Hindsight

I'm not exactly sure what to do with this blog anymore. Reading over what I've written these past nine years with the comfortable vantage of hindsight, I know most of it is really bad. Not just bad writing, though that too is true, but bad logic, impure reason, and adolescent emotionality. Plenty of hubris, too.

When I was young, people had a habit of pointing out how smart I was, and I had the bad habit of believing them. I thought that they were in a position to make that judgement. They thought I had the answers to a lot of things, that if someone was confident and used big words they probably had a keen grasp on the truth.
I didn't really. I mean, it wasn't bluff or bluster - I legitimately believed I was being really clever most of the time. I thought I was using those big words correctly. I made the mistake of believing I'd read enough and seen enough to draw sensible conclusions.

I guess a lot of what I was doing was practice for the sort of person I hope to one day become. I'm still engaged in that practice, and perhaps the most kind thing I can say of the past preceding me is that I was on the right course in pursuing knowledge, but hadn't the skill necessary to recognize certain vital flaws in the way I went about Knowing. I needed more practice.

What I'm saying is that all the stupidity and misunderstanding that comes along with learning is an unfortunate necessity. No-one ever arrives at a point of expertise fully formed. They get roughly better at a thing each time they attempt it, until eventually they look back and are astonished, unable to see any clear sequence between where they began and where they ended up. The change is so utterly complete.

I don't want people to read my work and think it holds all the right answers, not as it is now and certainly not as it was when I began this blog. I could simply delete the imperfect, or revise it - but that threatens a second mistake: it would hide from others that practice is necessary, and hide from myself that my early ideas may not be motivated by such ironclad reasoning as I remember in shorthand.

I would keep this blog to shame me, and recognize that what I really needed when I was a kid was for people to tell me all the ways I was wrong, to insist I validate my smartness with rules that met not their standards, but a fixed, external standard smarter than they themselves were.

Notes on Conversation

~A Guide to Human Interaction

Phase 1: The Exchange of Vital & Non-Vital Information

Conversations which begin out of necessity will often open due to a need for information. These encounters are often preceded by a question, though it is important to watch a person’s behavior to assess whether there is any information they are attempting to currently obtain in the event that they do not ask (should you wish to engage them, and should assistance seem welcome). Once vital information has been conveyed, non-vital information should only be offered on request. An influx of non-vital information may be seen as a faux pas, or needlessly exhaust other participants, or impede the progression of the conversation to later phases, and should therefore be avoided.

Later in a conversation it is likely Phase 1 will recur as opinions diverge and need elaboration, or should more information become necessary for joint-activity. This doesn’t mean conversation is moving backward. Rather, it should be treated as a point of singularity as a single line of conversation meets an end where its further expression is impossible, and the baseline form of the conversation is returned to in order to provide completeness for later permutations of that same pattern. When in a conversation, always remember that you yourself can ask questions in order to reinitiate after a singularity of this kind.

Examples of information exchange are as follows:

·         “Excuse me, do you happen to know the time?”

·         “Has the doctor been out to see anyone yet?”

·         “What happened here?”

Phase 2: Observational Consensus

After introduction and information has been set aside, it is customary to assess the differences in perceptual vantage between the participants in the conversation. This is done for two reasons:

·         Firstly, to ensure that the participants are mentally sound, that there is no generative difference in their understanding of language or their physical senses. At this stage it may be necessary to concede to another’s senses in order to convince them of your sanity, should you wish to progress to Phase 3 or Phase 4. An improvisational attitude should be approached in this regard where it does not threaten disaster or discomfort, adopting a “Yes, and…” approach that accepts their version of reality and shows willingness to concede to it. Should this not be feasible, alternative observations should be made, though doing so can risk alienating the participant observers. In these cases the conversation should progress to Phase 5 or Phase 6.

·         Secondly, seeking observational consensus determines the particular value of the participants to one another. Those with little observational difference from each other are ‘allies’ who can be persuaded to work towards a mutual objective, and strengthening a bond to one another by way of Phase 3 and Phase 4 is a way to assure success when undertaking difficult tasks. Those offering a notably different perspective from one another are ‘enemies’ whose main use is to temper perspectives in order to reach objectivity. While these conversations are seen as much less comfortable, they are still to be valued as a means to negate misinformation and broaden awareness. ‘Enemy’ conversations take the route of Phases 5 and 6.

Achieving observational consensus can be so subtle as to appear bland, and is easily mistakable for ‘stating the obvious’ (missing the conversation’s transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2). Once a rapport has been established between participants, Phase 2 will likely be negated entirely in future conversations, but not as a firm rule. In later runs, Phase 2 can be used to determine a participant’s mood in order to direct the course of the conversation to the correct succeeding phase, and to reveal any particular biases that may be affecting their observations at that point in time.

Examples of forming Observational Consensus are as follows:

·         “It’s very nice weather we’re having, isn’t it?”

·         “It is so hot/cold today. I am going to wear less/more clothes now.”

·         “Have you seen what has been going on in the news?”

·         “Look at that animal. Is that animal not [insert observation here]?”

‘Allied’ Phases

Phase 3: Complimentary Trade

Should observational consensus be favorable (participant designated “Ally”), parties may then choose to engage in one of several acts of social grooming. The first of these is the exchange of compliments. Generally this action is suggested by the person who is in need of an alternate perspective to complement their own, due to having lowered self-esteem or a degree of uncertainty concerning their own observational utility. Because it is generally more desirable to get something for what you are giving than getting nothing for what you give, the engaging participant offers a complimentary perspective as tender, showing that they would value a similar compliment in return. This should be viewed as a signal to the converser that they have been identified as an ally and that they are expected to participate in the exchange if they wish to engage on that level. Compliments may go into some depth, such as when they enter discussion on a shared interest.

Here are some examples of complimentary trade:

·         “That sweater really suits you.”

·         “I really like that movie, too.”

·         “Wow, I wish I could do that.”

Alternatively someone may request a lopsided trade by engaging in dominance behavior. This can include self-deprecation, in which a person makes another person aware of an esteem deficiency and invites them to solve it through donating a compliment, or it can be acquired by demanding attention be drawn toward a target for complimentary perspective, forcing a converser to either agree with that perspective or reject the observational consensus. While less equal, these trades are far from uncommon. Dominance behavior is undertaken in conditions either where executive action is required or where it is necessary for one party to conserve their energy for specialized tasks. A willingly submissive participant needs to devote less attention to decision-making, but has less of a say in how their energy is utilized. A willfully dominant participant has to donate more energy to processing and control but has a greater say in how that energy is used. Because of this, dominance behavior can still be seen as an equal trade-off, but one concerning a much more complex currency than a simple complimentary exchange.

These are examples of submission:

·         “I’m sorry, I’m really no good at this. Can you help me?”

·         “I’m really feeling down today.”

·         “Really? Do you think so?”

Here are examples of domination:

·         “I just got a promotion!”

·         Don’t you think this looks great on me?”

·         “Guess what.”

Phase 4: Trust Exercises

Trust exercises are actions undertaken to deepen the relationship between allies. They can take the form of joint-input activities or, as strange as it may seem, exposure to intimate weaknesses.

