Existentialism and Poetry

The older I get, the more French Existentialism makes sense. And inspires me. Take the following from Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus:

Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it. We live on the future: 'tomorrow', 'later on', 'when you have made your way', 'you will understand when you are old enough.' Such irrelevancies are wonderful, for, after all, it's a matter of dying. Yet a time comes when a man notices that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time and, by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. The revolt of the flesh is the absurd.

Emphasis mine. So I have this:

Building by Jason Mical

Stone and brick make this place
My fort.
My tree house.
This thing I cleared with a stick
and summertime persistence.

Time flows oddly here
Days in seconds
or seconds in days.
I'm eighty, wrinkled and out of breath,
I'm ten and can't sit still.

Entropy House I call it,
my carved-rock place,
where I rule as King and cannot be touched.

Speaking of entropy,
I return here more and more
The older/younger I get/feel
I don't want to waste my key after all.

A tower, a cave, an elevator to space.
A roller-coaster.
Magic it is and was, something ineffable,
Least of all by me and I'll be damned if I'm telling you.

I've never left this room,
doorless, windowless,
The way blocked by a triangle
of insecurity, fear and ennui.

Some days I am Spider-Man, climbing walls with my hands.
Some days I just am and call it good.

959-Word Movie Review: The Dark Knight

I realize I’m doing one of the single-most boring things a person can do with a personal blog: review a film. But I just got back from The Dark Knight and I wanted to share my impressions, because films often change in my mind and I want to record exactly what I’m thinking now.

I loved it. Absolutely fucking loved it. It’s been a long, long time since I sat in a movie theater and thought, yes, I’m glad I’m seeing this in a theater because I’m having a great time. And it’s been a long, long time since I walked out of a movie theater and though that was an incredible experience.

The Beautiful Competition and I were discussing the film afterwards and I said that I liked it better than Batman Begins and probably better than any superhero movie before. True (at least, as of right now, give me a while and I’ll probably get lost in the film’s flaws.) It wasn’t a perfect movie, but is there such a thing? It was a fantastic Batman movie. I had to check to see if Jeph Loeb had anything to do with it (he didn’t.) It was a great superhero movie, and it was a fantastic film.

One of the things I like to explore both as a reader and as a writer is the way moral codes and philosophies survive at extreme conditions. Oddly enough, the best to cite about this is Elie Wiesel’s Night, a book I did not particularly enjoy but the crux of which was the very absolutist view that no morality can survive in the most extreme of conditions – in that case, the Holocaust. I’ve never thought that thesis was particularly true, except perhaps on a meta level, but lives are not lived and decisions are never made on the meta level. They are individual things. And that is exactly what The Dark Knight addresses, head on.

Spoiler Alert

Heath’s Joker is probably my favorite villain in a comic book movie, because his crusade forces Batman’s hand. At first, it seems he’s playing the same game as the rest of the mobsters that Batman’s been fighting: why else would he want to work with them, to ask for their money? But it eventually becomes clear his motivation really is, well, utterly unmotivated by anything except a desire for absolute anarchy. There’s a brilliant scene where Bruce Wayne and Alfred discuss The Joker’s motivations and how to get in his head and stop him. Bruce says that it’s easy for Batman to stop the other villains because in the end, they are motivated by money and fear. Even dyed-in-the-wool psychopaths like the Scarecrow (who makes an awesome cameo, by the way) are motivated on some level by these same sorts of things. But how does Batman deal with a criminal who is only interested in causing chaos and destruction? Something that’s more of a force of nature than a motivated human being? And is it possible to deal with someone like that in a way that allows you not to compromise your moral principles?

There’s a brilliant bit of foreshadowing, where the characters discuss the Romans and their practice of handing over power to a dictator in times of crisis. In all instances but one, the dictator (eventually, the historian in me says!) resigned his position and returned power to the Senate and People. But it only took one - Caesar – to annihilate the Republic and create the Empire. Batman cannot win his battle without a compromise, and the one he decides to make is just as interesting as the other moral situations in the film. Even better is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which is ripped straight from Game Theory (and, I should note, Matt Mason at The Pirate’s Dilemma covered quite eloquently.) As Mason notes, that scene is where The Joker slips and where The Dark Knight truly shines as an exploration of morality in extreme conditions. The outcome of the situation (I won’t spoil the particulars) actually left me quite stunned, but in a pleasant way. And it did give Batman the chance to beat The Joker, after all!

But this complexity is the greatest pleasure I can take from a film or a book. It’s simply an abstract form of what I like so much about horror movies, specifically zombie films – which are in and of themselves just the next iteration of post-apocalypse films. It is being forced to make decisions when confronted with the absurd. The day-to-day decisions aren’t so important: decisions made when faced with the most absurd and extreme of conditions – a ferry full of prisoners and a ferry full of normal people, with each holding the other detonator; a motivationless psychopath who won’t stop killing; the dead returning to life to feast on the living – these are all things that remove a person from the norm and force them to look at things in a new way. I use the word ‘absurd’ in a loaded fashion, because it’s exactly how Neitzsche, Heidegger and specifically Camus refer to what life and meaning are in the first place: ways to deal with these extreme conditions that, in the end, are something we must make and be responsible for on our own.

[Note: I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that Harvey Dent / Two-Face actually progresses from being responsible for his decisions to his infamous coin-flipping, leaving choice and more importantly responsibility up to fate as the movie progresses. Which is really an entirely different essay, but adds a good deal of flavor and another layer of depth to the film.]

So there I am: The Dark Knight impressions. Holy freaking crap it was a good movie.

