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  1. notes on the semiotcracy (2003-05-03)
    http://interconnected.org/notes/2003/05/the_semiotcracy.txt
    "This is the great tendancy or current of the modern physical world, as the technological metaphors infect everyday life: the push towards the semiotcracy, and it's refinement, definition, and own system of ethics."
    My oldest notes on the semiotcracy, from after Etcon 2003, just as I was realising it was there.
  2. 1. representation (17 January 2005, Interconnected)
    http://interconnected.org/home/2005/01/17/1
    On representation, power, the physics of representation, and finally: naming the semiotcracy.
  3. Disintemediation (Upsideclown, 13 November 2003)
    http://iam.upsideclown.com/2003_11_13.shtml
    "Nelson pointers: Why copy something when you can just copy a reference to it? Every item of clothing I buy comes with a unique identifier, coordinates in the noosphere that lets me, when I'm working more in cyberspace, locate it. A unique resource indicator, you could call it (although they're no longer unique, as I'll explain). Buying a coat, for example, is a matter of exchanging something for it. (Actually you give money instead of swapping directly, and money is a mechanism of abstracting swapping when we deal with singletons, that is, rivalrous objects, like a can of coke which if I drink you can't. Or the physical slice of this coat, which if you wear, I can't.)
    Anyway, when I buy a coat I get the physical slice and the cyberspace index to it -- these are ubiquitous; we live in a true semiotcracy now so anybody can create signifiers. The index I plug into my class hierarchy, declaring the coat to be an instance of my clothes (it's also an instance of coats of this style, just one of, oh, dozens probably, it was a big workshop, but that comes built in). That's done automatically, the hierarchy (which is actually a meshwork) is updated by the house when I put my coat in the closet for the first time. That's done so that if I get a message it can get routed to my-clothes-in-general, and if I'm wearing my coat, because my coat is-a instance of my clothes, the message will arrive in my pocket and I'll feel it drop in.
    Swapping Nelsons means mucking with the cyberspace index to the coat, with the no-longer-unique URI. Karen gave me the Nelson pointer her clothes superclass, to her wardrobe in other words, and I gave her the Nelson to the contents of my closet, and we merged them.
    Our coats are now no longer simply instances of an uber-coat, but actual manifestations of the same coat. What happens to her manifestation happens to mine. Like Ted Nelson said, years and years ago, when Shiva appears in two temples at the same time, you're not looking at two instances of the god. Hey, he's a deity, he can manifest in two places, you're looking at the same guy!"
  4. Cyberspace as a paratactic aggregate (2 July 2003, Interconnected)
    http://interconnected.org/home/2003/07/02/cyberspace_as_a
    "The driving force of virtual worlds is towards replicating the real world in a describable way, associating semantic handles with everything, and the power of the virtual world (in the current case: cyberspace, which is the internet and more) is that these handles are programmatically available - in the past, oral culture put handles on human nature; the great scientific models put handles on the physical universe - and the drive to do this [the continuing evolution because of incremental benefits] is called the semiotcracy. This however is also the weakness of the virtual world because the selection of handles is dependant on the worldview of its authors (so we have email addresses for individuals and not groups, not properly) which shapes the reality of people living within the world."
    There are two great tides in the world today. The first is taking our expectations from the virtual worlds - which are naturally semiotcratic - and imposing them on the physical world, attempting to make it more semiotcratic. This makes it more manipulable and gives us power (the choice of the labels is also power). It happens due to expectations, the brownian motion+entropy of making these choices, the physics of representation and so on. Given the world we live in, there is an ethical imperitive to make these representations. This is the semiotcracy: a nature, a state of being, and a force. The countertide is from the real world to the virtual ones: There is a tussle between reach and sense, and as our reach increases in the virtual worlds (our ability to shape and change), so our senses must become more developed and nuanced too. This is analogous to the clearing of the protooceans which allowed/encouraged eyes, and reach.
    The semiotcracy is both good and bad. While a manipulable world with the greatest franchise is desirable, things are forced to become their representations, and new representations are changed and demand use. The next phase will be exploring the unfoldings of these two tides.