Exposure to intimate weaknesses is a way to deepen dependency on another person by tying one’s wellbeing to someone else’s, and having them do so in return. In this way, the later betrayal of an alliance can have devastating consequences by creating an enemy with vastly more resources to wield against you than one who was otherwise unaware of particular flaws available for exploitation. Doing so as a matter of equal trade – weakening both parties only to one another – creates a powerful resistance to betrayal between them that encourages co-operation throughout the direst of circumstances, where those with less interdependency may be more inclined to act in their self-interest at another person’s expense. In other words, exposing others to one’s intimate weaknesses extends self-interest to the wellbeing of a social participant. While such an action is harmful if it occurs only one-way, a mutual trade ensures that both parties can rely upon one another under trying circumstances. It has the additional benefit of signaling to another person what kinds of emergencies may cause one to require their aid in future circumstances.

Obviously, there is a very strong temptation to fabricate weaknesses during these kinds of exchanges, so as to gain the confidence of another person while not having to weaken oneself in the event of a betrayal. It is for this reason that many people feign conditions, over-complain over mild ailments, and generally attempt to create a tragic backstory out of whatever likely material they can accumulate from their past – and why there is such prevalent skepticism concerning the outright exposure of intimate weaknesses. It is rare that the one fabricating these weaknesses would even see such actions as a deception, and these behaviors are likely self-deception, a consequence of only being able to deepen a sense of trust by deliberately creating an exploit within their own identity.

However these fabrications, whether intentional or otherwise, can be more harmful than simply telling the truth. If claims are increasingly found to be fraudulent, then the fraudulent participant is increasingly perceived as a threat that needs to be dealt with and actively ejected from one’s confidences (they are considered untrustworthy). The chances of discovering a fraud are relatively high considering two people who undertake such trust exercises are likely to develop a kind of co-operative dependency, and observe one another in conditions of actual weakness as a direct consequence.

When conversation extends beyond two people and one instance, this ‘exploit network’ becomes vastly more complicated. The source of the information is valuable, but so is the information itself. As such, one person may betray the confidence of one participant by exposing that participant’s weaknesses to a third participant (commonly called ‘gossiping’). Undiscovered, this provides not just one but two strengthened connections to the gossiper, who has proved to be both a trustee and a good source of information for the cost of exposing only one of their own exploits. If discovered, such a person is regarded as untrustworthy and is likely to be negated from all consideration of deliberate exchanges of intimate weaknesses. Their only avenues in this case (or this eventuality) are to trade with other gossipers for 3^rd party information or to move on to Phases 5 & 6.

Because of the skepticism that arises due to fabricated weaknesses, it is important not to expose a huge weakness too soon or without provocation without also being able to demonstratively prove it to be true.  Doing so undermines confidence in the veracity of that statement, and suggests to other participants that you are attempting to gain confidence without having earned it through exposing a legitimate weakness. It may also undermine confidence in one’s capacity as an asset to that individual, as when one exploit is shared too readily there are likely to be more and greater liabilities to follow. It is better to start with an exploit which is small, demonstrable, and manageable by oneself rather than through the assistance of others. If the participant agrees to the exchange by revealing one of their own flaws (immediately or at a later time) then it can be taken as a signal to move on to the next smallest, demonstrable weakness, and so on and so on. Specific kinds of activities (see below) may result in the earlier exposure of a weakness and a faster establishment of trust, but in most relationships trust deepens a little at a time as allies grow familiar with one another.

Examples of exposure to intimate weaknesses are as follows:

·         “I’ve never told anyone this before, but…”

·         “I totally didn’t see that coming.”

·         “I know, it’s just that x makes me really uncomfortable…”

Joint-input activities are actions which can be performed better with two or more participants, not just activities which can only be performed with two or more participants. This is an important distinction to make, as very often people will offer assistance in an activity where their participation is entirely unnecessary to that activity itself. The implication should not be that they believe you are incapable of acting alone, but that they believe acting together will be of mutual benefit in other situations which may require a deeper sense of trust and co-ordination, and that the necessary trust and co-ordination can be established in an activity where joint-input is unnecessary but still beneficial.

In these kinds of situations, an assertion of independence is not only a statement of the obvious but also an indication of unwillingness to operate alongside others in future, and may result in exclusion from such activities. Even should a task be easily achieved alone, the point is that doing it with others builds up a sense of trust.

The nature of the activity can be critical to the rate and nature of the trust invested between participants. A dangerous activity may inspire physical co-ordination between participants, whereas overcoming a tragedy may inspire emotional co-ordination. It is likely elements of both are required to establish a conventional sexual-romantic relationship. For such a relationship to remain exclusive, the activities have to be suitably bizarre as not to be shared or repeated socially, forming a kind of ‘language’ between the participants that cannot be entirely understood by anyone else, as its referents are bound up in observations only existing within those participants.

Examples of joint-input activities are:

·         Cleaning dishes

·         Getting arrested

·         Sex

These activities can arise in simple conversations as follows:

·         “You look cold, would you like to borrow my jacket?”

·         “I spy with my little eye…”

·         “Have you seen The x of x x? Let’s watch it together.”

In conclusion, trust exercises demand two things: deliberately exposing a vulnerability, and then working with someone else to overcome that vulnerability. ‘Dependency’ is often confused with co-operation, to the detriment of conversation and its aims. Trust can be built so long as one proves one’s willingness to be dependent. However continuous dependency of one participant on another inevitably sours a relationship as the dependee stops feeling that they are co-operating so much as operating on the behalf of the depender.

‘Enmity’ Phases

Phase 5: Argumentation

Arguments occur when participants observe different things, often through the same physical media. The simplest recourse of these arguments is to insist upon empirical awareness (‘open your eyes!’), either repeating certain exchanges of information, encouraging participants to observe from different vantages, or appealing to third parties to confirm the accuracy of sensory data. Any outright rejection of purely empirical information can be taken as an indication that a participant is physically incapable of observation or otherwise highly suspect in their mode of observation.

If basic empirical evidence can be agreed upon, then it is likely that the disagreement is over rational information which requires deduction to properly observe. The most successful way to go about this (without getting heavy into propositional logic) is to establish the participant’s premises. This means, rather than attacking their observations with your own, you ask them what empirical information led them to the conclusive observations they have made. Once you are aware of these, then you can agree with their version of the argument, or reject it in one of the following ways:

·         You can return to the task of establishing empirical truth by recourse to physical articles, either by directly establishing their observations as false or as merely limited in that they don’t consider the full scope of available data.

·         You can examine the structure of the argument in order to show that it is invalid. In this rarer case of argument, the information which is used to support it can be entirely true while still not leading to a true conclusion. For this to happen a person must usually be confused by an excessive or arbitrary arrangement of words which ‘sound’ correct but may contain double or triple negatives (or more), circular definitions with classes which contain themselves(All property is theft, all theft is property), and inefficient clarification over the distinction between operands (Either Hitler is a racist and a rogue or a charlatan, and he likes fudge, or he is a honest bigot who likes fudge.)

Needless to say, the realities of argumentation are not a problem easily solved. Two people by virtue of being in separate places at all times see different things at all times, and generally see more different things the greater the space and time between them. It is important to acknowledge this, and that argumentation is no-one’s fault so much as it is a result of physics. An ‘enemy’ stands to destroy everything you are by being proved correct in an argument, but it is important to understand that everything you are has little value if it is, in fact, wrong.

