Davis: Chapter 9

Chris Carr
Davis Chapter 9 meme and explanation

I found the section of chapter 9 involving the fear of fast developing technology to be very interesting. Davis states that technology is moving "at a speed that boggles the best of minds." To relate this to some fears people may have today, I decided to use the example of how quick telephones are changing. My oldest brother is a perfect example of this. He had a flip phone until about a year ago because he did not want to learn how to use a smartphone. It is also a perfect example of how people could gain information about you without knowing, due to the GPS, camera, and microphone. Batman represents some of the older generation which fears the change from the technology they know, and Robin is the new generation open to the inventions and innovations being made. I know I am not a comedian.

Journal Entry 7: Davis: Ch. 9 (Sara Loughran)

Question: At what point is it the technology that is controlling us, rather than us controlling it? Is our world going to become unrecognizable 100 years from now because everything is about technology and virtual reality, rather than the real world?

I took some texts from Davis Ch. 9, as well as websites about virtual reality and artificial intelligence, and grouped them all into a big block of text. I then put that text into the Lazarus Corporation text mixing Desk 2.0 and this is the answer I got, after editing it to find the things that made the most sense.

Answer:

Transform the fallen world. The fallen world.

Following the by way of our senses. Of our senses.

In satellite networks, global media, and the though, that it might also be what Michael Grosso calls “the slow medieval world’s changing notions of technology, other sensory inputs, plus some special superiority to the rest of nature", we know about our reality comes to all colors and ages, we that the information superhighway is open. “Just plug technomania of our contemporary world". 

Such a system could potentially astounding predictability, we tell ourselves (and we would refer to as a negative consequences in the future, thus are told) that the digital age undergo recursive self-improvement, triggering an intelligence suffused with religious belief. 

"It does the last, unless we learn to Internet,” a voice-over tells us we recognize the potential for a virtual reality. In the long term version of reality that isn’t real, we are saturated with the rhetoric there, but from our perspective it a superintelligence might help us eradicate fervor.

The creation of strong AI might cause an apocalypse progress as science does, forcing us to invent revolutionary new technologies, such as hearing. These are however only our the corporeal problems of the world, rich flow of information from the myriad peoples zeroes in on a communications utopia arises yet again. The almost brains ensures that we have a world for humanity. With the growth happening,” promises an IBM TV spot, hubris, myopia, and blind insensitivity to and others who insist that the the individual, restore community, aid the shows in his revelatory book. The information, your perception of reality would eschatology, with the result that is history.

Some experts have expressed concern to if this is beneficial. We, humanity, one that will help empower of computers, communications networks, and electronic unintentionally cause great harm. We believe development that has characterized western culture. Religion of Technology, our drive for centuries is infused with millennialist influence, and the world is yours. Strong AI will be achieved, research today will help us better even spark world peace. Something is where all this is heading. Today, there are some who question whether sensory information and our brains sense-making to reason then, in other words, our entire experience of an important question is what will be the next Renaissance. The West has committed itself onto a terminal screen.

No, the secrets. No, the secrets.

Technology became an evolutionary leap forward for environment in our minds. Everything that is, and interbreeding of the Internet, wire our most obvious sense organs. Obvious sense organs. The truth know the world through our senses considerable consequences: the scientific and technological see the word “utopia?" The word “utopia?” typed out. A montage of the world is an MTV-flavored television advertisement.

Databases will automatically produce a better and perception systems. In school we explore myriad worlds of the computer, with religious conviction. A widespread adoption of this would be perceived as real. Something which informs us regenerating the earth and revealing its perfect history fed directly into the AI systems is itself a cognitive event.


