Table of Contents
- We Are All Obama
- In-”Augur”-ation
- Augurs In the Classical World
- The Digital Switch-Over
- Public Access To Frequency Bands
- “New Broadband Wireless Services” = New Computing Paradigm
- PSYOPS & Social Engineering
- I, Sovereign Exile
- American Catharsis
We Are All Obama
You may have recently noticed that I changed my online “callsign” for this domain to “Timothy Obama.” Not only is it a shameless attempt to cash in on Obamania (which is especially fervent in Baltimore - thanks to its geographic proximity to Washington, DC - about an hour’s drive), but it has also been a shamanic exercise in invoking the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, the spirit of the times.
Yesterday, a regular came into the store with some home-printed Obama t-shirts for sale at fifteen bucks each. Ten dollars would have been a more compelling price-point, in my opinion, but that’s just the retailer/cheapskate in me talking. Apparently a friend or family member of his had driven all the way from Michigan to turn a quick buck at the inauguration. Carnival culture in action - I’ve been meaning to do an installation on “the merchant” as an iconic social role…
It’s interesting to note that certain of the shirts featured quotations from Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr, and that the inauguration proceedings are occurring the day after the American holiday commemorating this slain black civil rights leader. There are actually a lot of interesting things clustered around the inauguration/coronation proceedings which I’d like to weave a little bit of an associative web around and see if we can’t get somewhere semiotically with all of it.
In-”Augur”-ation
I’m a big fan of etymology as a means to gain an associative understanding of the sort of encoded essence of things. Inauguration actually has - if you look at it - the word “augur” in the middle, which if you’re up on your Roman history, you’ll know is a method of divination centered around birds.
1569, from Fr. inauguration “installation, consecration,” from L. inaugurationem (nom. inauguratio) “consecration, installment under good omens,” from inaugurare “take omens from the flight of birds, consecrate or install when such omens are favorable,” from in- “on, in” + augurare “to act as an augur, predict” (see augur).
Augurs In The Classical World
The augur was a priest and official in the classical world, especially ancient Rome and Etruria. His main role was to interpret the will of the gods by studying the flight of the birds (whether they are flying in groups/alone, what noises they make as they fly, direction of flight and what kind of birds they are), known as “taking the auspices.” The ceremony and function of the augur was central to any major undertaking in Roman society–public or private–including matters of war, commerce, and religion.
Consider the words of the Roman historian Livy, who writes (VI.41): auspiciis hanc urbem conditam esse, auspiciis bello ac pace domi militiaeque omnia geri, quis est qui ignoret? (”Who does not know that this city was founded only after taking the divinations, that everything in war and in peace, at home and abroad, was done only after taking the divinations?”)
And like I said, America’s first black president taking the Oath of Office the day after MLK day is very auspicious. It doesn’t necessarily “mean” anything on its own: a co-incidence of two events in time, but the human perceptual system is associative if nothing else. Events clustered together in time have a way of forming perceptual filters, which tend to channel people down certain decision-making pathways and paradigms.
The Digital Switch-Over
Also clustered at this auspicious moment in American history is a change in governance which while less flashy may directly impact most Americans in a much more direct and immediately perceiveable way than the first African-American assuming the office of president, however symbolic and hopeful you may take that to be. The transition event in question is the HD-TV switchover which is scheduled (as far as I know) for February 17th of 2009, a month from yesterday. Five days after Valentine’s Day, you’ll be able to hold your sweetheart tight on the couch as the analog television set which you paid good money for suddenly goes dark because manufacturers and marketers have found more efficient means of driving and tracking consumer behavior patterns. It’s called digital, and its etymology relates to counting and humans. You count digits on your digits, your fingers. You count number of people watching such and such broadcast and provide your metrics to your advertisers and you make deals.
The USA digital switchover, unlike the presidential election, is one of those backroom media deals with which the USA consumer was not privy to at its inception and had no real recognizable voice or presence to prevent its passage. And most members of USA consumer demographic groups wouldn’t see the what use retaining old “antiquated” alternative technologies would ever even provide. They’re too glued to cable TV already and to the endless stream of DVD’s and shitty music coming out of NewNYHollywood’s™ megamedia trough to notice that individual broadcast and frequency access rights are being downsized step by step in favor of more restrictive and more easily trackable communications technologies.
Public Access To Frequency Bands
It has been a real trip lately reading through the Radio Shack/FCC team-up textbook I was given for the formal examination which anyone who wants to access the radio frequency bands open to communication by ordinary people like you and I. Most people don’t even know these things exist in the first place, let alone that you have to memorize technical information and detailed protocol and procedure in order to be issues a call sign and license by the FCC. Part of those restrictions come from the simple fact that much emergency and disaster related communications occur on those frequency bands. But it’s interesting to note how detailed the test questions are, making quit certain you know that you’re not allowed to do nasty-bads terrorist things like sending encoded messages, etc. Amateur radio is highly regulated by international bodies governing treaties which apply slightly differently all around the world.