Conversations do not typically follow the rules of successful argumentation, so while it is possible to give good advice on what to do that doesn’t really explain what you are actually likely to see in an argument.

Firstly, participants are likely to perceive malcontent. This is to say that often participants will see each other as deliberately attempting to deceive one another in order to provoke a response which benefits them ahead of others. Much like skepticism in trust exercises (Phase 4), this is a defense against confidence tricksters who really would benefit greatly from someone believing in a falsehood.

In a similar way to gaining trust, it is wholly ineffective to declare something extraordinary true without being able to present demonstrable proof of it being so. It is far more effective – both in persuading and being persuaded – to find a small, demonstrable premise a participant is unfamiliar with and go about proving it. It is only after several smaller, certain changes in perception that an argument takes hold. Doing so requires a resistance to perceiving malcontent, assuring participants that you don’t want them to believe something unbelievable (deceive them) so much as have them perceive a number of clearly visible truths.

Secondly, arguments trigger impulsive enmity. This is closely tied to heuristic biases such as confirmation bias and the backfire effect which signal for people to dig in their heels and observe the world through the lens of everything they know to be true (even if it isn’t), and see it as a kind of foreign contaminant if it does not fit within that framework of reality. Impulsive enmity can manifest as anger (attacking people, verbally or physically), fear (denial or refusal to engage), or other emotions, depending on how an individual is wired. Few emotions are acknowledged as particularly useful when acting out a logical deconstruction of an argument. An awareness of one’s own impulsive enmity should be met with the need to step back. Emotions tend to cool when arguments are detached from the people presenting them, and considered at a dispassionate distance. Whenever possible, a conversation containing an argument should be prevented from becoming ‘heated’ by being broken off regularly. If done at a distance, this could mean writing a message and leaving it for a day or two before reading it again, editing and sending it later. In a face-to-face conversation it is more likely the argument will be dropped entirely and another subject from Phase 2 used to pass the time. This doesn’t resolve much, however. Should an argument be proceeded with face-to-face, it is more useful to couch it in terms of metaphor or a common interest which assures the participants of a shared intention of truth. Doing so requires some skill (more than I have), though appears very much to take the course of presenting premises as Phase 1 information prompted by clear differences in perception highlighted in Phase 2. Doing so can be disguised in the phrase,

·         “Oh my gosh, have you seen x? It’s such a good x.”

If they have seen x, which is usually a movie or television show, then it is possible to use it as an allegory for whatever point you were trying to make. If they have not, you can try again with a different ‘x’ or suspend the argument until such a time as they observe it as prompted.

Classic leads to argumentation are as follows:

·         “I disagree.”

·         “I beg to differ.”

·         “Not really, because…”

·         “That’s stupid.”

Phase 6: Value Testing

Value Testing encompasses a diverse set of behaviors which range from the strategic attack of a person’s sense of self-worth (specifically their ability to observe things and rely on those observations), to the more passive approach of establishing a clear understanding of the physical and strategic capabilities of conversational participants.

Attacks on self-worth (putdowns) are performed so as to reduce an enemy to a known quantity, and to weaken their position in preparation for an act of argumentation. Put-downs can be subtle, often as simple as boasting of one’s own accomplishments (the more obscure the field the better) and then indicating that it is the turn of another person to state their accomplishments within that same field. The more direct approach of outright criticism is obvious to most, but can be effective with a direct subordinate, useful as a means to keep them subordinate.

A putdown is an act which appears cruel so long as it is obvious and gradually more acceptable as it gains complexity. For example, it may be a putdown to point out to someone with no scientific knowledge that they have no scientific knowledge, even if their self-esteem is based on a false notion of having scientific knowledge. Undermining them from such a position ‘harms’ them in the sense of devaluing their esteem, but at the same time liberates them from the false notions which have led them to a wrong course of actions. If self-worth is over-inflated, it stands to reason that rupturing it gives a person a clearer sense of self. If a person’s self-worth is accurate and a putdown deceives that accuracy, then it stands to reason that it obscures the truth. As such, a put-down can be positively or negatively used given the context in which one is performed.

It is not true to say that a person always benefits from an enemy having the lowest esteem for their own faculty as possible. As far as conversation goes, it should be clear that while holding a conversation it is possible for a person to flit from phase to phase from subject to subject, being an ally, and enemy, or a basic encounter in the space of mere minutes. So fixing a person into the position of a permanent enemy and inflicting permanent harms to their rational faculty can be a decidedly bad idea. It is only once conversation is abandoned altogether as a means of engagement that enmity can become permanent, and deception tooled toward their destruction.

As such, put-downs serve best in opposition to Phase 3’s complimentary trade, as a legitimate swap of insults (vituperative or slight) that remind a person of the limits of their rational capacity. They are also easy to view through the same mode of dominating or submissive behavior:

A dominating put-down may appear in one of these forms:

·         “You have NO idea what you’re talking about.”

·         “Yeah, I just upgraded to an NG174 with 56 xeraquad depolarization. What are you using?”

·         “If you want to improve, you should really look at doing x.”

A submissive put-down may occur in one of these forms:

·         “What do you think about x (x being a likely unknown element)

·         “You have a really unique style!”

·         “I’ve never really understood x, maybe you could explain it to me.”

This behavior has the same intention of establishing directive authority, typically by undermining or testing someone in order to bring about a clearer hierarchy of expertise.

***

These preliminary Notes on Conversation serve as a basis for a number of the more fundamental behaviors likely to be identified in the course of a human encounter. Undoubtedly, a great deal of the confusion of social interaction comes from the fact that these techniques are culturally embedded in those who use them, and are unlikely to be performed with any explicit awareness of the reason behind them (the end goal is known, the path to it followed purely by intuition). It is likely that there are many more phases and permutations which remain to be discovered on this subject.

Discursive Essay: Doctor Who S8.07 – Kill the Moon

The Time:            2049

The Place:           The Moon

The Situation:    Aborting a baby

After mistakenly implying that one of Clara’s schoolchildren isn’t special, Clara instructs The Doctor to play nice and take it back. So rather than go the way of an apology he decides to let young Courtney Wood be the first woman on the moon, so as to really let her be someone important. The fact that the first woman only gets there in 2049 is both disturbing and unfortunately likely to be accurate. We should launch more lunar missions. Who do we talk to about that that sort of thing?

Anyway, they go to the moon and the gravity is f***ed and it has f***ed the tides up on Earth so the Earthlings decide to blow it up. The moon that is, not gravity, which would be remarkably more difficult.

“One small thing for a thing. One enormous thing for a thingy thing.”

~ Courtney Wood, the first woman on the moon.

In a brief history lesson, we learn that after the dramatic failure of the first mining venture to the moon, Earth lost its taste for space exploration. When the moon facility went dark, they turned their sights inward and stopped their space program. The team they send to the moon in this episode is composed of retired astronauts in an antique shuttle.