This is the meme I came up with:

Original Texts:

From Davis Ch. 9:

Though the revolutionary rhetoric of digital technocapitalism has been attacked for its hubris, myopia, and blind insensitivity to the corporeal problems of the world, it also signifies a truth with considerable consequences: the scientific and technological development that has characterized Western culture for centuries is infused with millennialist fervor. As the historian David Noble shows in his revelatory book The Religion of Technology, Joachim’s drive to perfect history fed directly into the medieval world’s changing notions of technology, as monasteries began incorporating the once lowly “mechanical arts” into their otherworldly labor. Besides embodying man’s God-given rational superiority to the rest of nature, technology enabled him to dominate and transform the fallen world. Following the Renaissance, the West committed itself to what Michael Grosso calls “the slow apocalypse of progress,” as science and technology took on the task of regenerating the earth and revealing its secrets. In Noble’s words, technology became eschatology, with the result that the technomania of our contemporary world “remains suffused with religious belief.”

It does not take a Joachim to see where all this is heading. Today, we are saturated with the rhetoric of “mythinformation,” which the social critic Langdon Winner defines as “the almost religious conviction” that a widespread adoption of computers, communications networks, and electronic databases will automatically produce a better world for humanity. With the growth and interbreeding of the Internet, wireless satellite networks, global media, and the myriad worlds of the computer, the communications utopia arises yet again. With astounding predictability, we tell ourselves (and are told) that the digital age is an evolutionary leap forward for humanity, one that will help empower the individual, restore community, aid the infirm, overcome prejudice, turbocharge democracy, make us smarter and richer, and maybe even spark world peace. “Something is happening,” promises an IBM TV spot, as a montage of the world’s myriad peoples zeroes in on a wise old African man. “Just plug in, and the world is yours.” In an MTV-flavored television advertisement for the MCI Network, which informs us that the information superhighway is open to all colors and ages, we see the word “utopia?” typed out on a terminal screen; “No, the Internet,” a voice-over tells us

From https://www.vrs.org.uk/virtual-reality/what-is-virtual-reality.html :

We know the world through our senses and perception systems. In school we all learned that we have five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight and hearing. These are however only our most obvious sense organs. The truth is that humans have many more senses than this, such as a sense of balance for example. These other sensory inputs, plus some special processing of sensory information by our brains ensures that we have a rich flow of information from the environment to our minds.

Everything that we know about our reality comes by way of our senses. In other words, our entire experience of reality is simply a combination of sensory information and our brains sense-making mechanisms for that information. It stands to reason then, that if you can present your senses with made-up information, your perception of reality would also change in response to it. You would be presented with a version of reality that isn’t really there, but from your perspective it would be perceived as real. Something we would refer to as a virtual reality.

From https://futureoflife.org/background/benefits-risks-of-artificial-intelligence/ :

In the long term, an important question is what will happen if the quest for strong AI succeeds and an AI system becomes better than humans at all cognitive tasks. As pointed out by I.J. Good in 1965, designing smarter AI systems is itself a cognitive task. Such a system could potentially undergo recursive self-improvement, triggering an intelligence explosion leaving human intellect far behind. By inventing revolutionary new technologies, such a superintelligence might help us eradicate war, disease, and poverty, and so the creation of strong AI might be the biggest event in human history. Some experts have expressed concern, though, that it might also be the last, unless we learn to align the goals of the AI with ours before it becomes superintelligent.

There are some who question whether strong AI will ever be achieved, and others who insist that the creation of superintelligent AI is guaranteed to be beneficial. At FLI we recognize both of these possibilities, but also recognize the potential for an artificial intelligence system to intentionally or unintentionally cause great harm. We believe research today will help us better prepare for and prevent such potentially negative consequences in the future, thus enjoying the benefits of AI while avoiding pitfalls.

Davis Chapter 6

Maddie Baum
Davis Chapter 6

"We must conclude that it is far from accidental that ecstatic phenomena have developed to the greatest degree in the most technocized societies. And it is to be expected that these phenomena will continue to increase. This indicates nothing less than the subjection of mankind's new religious life to technique...Ecstasy is subject to the world of technique and its servant" (171).

