Diggin this...

(via Wooster Collective)

Human Pac Man

The escape from Crete

(pic from here)

Today on Twitter someone compared Michael Jackson to Icarus.

Icarus grew up in captivity. His father engineered the plan for his escape. And his mode of escape eventually led to his tragic demise.

The resonance is compelling:

At first there was a terror in the joy. The wide vacancy of the air dazed them-a glance downward made their brains reel. But when a great wind filled their wings, and Icarus felt himself sustained, like a halcyon bird in the hollow of a wave, like a child uplifted by his mother, he forgot everything in the world but joy. He forgot Crete and the other islands that he had passed over: he saw but vaguely that winged thing in the distance before him that was his father Daedalus. He longed for one draft of flight to quench the thirst of his captivity: he stretched out his arms to the sky and made toward the highest heavens.

Alas for him! Warmer and warmer grew the air. Those arms, that had seemed to uphold him, relaxed. His wings wavered, dropped. He fluttered his young hands vainly-he was falling-and in that terror he remembered. The heat of the sun had melted the wax from his wings; the feathers were falling, one by one, like snowflakes; and there was none to help.

He fell like a leaf tossed down by the wind, down, down, with one cry that overtook Daedalus far away. When he returned and sought high and low for the poor boy, he saw nothing but the birdlike feathers afloat on the water, and he knew that Icarus was drowned.

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RIP MJ...

Human stigmergy

Stigmergy is a form of self organization involving organisms and the encoding of information into their environment:

Stigmergy is a mechanism of spontaneous, indirect coordination between agents or actions, where the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a subsequent action, by the same or a different agent.

Originally used to describe termite behavior, it has generally been the monopoly of social insects.

But this is changing.

Stigmergy scales up to human activities quite well.

One of the best examples of a stigmergic human practice is graffiti: the encoding of ephemeral messages into the environment as a kind of metadata about territory and identity...literally tagging.

The broken window theory is another example of stigmergy in an urban setting:

Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.

The internet is also the backdrop for a number of stigmergic practices:

The massive structure of information available in a wiki, or an open source software project such as the Linux kernel could be compared to a termite nest; one initial user leaves a seed of an idea (a mudball) which attracts other users who then build upon and modify this initial concept, eventually constructing an elaborate structure of connected thoughts.

Now that the internet is a shared environment for close to 1/4 the world population, stigmergy contextualizes online collaborative behavior very effectively.

I'm starting to think Kafka was onto something...

Is Burning Man counter-cultural?

(image from here)

One dude interviewed for this academic paper about Burning Man had a pretty interesting answer to the question - is Burning Man counter-cultural:

No… I consider my day-to-day world counter-cultural. I think that society, the global-whatever you want to call this thing we live in, most of the time, going to work, it’s just… just so fragmented, so incongruent, that I think true culture is found in what we’re doing with Burning Man. I don’t get that same sense of community and cultural richness presented to me, or presented [at all]… It’s almost like you have to search for it outside of select few things, and Burning Man being one of those things. And the intentional communities that are forming through people having met one another at Burning Man, who started collaborating on projects, started to share their passion… that’s real culture. I think counter-culture is people getting numbed and going to work forty hours a week and losing their passion and sight of their dream and purpose, that’s counter-cultural.

It's interesting to think about Burning man not as an arbitrary departure from modern culture but as a powerful restoration of premodern culture.

I think I have to agree with this guy.

The modern industrial project is counter-cultural.

Burning Man, to some degree, is the restoration of human culture.

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"Cultural Performances at Burning Man: Dramatizing the Postmodern Crisis of Affect"