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< | Since even before we first began scratching out narrative on cave walls and in leather, man has longed to debiologize memory, to preserve experience in a shape less fickle the physical self. This is a desire born of necessity: Nothing more than the heavy firing of neural artillery, memory is as fragile as the tissue which embodies it, and so the life of man has been a constant search for way of escape from memory's caprice. Today, this escape is not only easy, it is already done: turn on the Facebook and let the ticking seconds of your daily life find permanent rest: memory, immortalized. | >
> | Since even before we first began scratching out narrative on cave walls and in leather, man has longed to debiologize memory, to preserve experience in a shape less fickle the
physical self. This is a desire born of necessity: Nothing more than the heavy firing of neural artillery, memory is as fragile as the tissue which embodies it, and so the life of man has been a constant search for way of escape from memory's caprice. Today, this escape is not only easy, it is already done: turn on the Facebook and let the ticking seconds of your daily life find permanent rest: memory, immortalized. | | | | |
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< | The biological memory, fragile though it is, does not travel alone, unmoored; it has for a constant companion its twin: that is to say, dreams--- the pieces of our day made ciphered, unreadable, and spit back into our gaping mouths while we sleep. Awake, the brain traces fire along neural pathways to form memory; in sleep, it reconstructs a narrative from the fragmented and bleating ashes of that loop, which whisper on and on into the night. But if the dream is the fractured reconstruction of memory, and our memories are now machinized, does it not follow that our digital selves too are susceptible of dreaming? Yes, yes, the digital self too dreams, but they are different in kind and more dangerous than those born of the body. | >
> | The biological memory, fragile though it is, does not travel alone, unmoored; it has for a constant companion its twin: that is to say, dreams—the pieces of our day made ciphered, unreadable, and spit back into our gaping mouths while we sleep. Awake, the brain traces fire along neural pathways to form memory; in sleep, it reconstructs a narrative from the fragmented and bleating ashes of that loop, which whisper on and on into the night. But if the dream is the fractured reconstruction of memory, and our memories are now machinized, does it not follow that our digital selves too are susceptible of dreaming? Yes, yes, the digital self too dreams, but they are different in kind and more dangerous than those born of the body. | | | | |
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< | In the Interpretation of Dreams , Freud tells us that dreams are a means of wish fulfillment, a symbolic reenactment of those wishes that have failed to find gratification in our waking life. But it is not our conscious desires that give rise to dreams, nor the longings we can readily identify. Rather, it is the workings of our unconscious that do so, and dreams are the child of the conflict produced by the unfulfilled nature of the wish that lurks beneath the surface. We try to suppress, push down, down, down the forbidden want, but we cannot kill our desire; in the dream, all is revealed, even if the nature of our longing is such that our mind must censor it. | >
> | In the The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud tells us that dreams are a means of wish fulfillment, a symbolic reenactment of those wishes that have failed to find gratification in our waking life. But it is not our conscious desires that give rise to dreams, nor the longings we can readily identify. Rather, it is the workings of our unconscious that do so, and dreams are the child of the conflict produced by the unfulfilled nature of the wish that lurks beneath the surface. We try to suppress, push down, down, down the forbidden want, but we cannot kill our desire; in the dream, all is revealed, even if the nature of our longing is such that our mind must censor it. | | |
The dream censor is responsible for the distorted vision of dreaming. When is a cigar not just a cigar? When your subconscious wish cannot be fulfilled in the context of the social mores of the world in which you live, and indeed your mind cannot even admit its existence--- here enters the dream censor. It is by this light that we can understand the digital dream. When the Facebook machine looks at your profile, reads your digital memory and aggregates the small movements of your day-to-day life to produce the target ads which reveal the subconscious wish, it is dreaming. But where the biologic dream is opaque, the digital dream is crystalline. What do you want? Ask your dreams and come up with only a handful of runes. Ask your Facebook, and all your wants are known. It reveals the wish before you know you had it, just as the biologic dream does, except here there is no censor to keep you from the truth. | | | I agree with Gavin, the style of the writing, this approach, is refreshing. I am inspired to try something similar in my next paper. Very nicely done.
-- BrianS - 03 Dec 2009 | |
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- It interests me how some groups respond first to the content and others first to the style of your writing. On this occasion I think you balance successfully on the edge of the precipice of just a little too much, stylistically, but I think the substance is invaluable and goes further than the readers have allowed for. The issue becomes clearer when one considers the theory behind the advertising. You might find it useful to spare a few words to draw those inferences.
- I think you might go so far in the project of adjoining Marx and Freud as to point out that what is advertised by the dream is not only consumption but debt. In fact, until the moment before yesterday, people had been referring to mortgage debt, the American's endlessly subsidized middle-class religious offering on the altar of suburbia, quite without irony, as "the American Dream." Debt is the essence of unfreedom from the distinctively American, Jeffersonian, point of view.
- I think you put a foot wrong when Justin asked you about the argument of Civilization and Its Discontents. I wish it were possible to assume that people have read the thinkers (Darwin, Marx, Freud) who cut the pathways of thought that led to the twentieth century. It should be possible, because people like the people we live with should have encountered those thinkers first hand. They shouldn't want to let others mediate their experience of the ideas that set fire to so many extraordinary minds. But, because taking it all predigested and imagining you know what the ideas in their real form would do to your head is so much easier, people don't read these incomparable thinkers anymore. You have to give people a few words more, or link to something explanatory. And when you cite to a great work, you don't have to assist the Google Books surveilled-reading approach. In addition to using them when you only want a page of something, you can always point the reader to a copy of the full free text online, if one exists, at Gutenberg, The Internet Archive or elsewhere. The wonderful works that everyone can now carry everywhere all the time in her free book reader should always be only a click away.
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