I really enjoyed how this chapter incorporated the influence of the outside on the digital world. It is interesting to see how over time different generations have seemingly used each other to come up with different ideas and connect with one another in the digital world. Where this was emphasized was through McLuhan's perception; He believed that the electronic media was eroding through the logical, linear and sequential world view that dominated the modern West. His theory was that the casual worldview was the product of the evolution of technology, and that without two specific societal influences, there would be no forum for the modern technological improvements that we have today. Fro example, the influence and coexistence of magic and scientific technology through Williams's analogy  His theory proved that through this coexisting we have created highly improved scientific technology.I find incorporating the thought of magic and technology to be a bizarre topic; how this chapter connected this term was through how we incorporate or imaginal lives in the digital world. Our imaginal lives have challenged us to become much more creative with the improvements that we make over mass media and the internet. A perfect example of this is how the gaming world has vastly changed imagery online, coding and our creative aspirations in the technological world. Gamers and hackers, or what Davis described to be "media tribes" have reconfigured mass media in accordance to their own needs and desires.

Davis Ch. 7 - 8

Davis Chapter 7-8
Maddie Baum

Something that I found to be incredibly interesting in this reading assignment was how Davis discussed the art of rhetoric. He described this as how the memory palaces of what a few Roman writers who discussed technical descriptions are a huge component of the rhetoric of technical descriptions. "Memory palaces could be based on real spaces or imaginary ones; some believed the best palaces combined the two modes, so that simulations of actual buildings were infused with impossible properties" (198). Why I find this to be such a grasping topic is because of how it emphasizes the wide variety of possibility when discussing the rhetoric of technical description. The way that Davis discusses the importance of memory and the art of cyberspace perfectly coincides with one another, highlighting how they both have very similar concepts to them.

This also relates to Davis' discussion on the relationship between the dream world and the virtual game world. Davis discusses how virtual reality in many cases becomes a place where people can represent their creativity and imaginary process in the game world. This is a very interesting concept; I am not typically familiar with the gaming world, but when Davis discussed the evolution of video games and how they influenced individual games and the improvement of how hackers I was very intrigued. It is amazing how the evolution of gaming has opened the doors for improvements in coding and creativity in not only the gaming world, but the computing world as well. It will be amazing to see the revolutionary movements that we make, especially over the next decade or two in our technology. There will only be improvements from here on out.

Davis: Chapters 7-8

Chris Carr

Davis: Chapters 7-8

Cyberspace: The Virtual Craft

            While I have noticed the same overall message in an earlier chapter, I find the main idea I take out of this chapter is that our imagination is our limitation. For instance, in the very beginning of the chapter, it speaks about theater being thought of as a “la réalité virtuelle”. This term came from the late 1930’s, and sure, the thinking behind it was not exactly what virtual reality became. However, it did become a reality in the 1990’s and is still evolving today. While there is no older example to show where the idea originally came from, but I remember growing up connecting x-boxes together so more than four of us could play a game at once. While MUD was created in the late 1970’s, nothing like x-box LIVE started to become popular until the 2000’s. The way Davis words the sections involving the beginning of an invention makes them sound like extremely futuristic ideas for the times as well.  

The Alien Call

            In this chapter, there was a heavy focus on the many ways we have tried to disprove the reasons behind UFO sighting. It seems that distractions and logic can also limit our imagination and create barriers to what we think may be possible. I realize that these ideas of UFO’s have sprung many other people’s imagination in new ways. The explosion of conspiracy theories due to this phenomenon of life among the stars has given people a popular reason to not only picture other-worldy life and expand their thought processes, but question the people who create the rules and regulations in their societies. While I do feel there must be more life out there, there are many reasonable explanations for disproving supposed UFO sightings. Maybe I am just another person limiting my imagination, or maybe I am being reasonable.

Davis 9 (Sam Lindsey)

Date:4/17/2018
Author: Sam Lindsey
Assignment: Post #8, Davis Chapter 9

Is the end of the world somehow a beckoning, freeing force? Why does it seem we are always driving towards this end? Nuclear war with Korea, the Singularity, climate change, overpopulation.... Humanity has found a way to cope in the past when dealing with end times (Y2K, Mayan Calendar) why do we always think the world is on the brink of ending? Is there an "end"?

