Myopticon

Specialization creates ever smaller views. Small fragmented pictures bubble up from specialist studies into a cloud, like swamp gas from a bog, where they drift about with art, culture, advertising, propaganda, and other specialist fragments. Taken all together and mixed with desire specialist particles form the spectacle that media and communication specialists organize from their own special view points.

As a simple example, an art specialist ( curator ) may term some art work “outsider art,” because it doesn’t fit the usual specialist views of art. Other near by art specialists might take up this new term and repeat it. The new term and image fragments turn up in the spectacle. The geometry of the situation goes unnoticed, because a cloud has no specific geometry.

What the specialist curators fail to notice, is that they are not on the inside of anything; that they are, in fact, practicing their craft at the outer margins of the myopticon of specialization. The curator specialists can’t detect from a collection of fragmentary views that the so called “outsider artist,” working within the compost heap of human creativity, is at very minimum some distance more centrally positioned than the curator specialist is. If we assume life is the central occupation of living then the “outsider artist” is nearer to life, living and the center than the curators talking fragments of art types at the margins of life. The specialist, then, is the ‘outsider.”

Aside from some “confusing gas” and perhaps a detectable influence in the lives of the selected artists, the specialists in this case, have not created a life threatening problem.

The geometry of specialists working other windows of the Myopticon is not so innocuous.
Cats heads cause cats tails
The view looking out of ever smaller windows.

Where “a” is the first phenomenon “t” is time and “b” is the second phenomenon and a knothole in a fence is a window of specialization. Researchers around the world can set up the same experiment and verify these results and thus the generalized principle of cats heads and tails can be held as true.

Similarly, given a logical sequence of phenomenon, say chickens and eggs, a philosopher specialist ( expert in dichotomy ) might pose the question “Which came first, the chicken or the egg.”

In order to create a chicken and egg problem, the dichotomy specialist must break a continuum into discrete parts and assert that one part occurs therefore before another. In order to accomplish his task the dichotomy worker must suppress the obvious, observable facts outside his knothole, of what chickens do when they are naked.

What we call chicken began in the trees of South East Asia a very long time ago and continues up to this moment in an unbroken ( not even for a second ) continuum.

The package always contains uninterrupted chicken. The singularity we call chicken never passes through a doorway before or after it’s self and so, the clever dichotomist has only asked, “which came first the chicken or the chicken.”

What the philosopher means is: “I think there is a dichotomy therefore I am.” because in an absence of dichotomy there is no need of a philosopher.

By representing fragments of the whole as separate phenomenon the befuddling myopticon perpetuates it’s self in continuous production of problems both real and imagined, then it contents and sustains it’s self selling solutions for it’s own problematic output.

Payday is every other friday

In another example: civil engineers will boast that they have “saved” more lives than the medical profession, by simply providing water and sewer facilities to homes. Looking through a small window this appears to be logical and true; removing excrement from a home greatly improves sanitation.

Outside of of this “knot hole,” however, we can easily notice excrement floating in the drinking water somewhere else. Civil engineers then, have exported a health problem down hill, where all water flows, for other down stream people to consume, and where other doctors seek “cures” for water borne diseases.

Peering through the same knot hole civil engineers will argue, in their own defense, that the down hill problem exists only because, down hill people can’t afford “proper” sanitation. Outside of their knot hole, observable for millennia around the world entirely, is the simple fact that soil, with all of it’s creatures, processes dung with great benefit for all and detriment to no one. Animal / human excrement and self produced biomas are the food stuffs of plants and insects. Plants and insects are the food stuff of animals. Simple really. In my little town 93 million gallons of raw sewage is dumped daily into the Pacific Ocean while selling chemical fertilizers is a booming, big dollar national industry. Canadian farmers spend about $2.7 billion per year on manufactured fertilizers.

Specialization for hire is inherently problematic.

The Myopticon assumes that narrowing trends of specialization are natural and desirable. As a result, people have come to expect all communication to be a quick “sound bite”. Thus the specialist’s brevity is a dubious dot without connections to or revealing connections within a larger coherent picture. By this, human beings are deprived of a comprehensive understanding. Aside from isolation, feelings of futility, and confusion in individuals, specialization has also resulted in individual’s leaving responsibility for cognition to recognition and responsible social action to others. Specialization breeds easily manipulated ideological conflicts, spurious competitions between people or groups that can and do aggregate in international conflicts. The usual “nut shell” thinking in economics that, the more scarce a resource the more fierce competition for it must necessarily be seems flawed to me. The deeply embedded concept of winners and losers is central to both kings and religions who’s interlocking historical appearance is simultaneous with each other and at the same time with the concept of centralized power and non stop warfare. Simply stated, a system of “god told me to tell you that all the stuff of the world is mine and if you won’t play along with this my gang will poke you and all of yours full of holes with some sort of pointy device.” Central to this concept is the habit of taking a person stripping out the natural human being to replace him or her with new artificial human inclined to follow even the most monstrous or unnatural of orders. A sophisticated human robot who’s natural ties to family, tribe, and community are supplanted with an unbreakable bond to serve without question centralized power. In effect, permission to commit brutality or atrocity: “for the good of all man kind;” being the usual explanation given for this particular monstrous trick. Though all this is savage enough, the modified human, if they survive at all, is then thrown back into the general population, with all linkage to it broken; thus causing a destructive ripple effect that lasts for generations. Everyone is wounded and needing specialist attention and, best of all, specialist medication to “help” them live “normal” lives flooded with chemical concoctions and slowly dying from chemical side effects. “There is no cure” the brain specialist says to his investment specialist friend.

Biological studies have revealed that all the known cases of extinction are caused by overspecialization or a robot like inability to adapt to changing living conditions or resource allocation.

While the specialists of artificial intelligence and robotics assure us that one day a ghost will somehow develop in their silly machines, if only we spend enough trillions on research, they fail to notice successive generations of human beings behaving more and more like robots. The machine has gotten into the living ghost of generations of people, not the other way around. Over time former sentient beings become artificially intelligent counterfeits.

“Clever men are good, but they are not the best.”
- Carlyle, Thomas