Doing some impressive yo-yo science, The Doctor determines that the alien ‘monsters’ who attacked the moon-miners are macro-organic bacterial spiders living in the shell of a giant space egg, which has actually been orbiting Earth as its moon for millions of years: and the recent gravity f*** up was due to it being in the process of hatching. Physics fans will probably be writing to the BBC about this one for years.

After being chased around a bit with skeletons and spiders and shadows and things the whole situation is thoroughly explored, laying ground for the scarier second half of the episode: the abortion debate.

“Please can I go home now? I’m really, really sorry, but I’d like to go home.”

~Courtney Wood, a Disruptive Influence

The Doctor and Clara talk about the fate of the moon, and of Earth. Clara believes that it is possible to predetermine that the moon is saved because she has seen it exists in the future, but The Doctor explains that it may not be so; the moon she saw could be a hologram, or a replica. Even with time travel, he claims, events are open to interpretation. There is no direct course to follow, and choices must be made without any awareness of their outcome. The idea shocks Clara. As the Doctor seems so often to be infinitely knowledgeable and experienced, the idea of choice and risk are practical non-entities. Now facing them clearly, she becomes a little more like him by having to stick by a doctrine and abide its consequences, with no guidance from her friend.

“Clara, there are some moments in time that I simply can’t see. Little eye blinks. They don’t look the same as other things. They’re not clear, they’re fuzzy, they’re grey. Little moments in which big things are decided – and this is one of them.”

~ A Needy Egotistical Gameplayer

They are left with the question of whether or not to undertake an abortion of the moon’s birth. The last surviving astronaut of 2049, Captain Lundvik, believes that it would be justified because the birth has been causing disasters on Earth. Clara rebuts that you can’t really blame a baby for kicking. As a living being, even though still in its foetal stage, doesn’t it have a right to life? Even if that life will destroy the lives of others?

The Doctor abstains from making the actual decision, as many who have strong opinions on other people’s abortions would never have the decency to do.

Putting aside the fact that the moon baby may be the last of its kind, and that Earth won’t have to pay its school fees or any of that other superficial information, it essentially does come down to a debate about abortion: It is a very good one, too, because many liberals enter into it as pro-choice advocates (though in certain cases ‘pro-death’ is more accurate), and do not recognize the infinite, potential beauty and possibility of a baby as a unique life – only seeing it as a life ‘in general’. Knowing the theme of Doctor Who, they will likely unconsciously side with the choice of letting the unique, alien lifeform live at the expense of human comfort, as The Doctor has done on past occasions in a presiding spirit of xenophilia. Now those liberals find themselves working against their own established arguments: this foetus is a unique living being, and intervention to its birth is undoubtedly killing.

To an extent this can be considered true of all foetuses. The truth is that we are entirely unaware of what they will grow to be. A foetus can grow to be the next Einstein – or the next Hitler. But what is certain is that there will never be that baby born at that time under those circumstances. Abortion kills a possibility, and it is always a unique possibility. But – and it’s an important ‘but’ – a baby also kills the possibilities of life without it, just by existing. A baby’s very first act in being conceived is to commit an extradimensional homicide.

Killing doesn’t necessarily entail murder. The task of the moon-landers is to determine whether the foetus is innocent if by attaining life it threatens the lives of every human on Earth – life which is just as unique and irreplaceable as itself. This is the question of whether you perhaps can blame a baby for kicking, pronounce it guilty of attempted murder, and kill it in self-defence.

Being ‘pro-choice’ in its strictest sense is what The Doctor chooses to do in this episode: he steps outside and lets the mothers have the argument. A strict pro-choice stance is one towards non-influence, to exert no pressure over the one making the decision by removing any relief, contempt, picketers or expectation from the path of the one making the choice. To exert any influence, it is believed, is to sway a person’s choice by tying strings of obligation to them.

 However, there is no option of non-influence when an abortion affects everyone around it. This is demonstrated when the moon-landers contact Earth and ask every human being to weigh in on the decision. It’s insanity to imagine that with a colossal alien about to burst into existence above their home, any human could expect that their life won’t be changed by the decision. That they won’t be forced to take action once the decision is made. They aren’t the ones making the decision, but they are personally invested in the outcome.

If you as the viewer take a side in this argument, as it is assumed you will (we all get personally invested in good television), you become either ‘pro-life’ or ‘pro-death’ in the matter of how the alien abortion affects society as a whole, which in a sense any abortion really does. You make your choice of which one best suits your own interests, and how you will respond to each. If you believe in individuality, you acknowledge that that is the choice that belongs to you, just as the choice of whether or not to abort belongs to the mother or host of the foetus. They are different choices. But both are worth protecting.

*

Ultimately and objectively, there is no clear right answer to this kind of abortion. You will be killing something beautiful and unique in either case, and so you cannot make the decision on whether or not you are killing something beautiful and unique. You could make the decision on race, saying ‘us or them’, but if you’ve been paying any attention to Doctor Who up until now you know there is no ‘us’ and no ‘them’, only ‘life’. You could make the decision based on utilitarian numerical values, saying that ‘the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’, but who is to say that that few, that one, will not have the great and brilliant life that has more gravity than the millions around it? Whether that one is the mother or the child?

A spectrum of these outlooks is presented by three types of people who commonly find themselves in the position of undertaking an abortion:

Courtney Woods is a high school student, at a very young age to adequately deal with having a baby. Proceeding with a pregnancy would mean sacrificing her future, losing her own childhood in the process. She has been put in the place of performing her first serious decision, and is understandably terrified. It’s entirely natural in this position to see abortion as a safe choice, putting everything back the way it was. As it is, Courtney is mostly paralyzed by the gravity of the situation. Which is higher than normal.

Captain Lundvik is at the opposite side of the spectrum, likely on her last eggs and entirely wearied by the thought of starting the next phase of her life. It would be easy to simply go on living the same life she always had, actively discouraging change and promoting a kind of stagnation reserved for a person who sees the important part of their life as over, looking back on it from golden years in which she is ready to die. Lundvik in this episode embodies the zeitgeist of Earth at 2049, closed off to the terror of space and unwilling to start a long and painful adventure.

Clara Oswald is somewhere in the middle, debatably in the best position to have a baby, even if it is as the result of an unplanned pregnancy right at the start of a new relationship. To her, the choice is mainly about whether her body is prepared, whether the environment the baby is entering is prepared, and whether the baby itself is healthy or a malicious monster. She correctly identifies that what she needs to make the right choice, to turn an unplanned pregnancy into a prepared birth or an informed abortion is information. What she needs is a doctor – and The Doctor is out.

We are presented with the responses of these three archetypes, and given something of a spirit of the moment. Courtney hesitates, wanting someone else to make the decision. Lundvik says no. The Earth, once polled, returns a unanimous ‘no’. Only Clara considers it as anything approaching an option. If I were to guess, I’d say this is an indication that it’s never the perfect time to have a baby – look for reasons not to, and you’ll find them. Change is scary. It’s something of a novelty to our 21^st century that abortions are as widely available and as safe as they’ve ever been, that when we are scared we actually have the option of backing out. Our ancestors had little option of backing out, were forced to be courageous. No-one is forcing the 21^st century to be courageous. We have to be courageous by choice – and f*** me if that isn’t the scariest kind of courage there is.

