Hacking Times

It's about the time, and the way we feel about it. 

One of those interesting ways to reflect on how "time" is embodied in technologies, is imagining what would it mean to experience this embodiment. The very moment we encounter a word "time" as an utterance, text, or thought, it opens up a whole totality of meanings and possibilities: it can be the date on a wall calendar (which is found — more often than not — on the screen), a clock (which is found — more often than not — on the screen), an old postcard (which is f. . .), etc. It must have — and it most often does — some particular meaning, one of the countless others, even if it's just a romantic generalization "oh, time... ."

What are we counting when we are "counting time"? That is a good question. What does this imaginary "tick" refers to? It's not a mechanical click of a clock. It's barely a sound anymore. The vibrations are not detectable, because it's a signal in a circuitry. It has no commanding physical presence, unlike the relics of an era which has just passed away: an old mechanical watch, ticking, banging and squeaking hours out 24/7, a bell tower in the middle of a town, a wrist watch. The sceptre * of time is confidently delegated to an electric signal in a "digital world."

* Peculiarly enough, sceptre a misspell-away from spectre. The latter could serve as an interesting substitute in another discussion, maybe I'll return to it in another post about ghosts.

Now let's see what would happen (within the strict confines of the imaginary experiment, of course) if the time (i.e., the official, scientific Time) in a particular social context would be changed without people being aware of it. Even if it's a relatively slight change. Imagine, that you wake up one morning and every media confirms a bad feeling that it is... yesterday. Let's say, yesterday was Friday. You expect to wake up into a lazy Sunday morning, but instead of that you're awaken by an alarm clock. It's 7:30 pm. You can't believe your eyes, check the date on the iPhone. "It cannot be!", — you get up out of bed to debunk this glitch, but TV, Internet, even the old electronic alarm clock seem conspired against you: it's Friday, again. You finally loose your sense of righteousness, when you realize that you're rushing to work, like everyone else, like you normally would, on a Friday morning. Soon you find out that everyone around share the same feeling of a "glitch." Even the pictures you really took yesterday, have proper dates assigned to them — it seems that time (again, the official, scientific, mediated time as a universal numerical representation, the "symbolic" time), together with the whole digital time grid, suddenly has taken a 24 hour step back. Nonetheless, you don't protest it too much, because there is no evidence to prove your point. You just have a feeling about it. Or maybe you protest and get hysterical — it doesn't matter. What matters here, is that our imaginary time shift occurs on top of, or in the background of... something. This background already has many names (and counting): reality, the Real, materiality, subjectivity, the World, nature, the physical. That "something" is always being referred to and coordinated with. There is this peculiar link between the universal time and "something."

It is possible to shatter this link not by questioning if the real events are "real", but by wandering are the real events still relevant? We're not just counting something when we mean "time," we're counting on something, which does that instead of us. There are no everyday observations of nature to rely on, these observations are carried out by groups of specialists and scientists, which count on scientific methods. For someone who is far from this particular scientific area, universal time is something given as a trusted knowledge. And like every knowledge, it — in its digital form — is, technically, "hackable." It can be altered, even if it is a highly difficult and complex venture. At least, within a certain scale. Here I caught myself thinking about The Truman Show, only in my version Truman was living in the real world with... the wrong time. Say, he would normally read that kind of newspaper every morning:

1853, 19th century. And it's ok. Until the day when poor chap discovers that it is actually 2013 that he's living in: same world, different dates. If my imaginary scenario were a Hollywood movie, it would end with the protagonist returning to normality and accepting the right time, right sexual partner, right thinking, etc. But it is not a Hollywood movie, it's my line of thought, and I'm ending with a promise to return and take care of further developments.

In Defense of Incalculable: Big Data and the Un-dead Theorist

Quick comment written after reading Ian Steadman's 'Big data, language and the death of the theorist' in Wired UK [http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-01/25/big-data-end-of-theory]

A theorist can (and will) die, indeed, that is quite a probabble event. S/he can commit suicide as a result of a nervous breakdown, exhaustion, or loss of faith in something essentially humane. Theorist can also die in an accident caused by some crucial miscalculation. And death can be a calculable event as well——when it actually happens. But until then (when?) there is also a potential chance to make some incalculable reflections about this calculability.

It is the theorist who makes a resolution to understand The Data itself instead of competing with data crunching supercomputers. This concept of calculable realities, which is being propagated and exploited by the dominating contemporary techno-scientific discourse, was (and still is) tormenting many theorists. Wittgenstein was forced to make a paradigmic U turn after publishing his 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' and renounce the idea of calculability. Godel used the language of calculation itself——mathematics——while trying to prove that the result of a correct calculation can be wrong and thus arrived at his famous theorem.

And there is another aspect of this 'big data crunching ideology': it encloses the discourse within itself by remaining mute about the philosophical problems surrounding some of the fundamental constitutive elements of a techno-scientific reality: 'thinking', 'intelligence', 'reality', 'self', 'representation', etc. Here the premise of incalculability, or 'outside calculability'——i.e., also, 'outside-the-text'——functions not as a reference to some self-sustained Being outside-the-text per se, but rather points to something which can be identified as a potentiality, a human 'spirit'.

To defend the incalculable would also mean to defend the faculty of reflection. The 'death of a theorist'——or, rather, termination of reflection by rendering it obsolete as a faculty——would signal that the text is finally able to reflect upon itself, that it has become conscious of itself.

Birth of Language

And still, despite the lack of evidence for a serious academic research and study, despite the risks of being accused of profanity, and no matter how pointless the speculations might turn out to be, the question of emergence of the language faculty is something that constantly fascinates and excites me. It truly is the great mystery: at some point human being began to talk. A symbol was born. The symbol of "fire" instead of fire. The "I" instead of I. The moment, when the same idea was comprehended by two human beings in a dialogue, when one logos encountered another logos.
Did the ability to talk evolve gradually, or did it appear suddenly, as a result of some genetic mutation? Steven Pinker, or Noam Chomsky? Is language an evolutionary error?
We don't know why we are able to ask a question about our ability.