Kenneth Burke, personal supply-chains, and Mao now

WHAT:

In the 1990's a book called Beyond Calculation guessed at what would happen when computing leaked out of data centers.  It's worth reading today to gauge how far off target were the speculations of various leading thinkers--you'll recognize their names.  Used copies are available for less than a dollar from Amazon.  Harder to read is the forward-thinking literary critic Kenneth Burke, who leapfrogged all the French acrobats from the post-modern era when he wrote, "Literature is equipment for living."  This means that inventive writing and performance encodes, re-packages, and expresses other people's experience so we can de-code, unpack, and impress it upon ourselves to avoid having to reinvent every insight.  Usually it's encoded in books, a highly mobile way of carrying around the past for handy reference in the present.

Enter mobile digitization.  Although they speak of "ubiquitous computing,"  none of the technoculture wizards in Beyond Calculation anticipated what personal computing via mobile phones is doing to shift the way we exchange goods and services.  "Did you know you can order a pizza from Papa John's with a text message?" my nephew Jack said last night.  Today Amazon is also selling, alongside outdated prognostications in print, rugged, hand-size hard drives, bar-code scanners, HD video devices the size of your palm for under $200.  And to service this mobility, almost-everywhere connection to the cloud is coming like, well, clouds on the horizon. 

Shopping and buying and photocopying and typing on cell phones, people use this cheap hardware for digitizing human behavior and desirable objects, so we can make transactions with other people who are on the same wavelength: I encode, re-package, express; you de-code, unpack, impress.   The more each person signs on to this mobile network, the more the math of networks takes over.  The network increases possibilities exponentially, creating a mass matrix of handheld-equipped producers and consumers providing tiny signals to each other, and adjusting their behavior accordingly, so they can keep getting the signals they like.

This has a normalizing effect just like the comedy of 7th-grade social life.  Each new node and vertex that survives, normalizes behavior and pushes the non-mobiles outside the network to the hinterlands like Malvolio, the Amish, underdeveloped nations, or people so rich that they don't need to make any transactions anyway.  Those folks will barter or use cash until they die.  (AND they will become the barbarian outliers whose behavior will invade the network where it fails to self-heal. But that's for another blog.)

What kind of stuff is being produced and consumed in this mobile personal supply-chain?  The spectrum ranges from natural, "representative" stuff like voice and HD video and pictures, on to interactive 3-D animations or data visualization like graphs, to "second-nature" codes like text that requires literacy, to smart-structured data like Terry Jones's fluid database, and finally machine-only images like barcodes that enforce very specific rules if you want to play.

SO WHAT:

The easier Internet providers like Amazon make it for you and me to identify each other, connect, and conduct a transaction we don't regret using mobile devices, the more powerful, intricate, adaptive, and self-healing the network of personal supply-chains becomes. With this increase in power, grows the urgency of demand for information tailored to my needs--consumable by my understanding, passions, and desires.  That's how this symbol-made symbol-exchange becomes natural, or at least, as Kenneth Burke pointed out, so much like nature that my human brain treats it like a natural object, just as dreams, feelings, and imagination outmaneuver our reason to produce shudders or stomach aches.  The symbol-made world, because it can travel everywhere, can not be interrupted like a dream, when its reality fades.  It behaves predictably enough, everywhere, that I can rely on getting it and giving it to increase my pleasure or reduce my pain.  That's an economy.

In the current economic "crisis" (as we all now say, "second-nature"-like), factory production is slowing, and with it, supplies will soon drop.  So imagine, if you will, that we are only months away from vendors (like you and me) getting supply from Amazon and reselling on craigslist--taking credit cards, but refusing plastic:  I meet you on the street, and with our cell phones and a battery-supplied bar-code reader, I take credit charges from your cell-phone screen and clear the transaction through PayPal. 

Because sovereign individuals have new power to produce information that other people want to consume, we can expect the production of information to INCREASE as production of hard goods FALLS.   Information has a way of consuming people, too:  that is, when we exchange information, we learn from each other what works and what doesn't ("literature is equipment for living") to increase pleasure or reduce pain. As the pain of supply increases, the demand for information to offset the pain increases, too.  And the mobility of information-processing power is producing human behavior that would NOT have been produced had the mobile information not rewarded that behavior.

This trend might still be counter-intuitive, so let me see if Burke can help, and I'll add a savory Mao garnish to close this off.

Wikipedia says, "For Burke, some of the most significant problems in human behavior resulted from instances of symbols using human beings rather than human beings using symbols.

"In Burke's philosophy, social interaction and communication should be understood in terms of a pentad, which includes act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose."  I see this pentad as a way of defining "culture":  a culture is the stage upon which people do what they have to do, to get what they value.  Culture acts like a market: it's the structural agency that the culture-actors use to keep exchanges going.

Wikipedia goes on:  "[Burke] proposed that most social interaction and communication can be approached as a form of drama whose outcomes are determined by ratios between these five pentadic elements. [...]: for Burke, all the world really is a stage."

So...people with highly mobile devices in their hands makes the conscious production of phones by human into the production of human consciousness by phones. It's not just holding the mirror up to nature.  The wider the net spreads, the more it IS nature: 

NOW WHAT?

People quote Mao Tse-Tung saying, "Power speaks from the barrel of a gun."  If Chinese financial transactions continue to underwrite US military spending, we may find that power now speaks from a transaction device:  today, that will be huge international credit markets, Treasury auctions, etc.  But if China's money comes from its enormous production engine, and if China is equipped with billions of cell-phones and the technology to connect then, without a shot fired, China may have enormous power:  we may see soon enough that power speaks from the screen of a cell-phone.  The "language" of mobile commerce will shape not only how we communicate, but what we think the world is made of, and who we are on that stage.

Comments

[Charles Knight]

I would add Jacques Ellul's Technological Imperative - the Google guys are on record speculating on a brain to Google connection and so, "if it can be done it will be done."