The conclusion after assessing all the influencing factors is that a decision can only be based on what is needed by the mother. THIS is why being ‘pro-choice’ is so important: To respect individual autonomy, to stand by the idea that even a wrong choice for you is the right choice for her, and hers to make.

But that’s just the start of being pro-choice. Some might respect The Doctor for standing back, but from Clara’s position, it is clear that The Doctor is making a crucial error:

“Womankind: it’s your choice. Some decisions are too important not to make on your own.”

~ The Doctor

The decision itself is a mother’s alone. But that doesn’t mean leaving her without perspective, without support or assurance or information or a companion should she ask for one to be there with her. Being pro-choice does not mean removing yourself from an issue. It means being there before, during and after the choice is made, so as to allow the maximum number of choices a person could ask for. The idea of non-influence fails, the smallest baby has moon-sized repercussions to the lives around it. If you make the choice to walk out on that, to be a ‘non-influence’, then stay out. But if you want to actually help, let the mother know it. Be an influence. Let them know your stance as pro-life or pro-death, and let them know what you plan to do based on their decisions. And if you are a total a-hole, raising a picket outside a clinic while having no intention of actually helping a mother raise a baby, maybe reconsider that instead of shaming people for making a difficult choice, you could make it an easier choice by focusing on making our galaxy a fit place for a little alien to live.

The adventure winds down in the TARDIS with Clara ripping into The Doctor, and ends with the rift Danny foresaw coming between Clara and The Doctor in the last episode, where the Doctor pushes her too far by making her follow an order without explaining it. By leaving her to make a decision with such a narrow margin of choice – by forcing her to believe any action she took would kill without a promised cause – he made her hate him quite a bit.

***

Now, when making a decision about your abortion, or in the unlikely case that a planet you are part of has a moon that is about to hatch birth, remember:

There are times when a mother is worn out by births, unprepared, or suffering, and will not survive the process even should they live through it. In such cases an abortion is a very necessary thing.

But there are also times when life is stagnant; a mother is fat, happy, but afraid of change and the pain of it. Times when a planet has turned in upon itself because it believes there is nothing great in life: and in such cases, there is a very, very good reason to choose to have a baby.

“The mid 21st Century. Humankind starts creeping off into the stars. Spreads its way through the galaxy to the very edges of the universe. And it… Endures. Till the end of time.”

Cyberspace

Electrons were launched like scout ships across static oceans, along routes gleaming copper and gold from silicon ports. The human empire had walked on every shore of its planet that it was possible to walk. Space had closed in on it, grown tight around its girth. But still, it needed to advance. So it reasoned the means by which to create space. Infinite space. Those first electron scouts were sent to discover the new Eden, the virgin continent, the new world. They came back to their designers with hope and plausibility. There was a New World. It was Cyberspace.

With a promise and a dream, life rushed in. Eager prospectors who saw the means to profit in it made port, putting cyberspace’s ready resources to use. It had cheap land to store information. A data trade route that bested the fastest roads the world could offer. Pastures in which to play, dangerous dimensions to explore. The ability to speak out across time and space. The more humans needed space, the bigger cyberspace became to fill that need.

But what was cyberspace, really? What set it apart from the real world?

The answer goes back way further than silicon and gold. The primal cyberspace was flesh and sound, then ink and canvas, and only now is it electronic code. Cyberspace is humanity’s oldest companion and greatest asset. It is, by the very nature of the word, ‘A place of guiding systems’. Whenever something holds inside of it information of things that are outside of it, that’s cyberspace. Everything that is real holds only the information that exists within its own form. A tree holds information about chlorophyll and photosynthesis and osmosis - only things about its unique self and the forces that have shaped it. But the abstract can be that same tree mashed and pulped into a book, filled with stories of planets and people, a medium through which information is passed, a language. Cyberspace was there in the savannah when a precursor human spotted a wildcat and ran home with its image inside to tell the tribe. Cyberspace was restive in the caves, splashed across the rocks with tales of birds and beasts and battles, waiting to update a user.

Cyberspace grew, and grew, and ran rampant whenever reality constricted, or broke apart to reveal what was hidden in its own spaces. Until it at last evolved past all former imagining into ones and zeros, photons and electrons, silicon and gold.

They once called it the Republic of Letters.

It was envisioned as a free exchange of information and ideas. A place where philosophies could be presented in abstraction, before selection for use in Reality. A place where information could be accumulated before judgements were passed on their content. A prototype, an imagination.

You want to know what cyberspace is? Shut your eyes and think. That’s cyberspace.

Now imagine everyone else thinking right at this moment. All those humming, drumming, buzzing thoughts, just beyond the real world. The whole planet is pulsating with it. Small notions, grand ideas. Each held in their own little cyber-sole, swimming in a school of cyber-phish. Communicating constantly, reading one another. Each gets drawn up in a network. Each contributes, in some small way, to the mainframe of a single all-inclusive mind. We now call that mind The Internet.

Of course, a very large part of it is devoted to memes and porn. That’s how a mind works, you see. The fleeting whims and jokes and fears and fragmentary notions sit bottom-heavy, rudimentary ruminations pulsing with energy, leaping up to the top and trying to stay there for as long as possible. That’s society. Each little tweet and tumble is a single possibility in a spectrum of possibilities, submitted to the senses and declared true and valid, or not, or a confusion of the two. But it is within our power to select the thoughts that are worth paying attention to; an important memory shared through flashbacks of pictures or video. News that may compromise or assist the network as a whole. Well-expressed ideas which provide the contextual framework for the influx of data.  The possibilities emerge over and over again to assert their probability, demanding attention and explanation.

We are not The Internet. Not its consciousness, not its intention, not what makes its executive decisions. If such a higher function exists in our great, many-headed cyber-brain, it has never revealed itself. What we are as its users are things used; little synapses firing off in cyberspace, forming something intelligible only on a large scale. But to this leviathan, we are also its citizens. And as its citizens we have something of a responsibility to understand its mechanisms. Like any space on Earth, Cyberspace has its own state, ideology, economy and culture.

New Terminology: Differentiating Cyberspaces

If I talked about how cyberspace looked in a one-user mind, the picture would be very different from how it looks in the internet. The way information travels through it is the same, but the information itself varies. It is composed of wholly exotic permutations of fictive structure. In the process of analyzing this structure, it helps to approach each in turn, careful not to muddy issues by running rampant paths from one realm to the next.

Intraspace

[Intra (within, exclusive) + Space (The intersection of dimensions)]

An exclusive intersection of dimensions

Intraspace is the cyberspace of a mind operating on an individual level. It is filled with conceptual patterns that allow us to make sense of what is around us, and perceptual figments or ‘spirits’ that are waiting to be fitted into a pattern, or form a pattern of their own.

Imagine for the moment that the human mind is a novel that you are writing. In a physical sense, it is a book with a leather cover for a skull, blank pages awaiting abstraction and ink to serve as a medium of abstract symbolism.

You start off writing this novel on Chapter One. Word by word, sentence by sentence, it begins to take form. You write the word ‘knife’. You elaborate a little more and write ‘the knife cut’. Already from the spirit of a few words, a conscious reader gets an idea of what kind of novel this is: a slasher thriller.

