Re: <documenta X><blast> jeopardy surface (fwd)
Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Sat, 19 Jul 1997 19:42:07 -0400
At 03:39 PM 7/18/97 -0700, you wrote:
>
>Yes. And what's rarely mentioned when discussing the promulgation of (new)
>ideas, is _how long_ the same idea (meme?) can continue to resurface (or
>legend?) and disturb any fixed sense of 'profile.'
>
"profiling" as a technique of social understanding has ranged from the
tragically crude (it has been reported that in Guatemala the security
forces developed a profile for "probable terrorists" that was no more
complex than female in her 20's wearing blue jeans and running shoes =
suspicious individual, detain; they apparently had been instructed in the
concept of suspect profiles, but utilized the idea in such crude ways that
it most resembled Pol Pot's directive that anyone wearing glasses was
educated, therefore a class enemy. Wearing glasses implied reading books
implied possessing historical memory implied coming between Pol Pot and his
dram of returning Cambodia to the Year Zero; glorious moment.) to the
fairly sophisticated (a corruption ridden police force in the American
Midwest, near Chicago, I think, used the widely available BrainMaker neural
net program to create a profile of officers who were likely to go bad. This
simple program was unexpectedly effective at targetting corruption-prone
police, so much so that the police union was in an uproar. When the union
president was then asked to justify his dissatisfaction with the profiling
technique, he fell into a baffled silence, then offered that it was
violating the privacy of the officers, presumably by it's seeming ability
to look into their private natures, or so it must have seemed to a naive
population). The next step appears to be in the tracking of social
deviance, as in the case of the serial killer(s) you described. However,
one can only speculate what the eventual consequence of machines that are
fast enough and deep enough to piece together the significance of all the
internet sites you have visited (your visits often DO leave a trace of your
ISP address behind, I was unhappy to discover), you credit card activities,
your medical and insurance histories, and so on. Like the human genome,
this tracing of your being-hologram, your meme-nome, your ontological code
will be know to desire, to be repelled, motivated, etc. in quite particular
ways, and at a higher level, groupings of these meme-nomes will interact in
given ways, leading to political and cultural outcomes. Given sufficient
sophistication, imagine a scenario where a terrorist organization consults
with a rogue computational business, one that will perform any analysis for
a sufficient amount of money, and determine that setting off a bomb of
specific yield, at a specific time of day, in a specific city will produce
the desired political effect, whereas if the bomb were twice or one half of
that yield, the public would either be inimpressed or so horrified that a
unwanted reaction would be created. Strange but possible. Or different
advertising would appear on your cable system depending on your profile;
you might be seeing an ad for beer while I'm seeing an ad for fat reducing
medicine..."web t.v." brings this possibility closer than before, as do
large scale servers, like the Oracle 8 Larry Ellison is so proud of... a
fascinating atomization sets in, the environment starts to become like a
second skin, an informational body glove that reacts to your every mental
stirring and adapts itself accordingly, unless one is so extreme and self
sufficient to live completely off the grid; in which case you're profiled
as a social menace and get pulled over for questioning five time a day...
this is a novel dialectical relationship wih the environment; the outside
becomes the inside, the inside becomes the outside... topologists; see
Klein Bottles.