SEO and the marketplace

What does the existence of "SEO-optimization" tell us about the phase of our civilization? How do we read it? Is it building up to something much more invasive and radical, or is it the harbinger of inevitable decline or collapse? First, is this occupation structurally new? Haven't people always tried to make themselves and their peers more visible if that visibility could benefit them? And a SEO-optimizer does precisely that: using the right set of keywords, meta-tags, titles, headers, resource identifiers, links, and so on, to make it more likely that people find it when they look for something similar. This is the digital equivalent of a crowded marketplace, with everybody shouting at their loudest to promote only their products. The equivalence seems fitting, except that in the digital realm, the organizing principle is far inferior to the real marketplace. In the real world, space (location) offers a perfect way of organizing the market in such a way that it becomes efficient for both customers and salespeople. Vegetable stands will naturally attract each other, and corners for dairy products, meat, and fish will emerge. The loudest merchant can only reach the proximity of its market stand, and his advertising won't help him much if he can't back it up with good value-for-money. The marketplace, with its organizing principle of location, develops an efficiency that has no equivalent in the virtual marketplace.

The virtual marketplace is an overkill of possibilities. The customer enters through a "search engine" where she enters what she thinks she is looking for, relying on the software to provide adequate results. She'll probably look at the first few search results and then decide to buy or use the services offered, and that is why it is so important for businesses to hire these SEO-specialists. If they succeed, they have a 100% advantage over the other businesses: visible vs. invisible. Because there is no organizing principle on the virtual marketplace, a lot of (and as I like to argue unsustainably much) energy will have to go into advertising, promoting, customer-acquisition. Indeed, in a broader sense, free-market capitalism often rapes the very metaphor that gave it its name. There is no market of people browsing and making household-decisions as they purchase certain goods; there is a many-tier inherently complex structure of backdoor deals that manipulate consumers and always work in favor of the possessing class. But one thing at the time. We want to say something about SEO optimization.

There are too many people whose job it is to "optimize" a company's stance in search engine results, its global visibility on the Internet. I think this is not a beautiful culture. Global competition, except perhaps when done by infinitely intelligent machines, will lead to mass starvation and an unjustifiable gaping gap between the rich and the poor. It is at its best a blatant overrating of human collective intelligence, and at its worst greed writ large. What's my argument? If the current trend continues, corporations will not only buy their place in people's heads, as they've always done with advertising, they will effectively obfuscate any competitor that is not part of the global elite. It will be almost impossible to create a different sneaker or soft drink because the "visibility capital" is in the hands of the elite players. They will of course hold on to their power and what will emerge is an elite of brands and providers large enough to fill anyone's imagination but too small to provide enough jobs for the world.

Eventually, the unfettered virtual competition over visibility will result in massive unemployment. The SEO-specialists will be laid off last, but they too, will go. The virtual marketplace will have evolved into something very undesirable (as this culture is not ready to replace the concept of "work" with something more sensible). I call the mechanism at work the "curse of efficiency" and will write more about that next time.

Is truth=beauty is true?

We all know people who occasionally proclaim that truth is beauty. But have you ever shared a table with somebody who made the statement in such a convincing way, that you felt that their whole existence was breathing this truth? I did, last week.
I met a stage designer somewhere in Amsterdam, and there he said it. I instantly believed what he said and nibbled on my cookie while nodding my approval. Later that day, cooled down by a bout of Dutch rain, I felt I had to somehow reproduce the philosophical underpinning I have for it. Strolling alongside the pretty canals, crossing wonderful wooden drawbridges, and looking at the reflections of the slanted facades in the last remaining mirrors of ice, I attempted to think about the subject.
The concept of Truth, when extended beyond the purely functional "what is the case" (under certain circumstances), is a concept vague enough to keep many philosophers busy for the next couple of centuries. But that's no reason to shrug. Let's deal our cards:

1. Truth under NO circumstances - mathematical, logical truths, tautologies (eg. Pi is not a rational number)
2. Truth under SOME circumstances - everyday truths, scientific knowledge (eg. Jupiter is larger than Neptune)
3. Truth under ALL circumstances - ultimate Truths (eg. religious truths)

I write "NO" circumstances (or context) in the first case, because these truths don't depend on any context. Of course they hold, but since that fact is not influenced by the context, it doesn't help distinguishing between contexts. 2+2=4 on Mars or among microbes. We would say it doesn't tell any aspect of the "truth" about Mars or microbes. Truths in the second sense, that hold under "SOME" circumstances, do help us tell some aspect of the "truth" about planets, animals, humans, or words, colors, smells. Intuitively, what religious truth means is some kind of generalisation of this second kind of truth, a truth that tells us ALL aspects of everything, and tells it apart. Truth in that third sense is a perfect categorization or taxonomy of everything we dare talk about.