But then you finish rounding off the sentence into a grounded concept: ‘The knife cut the salmon’s flesh into three edible strips and the smiling sushi chef placed them atop three scrumptious lumps of rice.’

The words – the spiritual figments – are present in each stage of the process, but they can confuse the reader when taken by themselves. They have to be considered with a degree of anticipation for more information if they are to make any sense.

You finish off the page, and reread what you’ve written. Already there’s a pattern emerging. You’ve used the word ‘like’ an inordinate number of times, and the word ‘massive’ at least seven. You could accept this as your literary style, and proceed deeper into the book page by page until the pattern of the novel is complete. This is the equivalent of adopting a worldview based on the things that you know – deciding that it’s the best way to get things done, and continuing to do it. What works on a small scale, works for mass production, right?

But then you decide that maybe this isn’t the best way to go forward. Maybe the style was wrong, and you really should be writing a slasher thriller. Maybe you should just see what it looks like when you remove the unnecessary ‘like’s and find a few synonyms for ‘massive’. You turn the page.

Chapter One, you start again.

This part of the process is lateral, generative thinking, in which you produce a number of competing patterns in order to select the best one. You could fill the whole book with different versions of Chapter One, and still not exhaust all the possibilities. Lateral thinking is often accompanied by observation, or what we can call inductive thought. The more possibilities of pattern you are aware of, the greater chance there is that you will find a naturally superior way in which to stylize information. But without pausing that industrious work at some point, you’ll never get past Chapter One.

After five drafts of the first page, you select what you see as the best. The metaphors are rich, but the vocabulary is simple. It’s the kind of writing that engages the senses, but packs deliberate symbolism behind every sensation. Eagerly, you rush forward.

Page after page, the book gets deeper. The story is simple: you set out the premises on the very first page, and now you’re just following them to their most natural conclusion.

·         The protagonist is Suzie.

·         Suzie likes Sushi.

So it would be pretty odd if in Chapter Three Suzie decided to open up an Italian restaurant. Less believable than if Suzie decided to become a sushi chef, anyway.

This pattern extrapolation moving forward is vertical thinking, or Logic, in which you take the things that you know and squeeze as much information out of them as possible, stacking up the cubes of data block by block to make the story as tall or as ‘deep’ as possible.

But every now and then, just like in real life, you add more lateral possibilities to the novel to bring richness to the story. The main plot – the main pattern – is about Suzie travelling to Japan to learn to be a master sushi chef. But there’s also a subplot about a Japanese wishing tree where Suzie makes an offering to a kami spirit and begs it to help her become the best sushi chef in the world. This happens in Chapter Seven, so you rush ahead and write Chapter Seven, and then know that logically for Suzie to get from Chapter Three to Chapter Seven she has to take a plane across from Jamaica, where she grew up.

We do this all the time in Intraspace. On one level, we’re deepening the story of our day-to-day existence. But then we decide that in the future, we might like the pattern of our life to change. So we begin to construct a pattern between the present and that possible future with a set of concrete changes: learning a language, learning a craft, dealing with emotional barriers. When the two patterns merge, they form a kind of super-concept that makes a new kind of sense we couldn’t possibly have been aware of just by imagining the possibility.

The novel continues. With twenty chapters behind you, you’ve got pretty good at this. Suzie’s kami answered her prayer and took her into the spirit world to be the sushi chef of the gods, where this kami fell in love with her and decided she could never go home. Suzie laces his next meal with a magical poison, and instead of dying he turns into an Oni. She escapes until such a time as she can feed him the cure, which heals his spirit and softens him to the idea of her going back to her own world.

And while the story’s imagined space has broadened dimensions laterally and vertically, so your own configuration of cyberspace has mirrored that expansion. Do I use the word ‘terrified’ here, or ‘frightened’?  you consider laterally. You find synonyms, because there’s one that’ll most accurately portray the emotion in context. You select it, running it up the flagpole vertically, and it can have a dramatic effect on the story. You do this about twenty times a minute in the process of writing, refining your style, editing to break up old patterns and replace them with better ones.

**

We use terms like ‘lateral’ and ‘vertical’ to emphasize that Intraspace is space. Lateral length is a dimension, and vertical height is a dimension. A series of intersecting points between them* form a shape of consciousness we refer to as ‘Ego’. The bigger the Ego is, the more self-conscious it is – the more aware it is of the pattern that has been scrawled across the intraspace by its thoughts**.

* These intersection points can be thought of as memory ‘beacons’; points of awareness within the mind than hold ideas together as though they were constantly being viewed, either episodically or through abstract connections to other ideas that are being viewed.

**Which isn’t to say a person with a big ego is a particularly adept thinker, or has made a sensible pattern across their intraspace. It just means that they are aware of their own ability to think. The consequent metaphors for such people are bound up in Earthling meatspace analogies, where air is often thought of as the basic medium for empty space. People with a big ego and little pattern are thought of as ‘windbags’, or ‘full of hot air’. A person with any ego in an undeveloped intraspace is an ‘airhead’.

But ego doesn’t encompass the whole pattern scrawled by thoughts, because we forget things; sometimes deliberately, but mostly unintentionally. They never really go away, they just reside outside of the shape of the Ego. And because we have eyes and ears and noses we’re getting these little nodes of thought popping up representational images in Intraspace all the time, and there’s no way we can be aware of them all at once. So Intraspace is automatically broadened by inductive data (expands laterally), and some of that data more fluidly yields itself to immediate knowledge of a concept (such as the perception of a clock’s moving gears giving a better understanding of mechanics than the clock’s face), and this is the basic awareness of reality we attribute to the sentience of animals.

But it’s also the grounding for what we call the Id – the unconscious functions of Intraspace that operate outside of memory and outside of directed thought. The mechanism of the mind sorts through data nodes in order to organize them the most effectively. In some cases a perceptual permutation of data may be structurally similar to a conceptual form of another permutation. So they end up being organized in a way that groups them together. So when the conscious center shifts – such as when the Ego expands or behaves in a way that deliberately seeks out an alternative pattern, in dreaming or creative thought – then we end up with a surreal combination of confused symbols. A giant rabbit checks the watch it keeps in little red waistcoat. The hydra rears its head, with many mouths attacking to feed a single corporate body. The Tower looms above, telling its own story in endless cycles revisited.

Part of why these symbols are dragged into the ego is because they are relevant composites of data structures already within conscious awareness.  This means that when consciousness focuses on a pattern in its immediate memory, the unconscious mind prioritizes data that is relevant to that memory. Actively we think ‘loan shark’ and understand what that description represents. But it is likely we will also get an image in our heads of something else, like a businessman in a pinstripe suit and a red tie, smiling with a row of shark teeth. This kind of sympathetic repatterning is how the Ego and Id interact. It’s often described as a ‘bubbling up’, as though there’s been a reaction in the Id that results in a particularly volatile association. But since the brain uses electricity I prefer to see in as a static discharge: as the brain storms, pockets of clouded data get charged with electrons. They are ‘grounded’ by an assembly of thoughts in the ego, and spark them as though pulled to a lightning conductor. Sometimes those thoughts are coherent enough to charge a lightbulb moment.