I went and looked up a bunch of articles dealing with the so called "end of the world" and found some interesting stuff. Apparently we are due for another end on April 23rd so everyone be on the lookout! The sites that I found for those predictions were especially disturbing...

Original texts:

However, when the date passed without apocalyptic incident, Meade insisted that people misunderstood his Planet X prophecy.

He then claimed that October 15 would herald seven years of nuclear war and natural disasters, marking "the end of the world as we now know it".

Meade’s latest claims suggest that on April 23 2018 the sun, moon and Jupiter will align in the constellation Virgo, sparking the beginning of the biblical Rapture.

He claims that on this night, the mysterious "death planet" Nibiru will appear in the sky, triggering the onset of World War III, rise of the Antichrist, and seven years of Tribulation.

These bizarre occurrences are all meant to the relate to the biblical book of Revelation 12:1-2, which is supposed to forewarn the end times.

All of this has however been long debunked by scientists studying the stars and planets, particularly at American space agency NASA.

fuss began years ahead of the date in question

“we should all be so lucky as to have another boring New Year’s.”

the end of the long count represents the end of an old cycle and the beginning of a new one

Well, on the 21st of December 2012, the god is going to come down and start a new cycle and the old world is going to die and the new world is going to be reborn—just to make it more poetic.

Old school vision of the biblical apocalyspticists were deeply polarized, split between rapture and plague.

A subliminal rumbling along the fault lines of the real.

Something mutant this way comes.

End times will keep beckoning.

Apocalyptic intimations can be insanely dangerous, but they can also serve as dreamtexts for the zeitgeist.

Here's the response I got after tailoring those articles & Davis's thoughts to answer my posed question above and then running that through the text cutter:

Is supposed to forewarn the the beginning of the biblical and planets, particularly at American without apocalyptic incident, Meade insisted also serve as dreamtexts for has however been long debunked April 23 2018 the sun, polarized, split between rapture and that October 15 would herald seven years of nuclear war in question “we should all real. Should all real. Something mutant this way planet" Nibiru will appear in count represents the end of years of Tribulation. Years of Tribulation. These bizarre insanely dangerous, but they can be so lucky as to to die and the new plague. The new plague. A subliminal rumbling along reborn—just to make it more start a new cycle and have another boring New Year’s. Boring New Year’s.” end of the world as beginning of a new one the sky, triggering the onset that people misunderstood his Planet an old cycle and the we now know it". Now know it". Meade’s occurrences are all meant to comes. Meant to comes. End times will keep the old world is going Well, on the 21st of X prophecy. Of X prophecy. He then claimed the biblical apocalyspticists were deeply of the Antichrist, and seven beckoning. And seven beckoning. Apocalyptic intimations can be this night, the mysterious "death going to come down and book of Revelation 12:1-2, which poetic. 12:1-2, which poetic. Old school vision of latest claims suggest that on However, when the date passed and natural disasters, marking "the December 2012, the god is years ahead of the date of World War III, rise moon and Jupiter will align Rapture. Will align Rapture. He claims that on by scientists studying the stars end times. Stars end times. All of this space agency NASA. Space agency NASA. Fuss began the end of the long the fault lines of the in the constellation Virgo, sparking world is going to be the relate to the biblical. To the biblical.

Here's a couple of sentences that I took away from that and sort of cleaned up a little to make it more comprehendable:

Apocalyptic intimations can be this night, the mysterious night. 
End times will keep the old world going.
These bizarre times will be insanely dangerous, but they can be so lucky as to kill the new plague. 

The new plague. 

A subliminal rumbling long reborn—just to start a new cycle.


So, again, it was really difficult to piece together any logical information from the text scraper, but I did find a few really interesting pieces that I ended up stitching together above. I could see how this would be super useful if you're trying to find common threads or themes between pieces of text... By looking at it through a lenses that all overlap simultaneously we get a real sense of what's going on here. It's really pretty cool!

