the keyboard, the ink, the graphite, reflections of light in thousands of colors, the million gems too little valued and too easily lost, leaving blanks, blanks. Without my hands, so little remediates between my brain and the smooth surfaces of pages and disks. My voice fails.

If I had my hands, instead of whispering from the bottom of a well, my voice would wend into the script and emerge to fearlessly fill its own space, trusting in the handiwork of the tapestry suspended below. No thread? I'd weave with cardboard strips. No paper? I'd sign what I can't write, knitting the atmosphere, directing my words to those who won't be bothered with odd sounds.

If I had my hands, right now I would be lost in the music of compositions anticipated by eager audiences who won't exchange their tickets for a later performance.

I certainly would not be mourning their absence on a blog. I would not be reduced to confessing this sin to the priesthood of the bored and distracted, waiting in vain for the penance which, however insufficient to the deed, will cost more than my life.


Still... I know my own penchant for disorder, and no organizational project goes unfinished under my supervision. Perhaps I should spend time among the odd piles saved from the shredder and search. On an outside chance, I may have outsmarted myself and hid my hands from myself in the consuming fury that destroyed the witnesses whose testimony I now crave.

No host of witnesses can define a person, but they add to the chorus - the cacaphony - of me. They make the physical and psychological field of me that persists, demands, expresses, and I realize now that I have always needed their voices, however ancient, however awkward, to produce the voice that speaks now, that answers and interrogates anew.

If I ever find my hands again, I will be lucky to survive with the curse of the remaining silence, the close reminder of the void into which that expression of me is permanently lost.

At my own hands.