Blog New World

If I had to choose one fiction book to preserve in case of a nuclear war, it would probably be Brave New World. It was the subject of my final research paper in college, and I can say with a high degree of certainly that it is the single most influential book I’ve read. The thesis of my research paper was that as society – specifically American society, but the increasingly global society as well – comes closer to resembling that of Brave New World the people in it must decide how to deal with the knowledge of its inner workings. Do we, as John Savage did, take the final exit and commit suicide with the knowledge that we will be powerless to change the overall society as individuals? Or make a different existential choice?

Re-reading my paper I stand by my thesis that suicide is existentially irresponsible, and what I’m interested in at the moment is the way in which society is looking increasingly like that in Brave New World (for the sake of brevity and clarify, I’ll refer to that society as BNW as opposed to the full title of the book.)

Brave New World often plays second fiddle to its cousin, Orwell’s 1984. Both are dystopian novels, but postulate two very different futures. Byfar the best summary of the differences is this excerpt from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

I emphasized what I consider the most relevant part of Postman’s summary of the two novels. In BNW people are conditioned from birth to have desires and wants, to have a driving need to consume but no capacity for reasoning why and when they ask why they are socially outcast and given drugs. Contrast this with 1984 and its poor, oppressive, tyrannical society. In short, BNW is a capitalist dystopia while 1984 is a communist dystopia.

Political and economic theories aside, what interests me as a digital strategist is the BNW take on information, specifically the flood of information that would ‘reduce us to passivity and egoism’ and ‘the truth [being] drowned in a sea of irrelevance.’ At the time Postman wrote that book, the Internet was in the hands of the government, the World Wide Web still a twinkle in the eye of some college hackers, and things like blogs, Twitter, RSS, social media and even forums completely alien. There was Usenet seven years before the Endless September, but was hardly a common media type.

In other words, with the explosion of the Internet, the Web, push-button publishing and what has become collectively known as Citizen-Generated Media (blogs, YouTube videos, podcasts, and so forth) the sheer amount of information to which we have access has increased. I’m not sure by what factor, but I’m willing to guess it’s in thousands if not the millions. In other words, that sea of irrelevance just got far bigger than the few hundred magazines, few dozen TV channels and local newspapers of Postman’s time.

We were already teetering on the brink of inanity before; how do we keep from completely drowning in it? What makes information accountable in digital media? Or have we already sunk so low into the ocean that we’ve simply been reduced to passive observers, willing to blog about something but little else?

There seem to be arguments for several sides and positions within this discussion. I’m reminded that while war and genocide raged in Darfur the citizens of Digg were more concerned with the suppression of the code that would have allowed them to steal HD DVDs. Two of the most widely-read blogs online are about celebrity gossip and captioning pictures of cats with grammatically incorrect jokes. This certainly seems to support the white noise and irrelevance argument.

Take Wikipedia, which despite having ranked higher than forums, blogs, social networks and other online sources of information in Edelman’s own Trust Barometer still has a (somewhat deserved) reputation as a source of credible information as long as you’re looking for references in DragonballZ, Pokemon, or Buffy. This xkcd cartoon from the other day illustrates the point in a humorous manner, and it sparked a conversation with Seth shortly after I read it and shared it. Seth turned me on to Wikipedia which, despite its flaws, is an amazing source of information. Sure, there is some inanity on it, but part of the Wikipedia user experience is to flag it or improve it for other readers (and myself). This is the important piece that makes Wikipedia work: it’s self-correcting and the vast amount of information therein can be filtered and adjusted as necessary.

Another example of the contrary argument is how quickly the online community picked up on Iran doctoring the press images of its recent missile launch. Less than 24 hours after Iran released the images to the international press, the online community noticed they Photoshopped it (poorly) to make their missile launch look more successful than it actually was.

It remains to be seen of course whether unmasking Iran’s Photoshop shenanigans will spark and real debate that might lead to actual change in the policies that have created that state, from internal and external influences. So it’s arguable whether there is any real ‘value’ in the online community responding so quickly and accurately as far as long-term debate and dialogue go. But it certainly appears that despite the vast sea of information out there, the truth is not drowning in the irrelevant white noise yet.

Or is it? As I have been composing this post, a fascinating post went up on the IdeaLab about Polymeme and diversifying what it calls the echo chamber. I particularly like the opening bit:

The iPhone is released. The world stops.

While surfing around on the Internet today, you would be entirely forgiven for assuming that the only news worth talking about is the release of Apple's 3G iPhone. Of course, there are plenty of other notable and interesting conversations taking place online (among them: the ethics of for-profit fundraisers, a Danish island's march toward energy independence, and how English is "evolving into a language we may not even understand") but most of us don't know how to find those conversations as we navigate through our personal echo chamber of bookmarked websites, subscribed RSS feeds, and the web pages they link to.

The post goes on to describe the Polymeme tool, a service that scours RSS feeds for related content to introduce users to new stories.

The idea that this moves beyond the echo chamber is what roused my interest. Digital Media’s greatest strength, and that which allows it to avoid becoming a sea of complete irrelevance, is also its greatest weakness in that the most relevant can easily be lost: it is an echo chamber for most. Even so-called news aggregators like Digg are fuelled by their userbase and what that userbase feels is important, which leads to situations like the HD DVD crack being the news of the day over Darfur genocide.

The takeaway here isn’t that it is still unclear whether the digital space will liberate us from our own BNW, or be the thing that finally encapsulates us in it. The popularity of the echo chamber versus discovery tools like Polymeme is disconcerting to say the least, but even my own Twitter group leads to me discover things I never would have before. At the very least we can stave off our willing slavery for a little while longer.

Image "Savages Row" from Ruddington Photos Flickr stream.