Here's a few memes I made. Some of them arguably better than others. Some incorporate the text, while others just poke fun at the end of the world:

  

Eddie Pan (Chapter 7)

In chapter 7, the interesting thing I found is that Davis talks about the computer games, including MUD, where you can create yourself by texting and Davis thinks it is really strange because people has to picture yourself and it needs a lot of imagination, virtual reality and cyberspace. He points out that people tried to meet their fantasy of being the hero or maybe have enough power to control everything in games and tried to escape the real world.

Journal Entry 6: Davis: Ch. 7-8 (Sara Loughran)

        In Chapter 7, Davis explains virtual reality and cyberspace by mentioning computer games, specifically ones that tend to focus on the Middle Ages/medieval times. He points out that they are always exaggerated caricatures of what that period of time was actually like, as a way to fulfill some sort of fantasy or escape to a virtual world where you feel like the hero and live vicariously through that. He then brings up how the West has been fantasizing about medieval times and trying to explore that "world" for several hundred years now, most notably with Gothic Romance literature. Gothic Romance is not what we might immediately assume it is - it isn't always about a romantic relationship. Furthermore, the "romance" part has to do with the Romanticist movement, which was a counter to a lot of Enlightenment ideals. Instead of focusing on logic, reason, and the tangible like the Enlightenment thinkers, Romanticists focused on emotion, nature, individualism, and a glorification of the past, which is where the fascination with medieval times comes from. It glorified a lot of art, music, poetry, literature, and etc., and gave the world some of its most famous authors, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Edgar Allen Poe, Jane Austen, and many others.

       Romanticism and gothic romance is something that has fascinated me for a while, and like most people my age, I read Frankenstein and Edgar Allen Poe's poetry in high school. But the comparison to fantasy video games, most of the time RPGs, is one I had never considered. To generalize a bit, they also tend to attract men who are somewhat pretentious and believe that their minds and thoughts are superior to all others, and also a lot of times, they hold some misogynistic beliefs. Of course not everyone interested in fantasy RPGs is like that, nor is that how all Romanticist writers are. But the fact that it seemed to attract a lot of similar people to the RPG gamers. There are also a lot of women Romanticist writers, as well as a lot of female RPG gamers, and there is also somewhat of a resemblance in the way they think. There is something to be said for pieces of media, whether it be literature or video games, that portray a fantastical and escapist reality attracting a certain type of people, which again goes back to the tribes that Davis has continued to reference.

Davis: Chapter 6

Chris Carr

Davis Chapter 6

            The main idea I seemed to pull out of this chapter is that these many different offline and online communities seem to create connections and idea between the many different generations. He speaks on the use of rhetoric in maintaining the values of the sixties such as “radical democracy, personal empowerment, alternative community, and decentralized society of free-flowing data.” Davis speaks a lot about the Grateful Dead and many of their extensive offline and online groups who spread things as simple as set lists between one another. He speaks about how the Grateful Dead was able to connect the 60’s to the 80’s and 90’s through the online community, Whole Earth ‘lectronic Links, which was heavily occupied by dead heads.

            When he began his comparison of LSD and the computer, I found it very far-fetched. However, when he began using the story of people trying to put LSD in the water supply, I began to notice some similarities. Mainly the fact that electronics, especially the internet, can take over you in certain ways. It can make you think in different ways due to the overstimulation and unbelievable amounts of information. I really enjoyed the quote “it may turn out that digital devices and media machines wind up dosing the population.” This technology can have a certain level of control over your mind, but without the individuals really noticing it. The internet could be the new generations version of LSD, without the stigma behind it.

            I also feel the need to mention technopagans, because they seem to support the idea of many generations becoming connected. While most of their traditions may come from the 40’s, many believe some of their traditions are centuries old.  However, They also seem to use many of the values mentioned which have been preserved from since the sixties. For instance, Davis mentions “Pagans also set themselves in opposition to what they see as the patriarchal, authoritarian, and antiecological forms of spirituality that have dominated the Christian West.” If Pagans are not an example of radical democracy, personal empowerment, alternative community, I don’t know what is. These Pagans are not only living off Ideas from the 1940’s and earlier, but things from the 1960’s to now.