Processing Post on Database Episteme from Nov. 12th

Data. Information. Knowledge. The abstractions feel almost like puffs of smoke. After reading Chaim Zins essay on data, information, and knowledge and his distinctions surrounding the ways in which to define data and information, I was struck by the sheer challenges society faces around how to pay attention to, sift, process all of our data and information. I think about the creationists back in my home state spouting the Bible as knowledge of how the world formed where at the same time knowledge of the Bible is a whole other form of knowing. To know and to not to know. In 1994 when I was graduating high-school I was reading an essay entitled “Information War” by the ephemeral poet-philosopher, Hakim Bey from his collection “T.A.Z., The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism.” It was the year that Netscape invented their browser, and the visual web took its first baby steps. His meditations on information served as a harbinger of what was to come some twenty years later. The title “Information War” sounds like something we all have heard, but back then, it was a new idea. Information was still a very guarded space that was not accessible to everyone. The world wide web, as it was called then, really changed that, but created a space where a virtual theater of war emerged. His words served as tools for me to guard myself against the over-mediation of the self, something that I was unsuccessful at accomplishing. Bey writes, “Neither “information” nor indeed any one “fact” constitutes a thing-in-itself. The very word “information” implies an ideology, or rather a paradigm, rooted in unconscious fear of the “silence” of matter and of the universe. “Information” is a substitute for certainty…”Information” is a chaos; knowledge is the spontaneous ordering of that chaos; freedom is the surfing of the wave of that spontaneity.” Reflecting on these words now, I am struck by how it still resonates. The Internet has liberated us, and caged us. The din of data informatics is like an endless sea with no end, or a crushing wave.

“Whoever controls the metaphor governs the mind.” – from NO, a Zine from England

I understand that the wordplay “Infowar” is metaphorical; the perpetual crisis around information and its veracity, between sender and receiver. There is a pervasive ignorance about the function of information that is directly attributed to the sheer power of our modern information technology infrastructure. The increased tension between my body and the machines I engage with, between art and commerce, between actual warfare and the infowar that attempts to render war as bloodless. To call every conflict a war is dangerous. Yet when we see the tensions and consequences between the government and folks like Assange, Snowden, Manning, or groups like Anonymous, we all know that there is a hidden cost behind the data; a hidden bloodshed. Imagine if these entities existed at the time of the Holocaust? Could the Nazi’s have been as effective? The data is like lye covering up the stench of the real. What the current state of our informational tension exists between the artificial world and the real world, man vs. machine, infowar vs. real war (or peace depending on what end we actually want.)

The war that is occurring is an insidious one between companies, governments, and people. The new “good news” is that the sheer volume of data that any user provides companies like Facebook or Google holds a sizable market value. A recent article in Technology Review posits if the big companies can profit from our data, why can’t we? According to Michael Fertik from reputation.com there is a plan to “launch a feature that lets users share certain personal information with other companies in return for discounts or other perks. Allowing airlines access to information about your income, for example, might lead to offers of loyalty points or an upgrade on your next flight.”  Is this the new freedom? Is my body a set of data packets to be quantified, processed, and databased so I can negotiate terms. When I am running my 3.3 miles around Prospect Park, and I am breathing in the air, and my $40 sneakers are touching the ground, my eyes take in the colors of the leaves, or when I sit at a baby grand piano, made of wood and wire, playing some jazz for no one to hear, and I remember that my body is the least mediated of all media. My capacity to stop participating in the din of information is always within my choosing. Real art is playfulness, and occurs in the spaces where there is no space for quantification, measurement, or commodification.

Cinematic catharsis or just special FX? – Final scene in “Fight Club” where the protagonist’s destroy major credit card company buildings in order to eradicate debt. Did they get the servers too? I cheered during this scene.