The Superego is at once similar and different from the Id. Like the Id, it exists in that realm of unconsciousness surrounding the Ego. But unlike it, it doesn’t produce and merge data: It orders it. This is subtly different from what happens when percepts collide in the Id: When the Superego functions correctly it is non-perceptual, focused rather on integrating conceptual information. But concepts have to be generated by first passing through the ego.

There were these stencil spinning tops that were popular when I was a kid, and I think of them as a perceptual image of the Ego-Superego interaction. The spinning top is the ego, moving across a piece of paper that plays the part of surrounding Intraspace. The needle is the accumulated pressure of conscious thought, pressing deeply into the page so as to make a mark. The needle at the tip of the spinning top roves around quite a bit, leaving a complicated trace of pattern that could, under analysis, tell a person everything about the spinning top that they want to know. If the spinning top is the ego, then that pattern is the ego extended to every instant of its existence – consciousness’s profits unrestricted by time and space – The Superego.

The brain is not a stenciled page, so the deeper pattern formed by the roving consciousness is a thought pattern. And the more fixedly the needle of consciousness attends to those patterns, the more difficult it is to get out of them. They form a kind of localized race track in the vicinity of the Ego, though they do not entirely encompassed it. The Ego may have traced an unusual pattern once in a moment of epiphany, only to veer off in another direction.

Id is composed of nodal points: small, localized patterns.

Superego is composed of a nodal network: an extensive, interconnected pattern.

And Ego, to complete the triptych, is pattern recognition and directed pattern formation.

*

Intraspace is a fascinating realm, and arguably the most important of all cyberspace. Every single one of us operates in Intraspace – we can choose to avoid any other platform of existence, but not the platform of existence that allows us to think, and have choice. You have a kind of responsibility to yourself to understand your own mind. Everything done elsewhere is blind grasping until you do.

Socialspace

[Social (Relating to the aggregate of people living in an ordered way) + Space (The intersection of dimensions)]

An intersection of dimensions between people.

The novel you wrote about Suzie and the Kami has come far since where we left it. It’s grown deep and interesting, creative and insightful. But now you want to enable it to do what novels do: you want to share the model of Intraspace you developed with other people.

Socialspace is the cyberspace network held between users in a community, expressed through interaction and conversation. It has some similarities with intraspace, and some very big differences. For starters, nodes of data in intraspace were held as elemental quantities in a formless abyss. In social space, nodes of data are held as people.

Every user functions individually as a percept*, and while it may have deeper concepts and connections running through its Intraspace, the part that they share in Socialspace is two-dimensionally summarized.

*From the perspective of another user.

You aren’t going to try and publish all the drafts of Chapter One that contributed to your novel. You’re going to take out the redundant data and present a concise summary. Just so, when you walk outside wearing a summer hat you don’t announce “This is a hat I am wearing because the sunlight is directly above and I wish to avoid sprouting melanomas.” You just wear the hat, and if that isn’t a clear summary of your actions, you wait for people to ask.

The difficulty with these percepts – these people – is the same as in meatspace and Intraspace. How do you tell which are honestly based in concepts, and which are ‘hallucinatory’ percepts containing very little valuable data? You give the novel to your mother, who reads it. She thinks it’s wonderful. But is that just because she associates it with the percept that is ‘you’ which she nepotistically favors? You decide it’s better to give the novel to an impartial stranger. That stranger thinks it’s awful – but can you rely on the expertise of someone you picked off the street to know good literature?

This specialized function of telling good data from bad is facilitated by a Socialspace operator known as a Maven. Mavens collate sources of data in a social network and analyze them to determine the value of specific sources of data within their field. Should the maven be optimal, they then spread the certainty of their findings to others generously. Mavens aren’t one strange, general profession aside from ordinary life, though in some ways the Otaku fits that description – Mavens are integrated into the functions of everyday society. There are fashion mavens, or coupon mavens, or software mavens. 

There are book mavens who read a lot and would probably be the best choice of person to get an honest opinion about your novel. Quite often their professional life reflects this passion for information, and they become motor experts, or sports commentators, or editors. So this is the function mavens serve to Intraspace innovators: to let them know they’ve made a good summary. To let them know there’s integrity between what they can see in meatspace, and the reams of data encoded into that Intraspace summary.

After finding the right kind of maven, you’re left with the knowledge that your book is actually very good – a literary masterpiece, actually. And while that makes you happy, it hasn’t achieved the very best of what you set out to do. You want your masterpiece to be widely experienced by others, and be considered for a place as a memory beacon in their individual Intraspaces. But the maven can’t help you there. The maven knows what people want – but doesn’t know how people connect.

In Socialspace, intraspace nodes are connected in overarching patterns simply referred to as social networks. Within a social network there are very deeply ingrained paths, just like there are in thought patterns in the mind. The enterprising pioneer (you, the novelist) moves through Socialspace along these paths, trying to find a junction between them. You could ask your friend Arthur to read your book – Arthur is a chatterbox and you know he’ll mention your book to just about anyone he meets in the street. But while Arthur likes spreading information, he doesn’t exactly have many people who consider him a friend, and value his vocalized opinions. However Arthur speaks with a certain reverence about Hildegard, a well-known member of his social network. Hildegard is one of those people who everyone knows and everyone likes – not just in your own social network, but in groups of people you’d never dream of talking to. She is an experienced hiker, and is very active at her community church. And the strange thing about Hildegard that separates her from Arthur is that she’s everyone’s best friend. They are all desperate to get closer to her by sharing experiences with her, like watching a TV series she’s seen or reading a book that she’s read.

Hildegard is what is called a Supersocial, a person adept at forming data node patterns and then filtering data through that network. It’s estimated that the number of close, intimate relationships an average person can have at any one time is 12. For someone like Hildegard, that number is more in the region of 20. This means that on top of that there are hundreds if not thousands of people in Hildegard’s social network, many of whom are bound to be supersocials themselves.

Often when meeting these kinds of people, you get the sense that you’re an extra, and they are the protagonist. Even though most of the time you assume that because you are the all-seeing narrator of your own life, that makes you the protagonist by default. But in a way this is due to a perspective shift. Sharing your novel through Socialspace isn’t about restructuring your own mind at all – that was Writing It, the process of intraspace. Sharing a novel is about society’s mind, and society’s cyberspace. On that level you really are an extra – a blip of Id data on the extending map of human evolution. The mistake many people make is to attempt to be the conscious center of Socialspace and Intraspace. They believe that to get their novel known they have to be a Supersocial, making dozens of friends, learning to manipulate people they don’t like and get favors from those they do. All this wasted energy just means they have less time to operate on the Intra- level, and the only things they have to seed at the end of the exercise are inferior ideas.

Hildegard is the answer to this. You don’t want to approach Hildegard directly, because just having her blindly promoting your book won’t be an honest projection of enthusiasm – it’ll be reluctant, a favour. Instead, you study the 20 closest people in her network. These are the people you want to give the novel to – especially if one of those people is a maven. How it gets to them doesn’t really matter. 

Shove it in their mailboxes, claim to be doing market research, or just honestly say you’re trying everything you can to get the book off the ground. If the novel is good – which the mavens say it is – then there’s a very high probability it’ll reach Hildegard. And if it does, and she likes it so much she wants to share the experience with others – the novel diffuses through society. Suddenly people have Read That. Which was the point of the whole exercise.