  5. Microsoft's Aura project- homepage
    http://aura.research.microsoft.com/aura/AuraPortal/Default.aspx?tabId=0
    "We are interested to study emergent individual and group behaviors associated with the ability to digital tag objects and places" -- the semiotcracy
  6. You Are a Web Service
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/32349.html
    stupid Register article with a few stupid lines. Says that email is old and we're not doing anything new with the social stuff. Also says there's a bizarre drive to make ourselves web services. No, that's the semiotcratic imperative.
  7. Heidegger, Phenomonology and the Essence of Technology
    http://www.abdn.ac.uk/philosophy/endsandmeans/vol2no1/gorner.shtml
    I'm looking into Heidegger's concept of the Bestand, or world as theoretical artifice, I think, the manipulable world. Why does it occur, and what is the imperitive? This is the semiotcracy.
  8. Foe- Personal names tabooed
    http://foe.typepad.com/blog/2003/12/personal_names_.html
    "Unable to discriminate clearly between words and things, the savage [sic] commonly fancies that the link between a name and the person or thing denominated by it is not a mere arbitrary and ideal association, but a real and substantial bond which unites the two in such a way that magic may be wrought on a man just as easily through his name as through his hair, his nails, or any other material part of his person." -- This is intriguing. Echoes of Ong, oral culture, and magic. Having a word for something gives you power over it, because it can be identified and discussed. The group-mind can attack it; giving something a word is for the group-mind what associating a symbol with a perception [external/internal sensation + brain feedback] is for the brain itself. No wonder words feel like spells! No wonder it feels like magic! This is the semiotcracy. This is ontological Sapir-Whorf. If you can give a name to the fact these people are stealing crops, you can do something about it. If you can name the people.
  9. NPR on what to say when you answer the telephone (Ahoy ahoy!)
    http://www2.cs.uh.edu/~klong/papers/hello.txt
    "Professor ALLEN KOENIGSBERG: When Bell invented the phone, Alexander Graham Bell, he didn't use 'hello' at all. He used 'ahoy.' He used it twice, 'Ahoy. Ahoy.' And apparently he was the only one that used it, because I've never heard anybody to this day say, 'Ahoy.' And Bell was not even in the Navy, so I don't know why he insisted on using a call that way."
    Later: "Prof. KOENIGSBERG: It was kind of a riddle in a way, because when you hook up a telephone and you are speaking basically to a stranger, it ran counter to what people expected in their day-to-day meetings, which was their previous experience. And you have to be properly introduced. And you're never introduced on the telephone that way. So you have to find a word or a phrase that very quickly cuts to the chase and allows people to start speaking, and 'hello' was pressed into service."
    1. It's very odd thinking of the word "hello" as being so contingent, that when the technology changes and we have ambient awareness of people approaching etc, we might not need the word at all. I suppose, being so unsemiotcratic a word, it has to be continuously supported by the pressure of use, a symbol that's maintained not through pointers in the brain, but thoroughly through the extelligence of behaviour.
    2. Secret fun: Reading transcripts of radio. I love the way the sentences run on and the way people talk. Novels used to be written like this (no longer) and I've noticed - reading Indian newspapers - people still talk this way. Of course, in India, speaking English, they still have turns of phrase I don't often encounter, and I can hear the accent in the sentence construction. This has particular resonance for me of course. For example, I remember reading in the Times of India I think, one of the local sections, about the monkey man. The statement from the cop was wonderful. And page 3 of the article about the guy who has invented a more efficient internal combustion engine...
     http://www.popsci.com/popsci/futurecar/article/0,20967,679464-3,00.html -- Mr Singh's Search for the Holy Grail
    His quote at the end: "'You have to understand, I have been working at this for such a very long time,' he says finally. 'Honestly, I am no longer certain whether it is possible for me to be happy.' He stands, and walks past the piles of parts and papers, to his hand-me-down computer. 'But I tell you this,' he says. 'At least now we can perhaps tell those 'No, no’ buggers out there that Mr. Singh is not completely off his rocker!'"
    Love it.
  10. Suzette Haden Elgin's homepage
    http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/
    Native Tongue is a wonderful book, really opened my eyes to the semiotcracy. It's a great balance of construction, reality, body/brain constraints etc. I need to get hold of the other two. Wonderfully, Elgin also has a LiveJournal where she discusses linguistics and metaphors. At the moment she's finding meaning in hard-to-translate phrases that people usually ignore, and they're the most important meanings too. Strategies of using language that are somehow outside it.
     http://www.livejournal.com/users/ozarque -- Elgin's LiveJournal

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