Wednesday, October 07, 2009

The Trickster

Photo Credit: Arlo Guthrie


Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself. He wills nothing consciously. At all times he is constrained to behave as he does from impulses over which he has no control. He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being. - Paul Radin


Again, knowledge cannot be aggregated into a single ruling body." John Papola



That quote from Papola isn’t precisely true. It is actually a limit on tracking identified resources in real time, that is, kinds, types and precision converted to actionable intelligence. The entire focus of web/Internet design has been to increase the precision given real time feeds.

No, you can’t know what goes on inside a human mind but you can observe, record and analyze speech acts. So trying to use human purposefulness as a defense or offense is to hide behind the rat hole of intensionality. You can know enough to make locally rational decisions.

To provide investors and other control mavens such information, you’ve been steadily and eagerly giving up your privacy and submitting to a 365 x 24 x 7 surveillance society. You did it for your convenience, fun and need to increase your self-perceived significance. By the very same game rules for markets, you are now hostage to the business models of IBM, Oracle/Sun, Microsoft, Apple and so on where next year’s profits rely absolutely on increasing your use and submission to the very technologies that provide that transparency.

After almost two decades of crying in the wilderness about this, my best advice is find a little place full of good people where you are secure with whatever your ambitions are and adapt.

Feed the trolls whatever will cause them to evolve. You can use the greed of others to modify their behaviors. That is the role of The Trickster.

Eat more rabbits.

4 comments:

John Cowan said...

When I looked at this in Google Reader before clicking through to the actual blog (I don't always, especially if it's just a video, as I don't watch video normally unless it's you performing), I saw "Arlo Guthrie Trickster is at one and the same ..." It really sounded quite correct until I got to "He possesses no values", and I thought, Whaaaat?, and clicked through.

Len Bullard said...

I think I fixed it. I saw the same problem on the Facebook view.

Dammed markup. Always tricking me. :-)

The Berkshires were beautiful last week. Great Barrington is a little piece of heaven in the fall.

John Cowan said...

Damn, and I actually have a house just over the border into NYS that I haven't been to in months (several different problems coalesced). Coulda seen you.

Len Bullard said...

Rats. You could have come down and hung out. The People were freakin' great. I'd never seen the Berkshires. I loved every moment of it. Arlo doesn't have fans. He has a flock.

I didn't think Norman Rockwell would move me. I was wrong.

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