That concept can only be approximated, as we are thrown into Being and possess only eyes here, on the inside. Such approximations (without calling them so) have been attempted by religion since the early rise of human culture (eg. the Gilgamesh). The optimal approximation would be as close as we could get to the Truth (insofar as that should remain meaningful as an absolute concept) and how do we get to such an approximation? How do we make a "move" that is at the same time a generalization of our experience and yet dependent on it. This move, I think, should be described as aesthetic. It holds the uniqueness of an experience (because beauty is what strikes us and inspires us) while generalizing at the same time as we identify it as beauty (the painful comparison to known beauty and past experiences). The aesthetic experience thus qualifies as a candidate for the kind of approximation of truths of the third category.

Some say that you can't do such wild thinking without soon arriving at some Hegelian phrase. Here is ours: (truth in art, like truth in general, requires the harmony of an inner and outer, of concept and reality. (Aesthetics Vol I, p. 343, translated by T.M. Knox)

So yes, affirmative, truth=beauty, our sense of beauty is the organ can perceive the most meaningful truths.

The Younger Narrative

It's five in the afternoon, incredible lighting makes the rocky mountain in front of me, across the stream, more majestic, more real. It is not easy to pick the right words to describe it, and artificial will it sound, but however weak and dimly pronounced, they are here the words, marking a memory newer than all that came before it.

It's the younger narrative that remains and will guide future minds, simply by virtue of coming later, and fading later. It is the narrative of the grandsons rebelling, no matter what the cause, no matter how honorable or grotesque, no matter how eloquent. The stories told by the ones who come later will overlay everything ever told. Stories, myths, fables passed on through from generation to generation is always the result of selective adaptation. Instead of the metaphor "passing" on we could use the image of a series of distortion mirrors reflecting and re-writing stories at the same time.

Do you love your own voice?

Go out into the world and learn to hear your own voice. In discussions about politics, commenting on a movie you've seen, consoling a friend, venting your discomfiture or dismay over a newspaper article, writing a note to your parents, leaving a message after the beep, you are using something most uniquely yours: your own voice. Be aware of it.

A voice is a mysterious thing

The only criteria we have to judge what we use our voice to create, to judge it as something beyond conventional frames of mind, is our very own liking of it. How do we feel when we read, see, or hear it again after an hour, a week, a month, a year? Does it still make our own hearts beat a little faster, our own breath become a little colder, the hairs on our skin rise? How do we listen to our own voice? Is it with the pervasive worry that something could be wrong, that there is a typpo somewhere, that we embarrass ourselves? Do we perceive it is something merely functional, a means of communication and nothing else? If you would have a machine that would detect your state of mind and what you need to express that would have some buttons on it you press to express it in an optimized way, would you use it? If you can avoid the stammering while confessing your love, or the shame while confessing a sin, or a writer's block, or too many "uh's", would you use technology for that?

What do I think about Zizek?

What is he thinking?

As a learned philosopher with a funny blog, I should have an opinion or two about the Thinking Beast of Ljubljana, the populist, famous, celebrated, roaring, one and only, please welcome Slavoj Zizek (the adornments on the Zs are intentionally left out) who twists psychoanalytical theories together with rabid Marxism and generates a steady stream of anticapitalist thoughts with a dangerously early expiration date. I remember that he once proudly proclaimed that he didn't watch the movie Avatar, but had seen the poster and read a synopsis or something and considered that enough to burn it to the ground in one of his countercynical reviews. I hereby proudly proclaim that I never went cover-to-cover in any of mr. Zizek's books (but ind of did get the gist and the jest of that body of his texts). I also grow a beard now.

Some criticize Slavoj because he abuses Lacanian thinking for his own purpose, others think his rhetorical ardor precludes engaging and meaningful discussions of his work. He is turning himself into a caricature faster than anybody would be able to escape such a fixation. But still, what can we distill from his philosophies? We could - and should - have a good laugh with the Elvis of cultural theory, and learn not to take ourselves too seriously. Disappointing? You want to gain wisdom, you want to know the true essence of society, the inner workings of revolutions, crises, and submission to the capitalist beast? I don't think you'll find that in Zizek's philosophies. You can find a lot of controversial material, I mean the man calls himself a "friendly Stalinist" and I overheard him once in Berlin after a lecture where he was basking in self-indulgence, "Oh how smart we are..." - his interlocutor was Peter Sloterdijk and the venue the Rosa Luxemburg theater;- But "real" communists find him dangerous too, because he is to wild to be a dogmatic anything. The 4th International over at WSWS calls him a "charlatan" and "puerile thinker", and their argument is, as far as I can see, mere non-compliance with Marx and denial of the existence of the working class.