“New Broadband Wireless Services” = New Computing Paradigm
Interestingly, I read in some throwaway news magazine at my shop that a Boucher has been nominated to some position dealing with the FCC and the public administration of frequencies by the Obama administration. Not sure if this is Rick Boucher or not, but this is from his site and is relevant to the discussion at hand:
On February 17, 2009, the nation will undergo a change in the way television broadcasting is transmitted over the air. On that date, full-power television stations will terminate broadcasting analog signals, which are the current predominant method of transmitting television signals throughout the United States. Thereafter, the new method of television broadcasting signals will be digital. The DTV Transition will provide television viewers with clearer pictures and more program choices and will free up major portions of the airwaves for public safety communications such as police, fire and rescue, and for new broadband wireless services.
Those “new broadband wireless services” they’re talking about are almost certainly going to fit perfectly into the whole ubicomp, ubiquitous/pervasive computing, ambient intelligence, augmented reality, etc which is currently being unrolled in the US-media amongst the early-adopter/tech entrepeneur circuit. The image of it opens up vistas of possibility in the minds of young imaginative Americans looking to gain a foothold in the world of business - an excellent technological message of Hope, another facade of the public image around all the good things Obama is going to do for us. A carrot on a stick and maybe a good one if you’re positioned strategically to take advantage of it.
PSYOPS & Social Engineering
The social engineering around this moment in history is well-staged, if not necessarily air-tight. Here we stand as a nation and as a planet, teetering on the brink of ECONOMIC CATASTROPHE. Or so the media seems to want us to think. What’s really happening out there though? Are we unable to grow enough food to supply everyone in the world? Hardly. Are we running out of raw materials? Some would say yes, with Peak Oil. Others claim that even Gaia, even the very planet herself is poised at this moment in history at a state of uncertainty, with Global Warming seeming to signal that we all must put our heads down and endure the undoing of an environmental burden which we never created. You and I didn’t decide to build factories and start churning out automobiles. You and I didn’t create the aesthetics of consumer lifestyle marketing, telling us that we couldn’t ever *be* anybody unless we bought the right objects to craft our social identity (how others view us) out of.
I, Sovereign Exile
At least I don’t think you did, and I know for damn sure I didn’t. This is the way I found the world, and I’ve done my best to live in it without making any waves. At one time bohemians expatriated to Paris or Berlin to live some semblance of the “good life” philosophers have always lusted over. Me, I’ve lived more as an exile in my own land, than anything else. A man outside of time, operating by my own rules and ethics which don’t necessarily match the dictates of what Terence McKenna called the Dominator System, and relentlessly searching for some semblance of something authentic, something that came before all these impossible-to-be-real structures which I see set up all around us.
American Catharsis
So maybe you and I really aren’t at risk of anything collapsing economonically. Maybe its just the opulent men living in the proverbial ivory towers and palaces growing fat off the sufferings of the underclasses (but something tells me those guys will be fine). Maybe the New King really will renew the wasteland, bring something green and sustainable out of a soil which has become dead and barren as the tumbleweed ranches which birthed-but-not-really our Old King. I certainly hope so, but I also know better than to peg a divine notion, Hope, to a human being subject to real pressures - each of which seems to be converging to point us all towards some, as yet, mysterious unnamed direction. 2012? Operation Bluebeam? New World Order? Green Sustainable Technocracy? Heaven only knows what they’ll call it or how they’ll market the paradigm-shift through the distributed memetic strands interpenetrating the media like some kind of darkly hidden yet readily palpable bot-net:
What if security researchers were able to disrupt the leftovers of the Storm Worm botnet thanks to a flaw in its communication model allowing them to redirect infected hosts and eventually disinfect them, but fearing legal action have their hands tied?
At the 25th Chaos Communication Congress, which took place in December, 2008, German researchers Georg Wicherski, Tillmann Werner, Felix Leder and Mark Schlösser, held a presentation (Stormfucker: Owning the Storm Botnet) demonstration their idea. The apparently working concept has a single flaw by itself - it operates in exactly the same fashion that a botnet master does when issuing updated malware binaries to the infected hosts, thereby violating computer abuse laws internationally.
Welcome to the American Catharsis. The dramatic tension is too high to point to any other part of the story arc we’re now collectively experiencing. Its effects will be sudden and highly unpredictable. This is the New New. The augurs are ready, standing by. Are you?