So that’s Socialspace:

You, the pioneering data node, set out with the intention of changing Cyberspace.

The Maven acts as Socialspace’s relevancy feed, presenting valuable percept data to Socialspace’s Ego.

The Supersocial is that Ego, a person capable of directing user consciousness. They process the percept and funnel it into a Social Network, the conceptual Superego of society.

Once your data has been passed through the social network – you’re golden. You’re a part of the thinking process of society. You’ve transcended a platform.

Internet

[Inter (Out, Inclusive) + Net (Network: An arrangement of intersecting horizontal and vertical lines)]

A grid embodying the relation between dimensional points.

The Interspace – which I refer to as Internet because otherwise at a glance it could be confused for intraspace – is a growing innovation in the 21^st century linking Socialspace to Intraspace on a digital platform. When we talk of cyberspace generally, we’re referring to the internet. You’ve probably heard of it.

The genius of the internet is in that in using it we become distinctly aware of what is meant by patterns -  how easy it is for data to move in some ways (and for some kinds of data to move) and very difficult for it to move in others. We’ve built artificial constructs that mimic the function of Socialspace user-nodes; Sites like Facebook and MySpace are artificial Supersocials, focused on the automation of the way data spreads within trusted networks and extended interest groups. Sites like Reddit and Tumblr are maven sites, where regular accounts plug choice information. Sites like Youtube, Deviant Art and Wordpress are User sites, designed to exhibit the creations of individual users across a variety of formats. These sites aren’t intended to exist in isolation, but to connect with one another and function in a way that sorts data, exactly as we select information in Intraspace and Socialspace. In a way it can be seen as the next evolutionary step of abstract thinking – a mind the size of a whole planet, each contributing to the focus of our awareness and actions.

Let’s say Hildegard loves your novel. She loves it so much, she finds you and asks you if she can share it with her friends. You give her the nod – the whole point of putting the book out there was to get as many readers as possible. In the bad old days, Hildegard would be forced to traffic the book manually through her Socialspace. But with the internet it’s much easier. Hildegarde has roughly two-thousand friends and nine-hundred followers. So she broadcasts in a single message that she likes your book. Quite a few people pick it up and start reading, hoping to stay relevant to Hildegard through their emotional attachment to her. Then they re-whatever their own review.

By chance you also pick up a Fan. Fans are people who are so in love with a work they are highly motivated to keep it alive in their day-to-day existence. In this regard, you’ve hooked Alice, who likes to make GIF-sets for her Tumblr account. She assembles a group of images that roughly portray the characters and world in your book. In a single collage, she’s depicted a kind of visual ‘blurb’ for your book that’s going to draw in more interest. People who are attracted to visual data more than pure text (let’s face it... that’s practically all of us) are now more inclined to associate your book with sympathetic themes. It’s like having an abstract cover placed over the ideas held within, and put on a bookshelf for people to see it clearly.

Then some mavens in Hildegard’s extended network hear about the book. One of them is an editor, and thinks it has serious publishing potential. The public approval you’ve garnered in the local network proves it. At last, you’ve climbed from simply scrawling the word ‘knife’ to a point of complexity that will affect thousands if not millions of minds, serving as a formal concept in their own ideas and inventions.

The internet managed this by its own lateral and vertical agencies within the server structure. Vertically the book has been promoted by Likes and Shares, which is to say by way of Affirmation. This means that it has a greater presence within a user base. However, that user base itself may be quite small, which accounts for why very good ideas will often get ‘cult’ followings. Even though Hildegarde operates in several different social settings, there are literally thousands of cultures to reach which are beyond the ability of one Supersocial to tap – even a Supersocial like Facebook, which keeps thinking up new ways to get people to communicate across cultural barriers.

The lateral axis of the Internet is seen in an idea’s fan base, and the ways it examines, comments or enriches the experience of an idea. What was originally a small culture can extend into an enormous one by branching off into movies, TV shows, fanfiction, soundtracks – just about any other medium, and its own interpretation of that idea. Lateral generation surrounding a dominant idea and its crucial factors not only extends an idea across the user population, but allows an idea to realize its most effective medium. You wrote a book, but as it turns out Suzie’s life is actually much better understood through the multimedia of a TV series. This doesn’t mean you were wrong to write the book – the series wouldn’t even exist if you hadn’t made the approach. Data has to undergo a process of weakening and strengthening to find its most effective format, just as data’s form in argumentation is teased to eke out sound reason.

In the Internet’s Ego, the important nodes that create a field of awareness are webpages, typically ones on which a user has an account. This builds up an identity profile which when effectively used acts as a conceptual representation of all aspects of their identity they deem functionally important. These can break off into 3-Dimensional facets, where multiple identities exist for the same user, a construction known as an ‘alter-ego’.

The SuperEgo of the internet is entirely more concrete and traceable than anything visible in cyberspace to date. It’s a combination of what you Like, but just as importantly what you Ignore. I say ‘ignore’ because ‘disliking’ something still patterns an association with it – a negative association, but one which will persist in the structure of an online profile. Ignoring is subtly different because it effectively excludes information from a user’s existence, marking it as irrelevant, and inaccurate.

The SuperEgo we lay down on the internet isn’t an active part of our profiles, but like the stencil spinning top it traces where we’ve gone in virtual space and how we’ve interacted with nodes along the way. Like Socialspace, this pattern is used to make up something that can be seen not as a user node’s ego, but the Internet’s ego. If the internet has a consciousness, some point of focused thought, it is the point to which the most nodes have trafficked their attention. The most likes, the most views, the most shares. It’s easiest to experience this after something newsworthy, when the same thought is affirmed across dozens of nodes on the network. It downloads to Intraspace, and we can’t help but think about it and its place according to our own identities.

*****

Hopefully understanding the way these three platforms connect will help people realize the importance of all three, and how to move between them if at any point they feel stuck. We know that this is how cyberspace operates, but not necessarily why it operates in this way. From the perspective of one Intra- node, why should the Inter- Ego matter? Why do people crave attention, be it from friends or strangers or even from their own mind?

I think that ultimately we have a strong conceptual awareness that observation premeditates control. We struggle for our ideas to be known not for the virtue of being known, but for the virtue of being used. When the precursor ran home with an abstraction of a wildcat inside to share the experience with the tribe, it was with the knowledge that it could enrich the lives of those updated. It was not done with the intention of controlling the actions of the tribe, but done so that members of the tribe could more readily control their own lives. That to me is what cyberspace is all about; providing a guidance map for others to realize there is more in the world than the one path they have walked throughout their lives. To provide that for something as reaching as the Internet seems to me to be a very positive trait. To want to inform oneself through contact with nodes of cyberspace – an entirely freeing, life-giving experience.

Inspirational Reading:

Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point

For understanding Socialspace and how ideas take off. Very good read, very diverse selection of experiences to draw from. Contains some gorgeous math on epidemics.

Edward De Bono's Lateral Thinking

A revolutionary novel in terms of understanding Intraspace according to vertical (selective) and lateral (generative) thought. Very short, as it mainly contains exercises.