Where he would get interesting for us is the moment he turns his Heraclitian rigor toward the planet. He is worried about ecological disasters like the BP oil spill, and climate change related forced migrations. Yet what I miss is a scientific understanding of the world. That is my main concern with Žižek (here my friend, I gave you back the toboggans on your Zs), when I hear him talk I miss a scientific understanding. I want to hear him explain in some depth the depletion of groundwater levels, the dangers of fracking, the destruction of the Amazon, the melting of glaciers and the pollution of rivers. Why? Because it is a basis we don't need to fight over. The blind fanatics and their spasm of denial of natural realities will die off quickly after nature makes her cold breath felt.

What we need is a philosophy - and philosophers - with a firm ground in science, not political theory or economy. Perhaps, ideologues and anti-ideologues have in common that scientific (ecological, geological) knowledge doesn't affect the core of what they want to say. While they diligently absorb ecological disasters into their theories, they are merely there because they illustrate the bankruptcy of the System (our artifact), not because we are a species among other species that are about to fuck up the planet - and ideology is piled up with anti-ideology on the trash pile of petty righteousness called "history".

Back to nature, less meta-reflection, and better sex.
At this point, I could suggest a counter-philosophy, and engage in some kind of dialogue with monsieur Žižek. But I leave that to the reader as an exercise. Please inflate your own balloons of meaning. What I see as the role of philosophers does have something to do with ideology and dialectics, precisely because these beasts of mass culture are not going do disappear ('t would be naive to think that). A philosopher knows what she needs to know about metaphysics, and should tirelessly criticize new ideologies, be it ecofascism, post-capitalism or new age collectivism. And precisely because they have a firm base in scientific understanding, they can differ and digress and do that what Nietzsche's old, halkyonic pharmacy once prescribed: bearing the largest possible contradictions in our chest. I hope this account wasn't too šcattered, and its intuition more or less clear.

Nouakchott to Dakar

My Mauritanian friend gives me some cash to catch a “sept-place” private taxi to the border with Senegal. I catch it somewhere in the outskirts of dusty Nouakchott and receive honest treatment from the taxi operators. It is not too far to the river Senegal and the border, and the scenery is already getting richer. Some brushes, even trees start lining the road and by the time I got off in the village of Rosso the desert was behind me.

The Next World War

This rant sprouts from the documentary film "Supermarket Secrets", a strong piece of investigative journalism concerning the UK food retail industry that came out a few years ago. I watched it with disbelief and tears in my eyes, disgust, then anger. This poor little apple that is not perfectly symmetrical like the snobby faces of its sick consumers and the supermarketeers who rationalize their system by pointing at the "demand" of these consumers. This one misshapen apple, thrown to the pigs or left to rot while a billion people are starving, should enrage billions. And once they are enraged they might start to see that it is not only this apple. It's everything. The entire food production and the entire non-food production. Wasteful, environmentally disastrous, unsustainable, disgustingly "efficient". The whole system should be taken down. Not "dismantled" but blown up, carpet bombed, nuked into oblivion.

Commercial Break

It's time for a short commercial break. Get comfortable in your chair and watch the wonderful products. Don't believe the communist propaganda that commercials are made to seduce people into buying stuff they don't need. Commercials are essential to life and without them even the most basic human functioning would be unthinkable, we would all live and die in caves, deprived of our basic human needs and desire. Without television commercials we would no longer experience desire, and become apathetic, defenseless against the threat of communism. Without radio advertisements we would stop to recognize our ability to be political beings. And without billboards and print media ads we would lose our sense of self. We have made it a number one priority to defend the right to make this society more livable which as per the above findings means turn this entire country into a canvas for commercials.

Ducks on Dawkins

Our Reflection is sometimes quite astonishing.

I got carried away a bit by a series of "related videos" about Richard Dawkins and his quest to extirpate religion. His eloquence is mighty and delightful, and I do agree with most of his arguments. Of course science offers a far better explanation of natural phenomenons, and its supremacy in predicting the future is self-evident. With experiments that must be essentially replicable in the lab, and the continuous effort to identify and eradicate every bias, science is the best thing since sliced bread.

Two Strangers

How much peace is in an evening walk
of two near strangers at the bay
when they hold hands and gently talk
even if their peace - has gone away

How much truth lies there, for a little while
when of human needs the most divine
between a thoughtful nod and then a smile
is shared by eyes like yours and mine 

The sea is whispering quietly below
her waves are pushing light shadows ashore
we inspired each other - and smiled even more
Our shadows, let's pick them up before we go
because the moonlight won't restore
those shadows and this instant, never more