totalitarianism today

Sanitation and public health propaganda: It's getting nastier all the time.

This Chinese propaganda poster urges citizens to "Push patriotic sanitation work to new heights".

Effective propaganda usually combines references to a higher cause or abstraction with a call to duty. For example, this propaganda poster for the US "liberation" of Puerto Rico represents the US military as "The Goddess of Liberty".

When propaganda is used to effect a military victory, it often falls into the category of "psych-ops", or psychological operations designed to exploit religious or cultural vulnerabilites in the service of war. Fear is the necessary condition for psychops. (On that note, John Elliston provides an unabashedly excellent account of psychops and the harnessing of local superstitions during the Vietnam War.)

But surely humans aren't stupid? They know a rational fear when they see one, right? Perhaps. But the right images and associations can enlarge a fear rather than encourage a man to reconsider it. For example, the thief/warrior motif in this anti-tuberculosis poster taps subconscious moral dichotomies, while this anti-STD poster enlists masculine distrust of women. And this poster, courtesy of the US Army's Social Hygiene division, uses the fear of STD's to influence impressionable young officers.

Contemporary public health propaganda seems even less subtle than its pre-1950's variety. From the worst-case scenario dangers of glue-sniffing to Brooke Shield's appeal to vanity, all of your worst fears are realized. Is it ridiculous to suggest that the Chinese public health propaganda seems less violent and less aggressive?

Rather than interpret this as an endorsement of Chinese communism, those inclined to critical thinking can explore right here for a brief backgrounder on what distinguishes propaganda from just plan poor taste.

Those who don't love the wild cannot claim to love the outdoors.

There's something about the desire-- not the mention the instructions-- to "tame a free spirit" that strikes me as pathetic.

The Buk stops here.

Inspired by Rachel Hulin's photographic tribute to Charles Bukowski, I'm adding a little tribute-- more like a tributary-- of my own to "the ugliest man in town".

Sit down and watch out for cigarette butts on the bed as Bukowski begins to sift through the trash in your head. Betwixt the mathematics of the breath and the way, there is an FBI file and the aftermath of a lengthy rejection script. If Bukowski opens his mouth, you might find a pearl bouncing over the rhythm of curses.

There are two kinds of hell, and one is being sober at 2 AM. The other is more common and summed by friendship.

He might insult you, but you can be sure 1:36 am will always seem half-hearted once so sullied in earnest.

What can we do? Make sure the well never runs dry, the rent is paid, and the immigrants next door know your racket. And scribble Bukowski's best on our toilet tissue in the hopes that our bathroom reading might provoke nothing approximating the ambition of revelation. A few of my personal favoritesin the poetry department:

Are you drinking?     confession    finish   for jane, with all the love i had which was not enough

Sciffy stuff.

• The top 10 sci-fi films that never existed.
• Hason Robotic's android portrait of Phillip K. Dick.
• The budding charms of 365 tommorows.
• An interview with Hal Duncan, author of Vellum (via SFsignal).
• Neil Gaiman web-journals about the new paintings in his bedroom.
• The best interview with Alan Moore to date comes from Blather.
• Randall Ensley's "Key of Pain" is a good screensaver for the AM hours.

Written in 1977, Phillip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly offered a most personal dystopia-- one which revealed his own trepidations and experiences with California drug culture (see wikipedia for all the gory details). One of Dick's most influential books, A Scanner Darkly even has a band named after it. So it is with great anticipation that I attend Richard Linklater's adaptation of Dick's book (trailer here) set for release this summer.

In an interview with Linklater about this project, Scott Macaulay puts his finger on the pulse:

Dick creates not only one of the best novels about drug addiction but also a prophetic allegory about government and social control. In the end, though, A Scanner Darkly is an elegy, which Dick makes clear in a moving and philosophical “Author’s Note”: “This is a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did,” Dick writes, then lists 14 friends in addition to himself who have either died or are permanently damaged by drug use.

 

Economizing on reputation.

Howard Rheingold is teaching a course on digital journalism at Stanford this winter which includes a cool dip into reputation economies and information networks. Specifically, Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, explores the existence and creation of low-cost reputation networks spanning the world wide web. Researching reputation mechanisms from the auspicious windows of MIT, Chris Dellarocas explains their charm:

Online reputation mechanisms have emerged as a viable alternative to the more established institutions for building trust (such as formal contracts) in electronic environments where such contractual guarantees cannot be efficiently enforced. On eBay, for instance, an online feedback mechanism that encourages buyers and sellers to rate one another seems to have succeeded in encouraging cooperative behavior in an otherwise very risky trading environment.

The potential applications of online reputation mechanisms go beyond the relatively narrow domain of trust building in electronic marketplaces. The appeal of reputation mechanisms is that, when they work, they facilitate cooperation without the need for costly enforcement institutions. They have, therefore, the potential of providing more economically efficient outcomes in a wide range of moral hazard settings where societies currently rely on the threat of litigation in order to induce cooperation.

If you are chasing this particular butterfly, it might behoove you to know that the University of Michigan is home to the Reputations Research Network, while the Institute for the Study of Cooperative Behavior offers access to arousing papers on topics like the effects of embeddedness in trust situations as observed in the case of buying used cars. Worthwhile academic papers and online articles on this topic include:

• "Managing Trust in a Peer-2-Peer Information System"
• "The Dynamics of Repuation"
• "Reputation in P2P Anonymity Systems"
• "Eliciting Informative Feedback: The Peer Predicitive Model"
• Rheingold's recent classic, The Virtual Community, is available for free online. A must-read!
• David Isenberg's Rise of the Stupid Networks
• Something even more interesting by David Isenberg

Love is in the air?

