WORKFLOWS
Posted by Erik Frey Wed, 14 Jan 2004 06:00:00 GMT
dot
we’re getting back images from a distended, primordial eye. the images are rippling across our collective whatever.
we’re demonstrating the form of a collective whatever. the shoe fits. if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then you’re trapped in the familiar prison, where things resemble ducks, or apples, or oranges.
IN 1906, ITALIAN ECONOMIST VILFREDO PARETO CREATED A MATHEMATICAL FORMULA TO DESCRIBE THE UNEQUAL DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH IN HIS COUNTRY, OBSERVING THAT TWENTY PERCENT OF THE PEOPLE OWNED EIGHTY PERCENT OF THE WEALTH.
the vital few and the trivial many. them’s that got, shall get. them’s that not, well, they clamor for equality. when the REVOLUTION happens, and the balance tips in their favor, they happily move into the digs of the former elite, and we do not pass go. we do NOT collect.
complex systems often exhibit traits of self awareness. strange loops. bach’s musical offering to king friedrich. the set of all regular sets. self-similarity.
civilization has fallen so pathetically short of it’s potential for meta, meta meta, meta meta meta meta. there’s fibonacci sequences crawling around in our collective whatevers, in my strange loop, in the way i am aware of myself, my family, my king and country. but no. no instead, we make the same mistakes since feudal times. if i beat you over the head with this club, i can steal the kill.
no one person is to blame for this slow anesthetization. case in point:
today i played darts while listening to debussy’s claire de lune. debussy did not play it for me. instead, he wrote it down on a sheet of paper long ago, and later, someone played it on a piano, in a studio room, with a microphone, which fed into a signal processor, which fed into a mixer, which fed into a DAT tape recorder, which dutifully scratched magnetic lines onto a ribbon. that was mastered and pressed, hundreds of thousands of times, onto a CD, which an old lady with a bandana packaged into a plastic case, and wrapped. it was trucked to an outlet, purchased, ripped spinning at thousands of rpms, through a laser lens, streamed onto a hard drive, through a network cable, through countless routers, switches, into my computer, through my bus, through my sound card, out my speakers, right into my ears.
i’ve been working on this process analysis plan. an organizational psychology thing where i make cute workflows for an organization, and then optimize them. after the study, i noticed all the before plans had flow-lines going through a position called “Administrative Assistant”, and all the after plans instead feed straight into the software i’m developing. i know the lady who works in that position. using the power of abstraction, i inadvertantly abstracted a sweet woman out of her job.
i sat there staring at the charts, thinking “fuck”. the report is due on friday. they probably wouldn’t fire her just because my paper says so, but this republican government has made all our operations BOTTOM LINE, so i just can’t leave it like that.
i thought about this while playing darts. then i went to the market to buy groceries, and as i walked into the store, i saw a camera, like the spirit rover, pointed right at me.
It was a dry wind
And it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand
Falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers
And the automatic earth
staccato signals and constant information. i sat and thought about this, and then i wrote this entry on an electronic forum, setting ones and zeroes in a sea of abstraction, comfortably nestled on top of the backs of little indian boys laying CAT5 cable across the barren earth, under the blazing sun. i drive a car named after a tribe we demolished. it’s fueled by lands we have overrun, and constructed by workers who earn in a month what i make in an hour. hundreds of thousands of layers of abstraction remove me from this harsh reality, as my twenty percent enjoys the eighty percent.
all the while, debussy, long dead, plays the piano in perfect form, every single time.
dick says the universe is irrational. therefore god must be irrational.
sometimes i can’t calm down.