<nettime> Time and the Post-Information Age

["Chad Scovi11e" <chad@chadscoville.com>]

Time and The Post-Information Age

March 2010

Chad Scoville


Technological innovation decimates the fuzzy myth of time. Higher
levels of automation, media and communication equate to progressive
levels of information. Humanity has surpassed the point of inundation;
levels of information constitute an obsolescence, a totalization of
temporality where the relationship between information and time has
eclipsed its zenith of interactivity; the completion of time as a
variable in human consciousness. Technology will substantiate the
project of moving beyond consciousness since the completion of time is
the completion of events in time, as the micro-acceleration of events
results in the end of the event, hence the end of consciousness.
When perception is no longer able to detect the sensible event,
for the nature of events have subsumed the nano-scale, everything
happens at once which we are now witnessing the emergence of. This
is the post-time society. While this occurs, the electronically
stoned and neurologically desensitized perceptions of mass society
become psychologically halved into biological agents and ephemeral,
cybernetic software daemons. The obsolescence of information is the
conclusive endeavor to accelerated signalization. As individuals
increasingly struggle to make decisions, the actual capability to make
decisions becomes capitalized and severely handicapped.

The post-information perception is in the modality of endless debating
and terminal speculation. Accelerated and perennially increasing
messaging rates and density of program flow makes a parody of content
.It is not the signal; but the management and control of millions
of signals, predicting the levels of expansion. This specificity is
the mediated image of the roundtable discussion, frequently observed
on Sunday morning corporate media outlets. The binding of infinite
signals endlessly ruminating on the infinite range of collective
signalization.Socializing becomes waveform switching through social
network platforms, analogous to performance quality management
integrated through tool-based dashboards. Watching is less the
activity of viewing content, but overcome by the decision of the
deciding what to view. We are no longer able to watch, but only able
to go through the decision loop. Government in post-information merges
all candidates into the signalized ideal candidate -- a fusion of
focus-group reporting. Poll-based and sensationalized government to
the extreme at which the mediated images of career autocrats act out
a nuanced irrational array of sputtering soap-operas which purposely
pantomime the reality television aesthetic, seeking a discourse which
talks-up to the bumbling electronically-stoned masses.The information
of politics has become the decimation of content as politics have
disappeared and been replaced by irrational reactions to network
polling, assemblies and congresses of politicon clones unable to
decide on anything besides terminal debate about engendering more
signalization.

Policy as content is obfuscated as the product of politics is the
mediated poll-based image of the politcon, of more terminal debate
and collective signalization all amounting to null potentiality,
only functioning to massage the wants and desires as the psychic
inventories of the demographic constituency massaged by the light
tubes as malware advertising creates desires for things no one ever
needs.In the economic domain, financial products are scored in
not the equity or bond issue, but rather the derivative contract,
a meta-instrument. All constitute but surely are not limited to
the myth- effect of Time, which is not only an illusion, but is a
dream encountering further acceleration in reaction to the digital
topography and it's constant progression. It is this myth which
is propagated through the screens watching us which elicits and
prefigures the psychological condition of the contemporary human. As a
centripetal resonator originating in the vibration of microprocessor
clocking, not only is the artificiality of time creating illusions
about the nature of what is real, the increasing reliance on mediated
forms of communications is pushing this fabrication even farther
away from consciousness of the self, arriving at the inversion of
a totalized information field to the end of the event, and the
corresponding end of time. The capability of large-scale financial
institutions to implement securities trading strategies which exploit
sub-millisecond fluctuations in pricing and volume expose a disparity
between levels of abstraction and scale.

Beyond information and approaching the surpassing of temporality,
here, the event disappears. The forces of the market are deeply
contingent on the artificial perception of Python and C++ programs
adapting to fluctuations signaled by the network. Capitalization of
the infinitely small, the speed of execution to where it ceases to be
the pricing which makes the market, it is the acceleration of signals
which creates the market. E-speed is an electronic exchange where
buyers and sellers of securities meet virtually over IP networks to
execute deals. In this scenario, manipulation of time, the capacity
to control time by executing strategies faster than the entity on
the other side of the transaction dictates the flow of capital and
power. This is nanotechnology in operation. In economics, this asset
and capitally-centered transaction matrix is a model of control,
distribution, and ownership which can be critically determined
and defined through the proliferation of electronic markets, high
frequency program and algorithmic securities trading. Network-enabled,
high-speed, and artificially intelligent features of market engagement
ripple a category of effects across the surface of contemporary human
society and are an enterprising function of the post-information age.
This is the generator of acceleration. As sentient beings in the world
with perceptions which are interpreting the action between thought and
experience, human beings are locked into a system of value exchange in
which the programmable interstitial frame of time radiated from the
realm of global markets drives consciousness collectively towards non
events and non time.

