[ Fractal Interpolation ] Ep 28 - The Grey Area Behind The Mall
Episode 28
THE GREY AREA BEHIND THE MALL
2017–06–29
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TransProse is a project that algorithmically extracts the emotion from text and generates music with it. Sometimes you can detect a familiar plot in 45 seconds.
Hello
As I was writing this, I took a quick straw poll on twitter as to whether it should be “Grey Area” or “Gray Area”. Results indicate that if you are American it is Gray, and if you are Anywhere Else or Pretentious American it is Grey. So. Grey it is.
Grey Area
Networks shift with technology, but there are certain topologies that can be modeled independent of the mediums that produce them. There’s an idea, usually approached with either a fond nostalgia and golden ageism, or an “aren’t we glad we’ve evolved beyond that,” of an ingrouping that was built into certain network structures until not too long ago. I’m talking about discovering new music by going out to a club, or by going to a record store and asking the person behind the counter for recommendations. Or digging crates, or grabbing things based on the cover art and hoping they would be good. (I recall picking up a $2.99 bargain bin CD of an artist named Shadowman just because the only non-Japanese text I could find was the track title “My Neighbors Hate Me (radio edit)”. It turned out to be what I would later know as Merzbow-style noise, which I didn’t understand at the time. The “radio edit” was a slightly shorter burst of the same noise. I often wish I could find that music again.)
I’m also talking about the fact that at certain times, certain forms of information could only be had by way of xeroxes, and only if you knew the right people to ask, or the right weird hole in the wall physical shop to walk into, with the sketchy guy behind the counter who was always listening to something really wild, which you would get the name of and go back to the record shop and bug that guy about. These documents were dangerous: the staples would prick your fingers, the ink would smudge on your clothes, and they would open paper cuts in your psyche that let in a new, weird world.
In the 90s and early 2ks, when the Internet was growing its rhizomes, it seemed like it was going to be the vast and infallible archive of all human knowledge. It would be the new library of Alexandria, one that could only be burned by a civilization-destroying event, and it would hold all the information in the world. This dream drove many a coffee fueled rant at people who wore less black than those of us who believed it.
I am beginning to discover that certain information is becoming more difficult to find on the internet. What seemed in the 2ks to be an explosion of all the information in the world, the great archive of all human knowledge, is now becoming more difficult to navigate. I’m not talking about information supressed in an intentional way. This is a conspiracy theory that doesn’t need a conspiracy, just feedback loops.
Part of it is that it’s just too damn big. I’ve been saying for years “Filter is the new Search”, long enough that I should stop saying “new”, except people keep being surprised by it. In a lot of cases, the information is out there but buried under piles of advertising. Recently, I was looking for information on a relatively obscure detail in ancient Roman politics, for a project. I found a reference on wikipedia, and searched for the two word latin phrase. I got three pages of results wherein someone copied and pasted the wikipedia text and wrapped it in ads. Finally far down on page three I found a link to a web page (an .edu) where someone had gone to the trouble of typing in the text of an 1800s public domain text. Also the page looked like it had been made in about 2004, which is around when the centralization of the Internet really started accellerating.
There’s something here about how popularity and profit are the two main drives of search results, with relevance being far down the list. And that ties nicely to the proliferation of misinformation, lies, alternative facts, fake news, and all the other euphemisms for disinformation propaganda. I have a whole other newsletter in the pipe on this topic, probably, as I am trying to get better at paring down the number of parentheticals in any given piece of writing. But here I’m focusing mostly on the proliferation of spurious TLDs. A TLD, if you don’t know, is a “top-level domain,” so things like, until recently “.com”, “.edu”, “.gov” and, in more recent times, “.xxx”, “.code”, and “.science”. Symantec, who make some of the leading anti-malware products, are now recommending blocking all .science domains because a very high percentage of traffic from them is spam or shady marketing. So, we now live in a world where if you get information from a web site that is literally named “science” it is probably trying to sell you something.
In my mind, this all ties together with an article I keep open in a tab, because it nags at me: After 41 years, Berkeley sci-fi bookstore Dark Carnival is closing. Dark Carnival, if you don’t know it, is one of the few remaining Sci-Fi and Fantasy focused bookstores left in the country, and it has been cited as an important cultural institution by some of the most influential authors in the genre. I went in there one year on my birthday, and the owner, upon learning this, wandered into the back of the store and returned with an early edition hardback of Fritz Leiber stories, which he gave me. I don’t know how he knew I needed Fritz Leiber, but I did, and it was a strangely magical experience. I am personally made incredibly sad by the fact that market forces are causing this, and all the other small temples of my people, to be shuttered in favor of the gleaming cathedral of Amazon. (Which I was about to link to another newsletter but then I remembered that one is still in draft form. Maybe later.)
It seems to me that there is a shift in cultural forces right now. Centralization is still happening, of course, walls are still going up around gardens, and the minds of us on the ground are just civilian casualties in the siege warfare between them for our dollars. But there’s something else, too. There are cracks forming, or, I guess, there are certain cracks that resist being filled and are starting to spread. There’s the Dark Web and the Deep Web and a bunch of other terms invented by people who recognize that we are living in Bill’s World but lack his naming skill. There’s Silk Road and Tor and Signal and Wire and all the other wretched hives of scum and villany that exist on the fringes of the web.
There are cycles within certain distinct circles between centralization (“why don’t you have a Tumblr”) and decentralization (“why don’t you have a self-hosted blog”) in personal publishing, and these ebb and flow at different times, like a series of locks and channels as social tides shift. But I’m seeing more people drift away from the walled gardens and set up shop in structures that defy extant spatial metaphors. The cultural forces that power Sci-Fi bookstores and zine publishing and sketchy record stores still exist. They are not going extinct. As they get pressed down, they leak out into other, increasingly dominant modes of transmission.
It feels like the Internet has been turning into The Mall. And the Mall is still growing, and will continue to be for some time, but now, if you go out the back way, and duck under some filthy awnings, you’ll find the grey market tent city that’s set up behind the Mall. There are fire barrels and bounty hunters and junkies and you might get stabbed. But there are also stalls selling anything you want. Next to the drugs and weapons there are copies of a research paper on the latest cancer treatments. Inside the Mall, it’s behind a paywall of academia where you have to be rich or well connected to see it, but here, it’s just sitting out to be read. There’s a cluster of witches peering at you from under their black peaked hats, offering a book of spells which also contains herbal remedies you will need when you can’t afford health care. There are some anarchist punks listening to Crass too loudly and teaching people how to defeat surveillance cameras. And if you look carefully, you might just find that xeroxed zine that pricks your finger, smears ink on your clothes, and opens your mind to a world you didn’t know existed.
Aftermath
As ever, feedback and notes are encouraged. In particular I am curious about those 1–5 people who unsubscribe every time I send out a a newsletter. I theorize that they don’t actually read them, they just see the arrival and remember “ugh I subscribed to another thing”. But if you happen to be one of them this round, please do drop me a line and tell me why you’re leaving as you do? I am genuinely curious. And if you choose to stay, thank you! I appreciate each and every one of you.