Well, if you insist... However, the evidence keeps pointing to the human mind as the primary inventor and slave of love. In our words, we make our own masters and then complain about the workload.

Love-- and its penchance for lacking-- is being studied in the monogamous behavior of prarie voles as well as the social interactions of autistic children. Perhaps we can look forward to a lmore compatible future in which Daisy's first reaction to her partner's marriage proposal is to schedule a "love MRI" which will scan her brain for signs of true love. We want the kind of love that comes with the proof of a brain-scan to back it up. Stars and constellations are all quite sublime, but situate themselves more effectively in the context of a Cliff-Notes than a Friday night date.

Why would anyone bother with something as uncertain and unverifiable as the big L-O-V-E anyway? Can the self-esteem-enriched self of the 21st century afford to linger or to pine or to long for something or to risk losing anything? (Ok, I take back the risk part-- most of us do play poker...) Why not just oil the tracks for turning romance into a safety dance with "dating credit reports" and love calculators?

Maybe love isn't worth the lawyers. Lauren Slater surveys the science, fads, and "received wisdom" for National Geographic, and the evidence is inconclusive. Come to think of it, so is the question. After all, who doesn't want love? Who doesn't want an emotional investment that doesn't require a monthly visit to the vet? Who doesn't remember the sweet nothings muttered by the cardigan-guru (a.k.a. Mister Rogers) as he laced up his shoes and instructed his eager pupils about the virtues of love and unselfishness?

And the questions smash against each other .... Does true love wait? If so, can true love cut its waiting time in half and skip the nuptials? Is love a fixed pie, the value secured by its scarcity and exclusivity? Heinlein-heads, what does this mean? Does my secret crush on the Iraqi Information Minister rub against my ideal love for Rama? Does being a "random brutal love dreamer" fare better with French men?

All this "literary thinking" makes my head swim. Perhaps I should reinvestigate the "hard science". In addition to teasing apart the neuroscience of love, scientists are also breaking down the phenomenon of chemistry. Researchers Manfred Milinski and Claus Wedekind discovered that a group of immune system genes—the major histocompatibility complex (MHC)—influences women's attraction to men's body odors. Each woman in the study seemed most attracted to men whose MHC genes were very different from her own.

Trying to sniff out other connections, Milinski and Wedekind expanded their experiments and discovered that people who share the same MHC genotype have similar preferences for perfumes. But they also found that those preferences are really about the scents people select for themselves, not the scents they want their partners to have. Finding your own perfect scent—the one that might make you romantically irresistible—at a department store counter or in a magazine insert is probably hopeless, say Milinski and Wedekind. They suggest that "the ideal perfume would be individually composed" by an expert perfumer.

But even if they can't bring people together, perfumes can still be used to amplify natural body odors to overcome what these scientists call "the smelly noise of human civilization."

Habermas, Fichte, Algren, Holderlin, Eliot, Marx, Styron, Moravia, and more.

• "The Idea of a Theory of Knowledge As Social Theory" / Jurgen Habermas
• "Outlines of the Doctrine of Knowledge" / Johann Fichte
• Interview with Nelson Algren / Paris Review
• "On Judgement and Being" / Friedrich Holderlin
• Donald Hall interviews T.S. Eliot / Paris Review
• The Essence of Christianity / Ludwig Fueuerbach
• The Poverty of Philosophy / Karl Marx
• George Plimpton interviews William Styron / Paris Review
• "Druids and Fairies: Zen, Drugs, and Hot Tubs" / Erik Davis
• Thoughts on property rights and agriculture / Nick Szabo
• Interview with Alberto Moravia / Paris Review

37 pages of William S. Burroughs....

This 1965 interview from The Paris Review runs the range of Burroughs' stem cells, including:

- - - disgust with Paris / theory of reality as a "constant scanning pattern" / the differences between hallucinogens and opiates  / quitting a smack habit with the help of apomorphine  / why there is no psychological aspect to addiction / "white junk" and the Russian bureaucracy / "junk as image" / experiments with scrapbooks / how he came to stop worrying and love the cut-up / the future is silence / Korzybski and his idea of non-Aristotlean logic / science and art / "biologic" films / the carny world and its charms / the artist as con man / "what we on earth call God is a little tribal god who has made an awful mess" / how the Soviet and American governments are not all that different - - -

The sexiest science links.

Because science is made more beautiful when placed in the context of social cultures.....

• Jonathan Gottschall, co-editor of The Literary Animal, assists the rise of interpretive theory known as "Literary Darwinism" first given mass attention by the work of Joseph Carroll.  More on Gottschall from the gentlemen at Biocurious. More on "adaptationist" approaches by Carroll.
• Loose women are less uptight and kissing is good for your blood pressure. Next thing you know, some wacky scientist might venture that sex is fun too.
• Questions about the autheticity of the Vinland map, the world's oldest known map, continue.
• New Scientist has a special feature on robots.
• Johnathan Harris' Phylotaxis explores the "space where science meets culture".

More on Magdalene.

Joan Acocella surveys the 2,000 year-old obsession with Mary Magdalene for the New Yorker. The best survey I've seen so far. Thanks to a certain wolf for the tip.