We feel the multiple effects of electronically-amplified capitalism.
This malaise as the relationship between time and capital exchange
chains the western consciousness in the binding incessant acceleration
towards non-existent events, the future and the past, which do not
exist. These are mental perceptions and proclivities which are
created resulting from the anxiety of resistance to the present.
The anxiety of the present and the difficulty of applying the
cognitive energy towards perception of the now is a core issue and
create problems of accumulation which provokes endemic problems
in civilization..The myth of the past and the future are the boot
code for electronically amplified capitalism. The constant imperial
barrage of the market opening and closing forces consciousness to
limit itself in its view of what is happening, segmenting experience
between these transitory trading signals, the buying and selling
of securities, and the movement of numbers between artificially
intelligent clouds of silicon. Along with the proliferation of
electronic personal media artifacts, micro-communications appliances,
and pico-scale entertainment devices arrives the radical shift in the
mechanisms by which the human species interrelates to each other.
Mobile text messaging, in which the oppression of time compresses
the word, concatenating and abbreviating expressions of emotion
and intentionality, quantizing and sampling every factor and every
aspect. Within the scope of five years, the language of texting has
antiquated the conventional speech patterns of humans. We speak
to each other less, and how we speak to each other reverts to a
generalist configuration of language. The sophistication and layering
of electronic interaction modifies the value and meaning of words,
plying them into a general fabric of nuanced and entranced meaning.

We write less than we say, shortening words and phrases because the
clocking of our keystrokes and screen taps is metrically gauged by
the sub-nanosecond reverberations of silicon vibrations. Though the
formalized text is atomized, the meaning is generalized as the primal
careening of the solar clock is replaced by the atomic, acting in
parallel, across five hundred million cell phones. Communication
is shifting to being the exchange of images, and not the intuition
and deduction of spoken phrases; a reversion from the auricular to
visual. A text received on a smart phone is not a conversation in
the linear, literate sense. It is a image, light painting, a video
still, a pixilated artifice. We look into the bounded and framed image
signalized by the network, as it is scanned for malware, and it relays
abbreviated and optimized small scale black form on the left hand side
of the screen, a letter or word. Our eyes move always to read and
intuit the picture, beginning at the left hand side of the screen.
This draws favor in the left hand side of the brain, the logical
side, dealing with the analysis of information. As our eyes are nerve
endings connecting direct pathways into the center of our cortical
apparatus, the text is the flashing of bright lights into the centers
of analysis. Texting is not communication, it's taking a LCD 3.2
megapixel 5 watt flashlight to your corpus callosum.Whereas we think
we are talking to each other, we are all simply connecting our bodies
into a massive network, creating a massive DNA calculator, with hosts
and endpoints consisting of carbon and flesh. The human species in the
post-information society is a Turing state- machine capable of either
turning on or off the screen. Communication on the macro scale becomes
the number of screens transmitting light at any given time. It is a
modality of code consisting of blinking UV and visible light emanating
from the surface of terrestrial earth.The input data either stimulates
the cortical nervous action of turning on a screen or not.

The earth pulses at varied rates, possibly radiating at some strange
cosmic level a gaia morse-code linking schuman resonance to galactic
exchange between Urantia/Earth and her surrounding celestial spheres.
Humanity as a whole becomes a massive empirical experiement in
systems analysis, an Einthoven fantasy. What ideas, images, and
events trigger the most ebullient patterns of UV splashing emitted
from the surface of earth outwards towards the cosmos? Thus the
shortening and dampening of words and phrases towards being images
and signs analytically flashed across millions of screens occurs
as a facilitator, easing and enabling more flashing of screens
as the earth uses humanity as path towards cosmic connectivity.
Post-information society wages an imperial war against the present,
for the psychological focus attuned through focusing attention to
the present moment, what is to be observed through hearing and sight
clears the cognitive space relished by multinational market interests
craving to insert their laboratory-designed mass produced branded
self sculptures. Without time, there is no need for accumulation.
Accumulation is a temporal-anxiety effect, and hence the endgame
technology, the death of event and time is the destruction of the
system from which its myth unfolded from.

/*http://www(dot)chadscoville(dot)com
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