#distributed self

[autumnblogs]

Companion Piece 3: Dave’s Poem, Crows, Eyes, Living in Another’s Shadow

https://www.homestuck.com/story/444

Dave spends a lot of time staring out of windows and contemplating dead things.

Death and the Past in Homestuck, as in real life, are intrinsically linked together. When a person dies, we can no longer get a lens into what’s happening to their mind, and all that’s left of the person from the perspective of information we can gather about them as a complete person is in our memories. Memories and Dreams are the real ghosts haunting us.

EDIT: I wrote this while I was a little buzzed on some bourbon, so it’s a bit more pretentious than things I usually write.

Dave’s first thoughts as he stares out the window link Time, Death, and Entropy together. As the present rushes forward, eating up the future and shitting out the past, it transforms the living into the dead, and transforms the dead back into the component particles that make them up so that the universe can use them once more to build new things. We leave numberless ghosts of ourselves in the past, memories haunting our present living selves - we can interact in real time with our own death, as we consider the people that we used to be, versions of ourselves who aren’t alive anymore - we can watch ourselves dying in real time every second of every day.

Crows become a motif in Dave’s dreams, albeit dreams that we personally won’t get to see which he’ll talk about in the future - he watches himself through the eyes of crows, dying repeatedly as he watches himself from the perspective of other selves, switching to the viewpoint of another crow every time he dies.

Dave is fascinated with his own death. Does he have a considerably greater degree of Death Anxiety than the other characters in the comic? I’m not sure if he does, but the fact that he dreams about dying repeatedly, and the fact that out of all of the characters he tends to freeze up the most around dead things - his Doomed Selves, the Crow, and so on and so on - he’s certainly preoccupied with it. It’s a pretty huge deal when, in [S] Game Over: Dave is prepared to die to protect Jade, and he does so heroically. It‘s not the only time when Dave is prepared to die alongside someone he loves for no other reason than that he loves them - he chases Rose on her suicide mission to explode the tumor in the Furthest Ring.

I like Dave Strider. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, he doesn’t have an insincere bone body, even though he tortures himself by pretending to be the same kind of irony ninja as his brother. He knows what he loves, he knows where he draws lines, he lives for what he loves, and he’s prepared to die for it too.

Dave’s preoccupation with his own death manifests in his preoccupation with the Daves who live not literally in the physical coordinates of Paradox Space, but inside of other people. There is a Dave Strider who lives inside of Rose Lalonde. There’s a Dave Strider who lives inside of John Egbert. There’s a Dave Strider who lives inside of Jade Harley. There’s a Dave Strider who lives inside of Bro Strider. And so on and so on.

None of these Daves is the same Dave as the Dave who lives inside of Dave Strider, and nobody will ever get to meet him. Even the Dave Strider who walks around in Bro’s apartment doing things is not the same as the Dave Strider who lives inside him. While heroes of Heart have to struggle with this aspect more than most, everybody in Homestuck - and I think, everybody in real life, too - has to struggle with the distributed self. We are all a disintegrated intricate dispositional complex, the heart, the mind, the loins, the glands, all wrestling each other for dominance over ourself, as we wrestle with the reputation that we build by taking action in our lives.

If Homestuck is Evangelion, Dave is Shinji Ikari, a title I bestow upon him with nothing but the warmest regards. A reluctant hero living in his father figure’s shadow, intensely anxious about the way he is perceived by other people, Dave’s struggle with himself - what actions he wants to define him, the conflicts he chooses to engage with, the conflicts he chooses not to engage with, his sexuality - are central to one of Homestuck’s major themes - Homestuck as a story about personal reproduction, cultural hegemony, and the repression of the self to try to conform to other peoples’ expectations. Once Dave finishes strifing his Bro, probably later today, I’m finally going to start talking about that a bit more.

Dave is constantly being watched by other eyes, and Eye imagery surrounds him at all times - he directly compares the Sun here to an Eye, albeit the eye of a needle, not a literal eye, and he spends a lot of the story feeling like he’s under the scrutiny of other characters. He wears sunglasses implicitly because he’s self-conscious about his own eyes. He doesn’t like to be watched. While Dave is surrounded by the trappings of a slasher film, thinking about the discomfort he experiences being observed by other people, as they create another Dave inside of themselves, another Doomed Self to haunt him, reminds me of a line from a 2000s Coming of Age Story, because of Winn Dixie. The lead character’s mother is long since dead, and now she only lives in other peoples’ memories of her. A line that stuck with me is the lead’s Dad recounting how she hated being a preacher’s wife.

"She couldn't stand having the ladies at church judge what she was wearing and what she was cooking and how she was singing. She said it made her feel like a bug under a microscope." Dave is in exactly this situation, but instead of being a preacher’s wife, he’s the little Bro of the coolest coolguy on the planet. Under the intense heat of other people’s perception, Dave squirms like a bug under a microscope.

Dave lives in Bro’s Shadow. Every action Dave takes, he takes in some way in relation to the overpowering ego of Bro Strider, who acts as Homestuck’s avatar of the badass. The Cult of the Badass is a fixture of American Culture, which I think troll society also examines holistically as it parodies Classical Sparta. Bro Strider is both a Hero and a Coolguy and Dave spends a lot of time trying to win his approval by patterning himself after him. But Dave’s character arc is about escaping from Bro’s shadow, and coming to a place where he stops being compared against other people - stops being compared against Bro, stops being compared against other Daves.

He doesn’t want to be the Dave inside of John, or the Dave inside of Jade, or the Dave inside of Rose, or the Dave inside of Bro - and he most certainly does not want to be the Dave inside of Skaia, the Knight of Time, a Coolguy, or a Hero.

Dave just wants to be the Dave of Guy. Is that a wish he can have granted? Is that a wish anybody can have granted?

[principleofplenitude]

This idea that being a person is something distributed beyond a specific body drives the work of Hélène Mialet, a French philosopher and anthropologist. Her book “Hawking Incorporated”, published in 2012, was an anthropological examination of the late Stephen Hawking and the human and mechanical aids which made it possible for him to navigate the worlds of knowledge and everyday life. The people and machines that surrounded him choreographed Hawking’s genius, Ms Mialet wrote in his obituary. She is currently applying a similar analysis to people with diabetes, trying to understand how the people and objects around a type I diabetic stand in for the pancreas within them that does not work. A doctoral student of hers has studied Lance Armstrong, trying to understand the network of people, objects and materials which supported his cycling prowess. This blurring of a biomolecular perspective with that of the social world and its man-made objects is a deliberate strategy. Ms Mialet argues that humans are “distributed” across these worlds; that what it is to be someone extends beyond a single body. But because such distribution is fundamental, it is also hard to see—except in exceptional circumstances. It is conceptually quite easy to study the cellular networks within skulls and immune systems, even if the actual experiments are hard. It is more difficult to get to grips with the networks beyond the body. They are so much a part of life that, like the action of the cerebellum, they are accepted automatically. But when the external networks start taking the place of an internal one—of a missing cerebellum, or an unbalanced insulin metabolism, or a nervous system raddled by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, like Hawking’s—their role is made more apparent. At least, it is to the theorised, anthropological eye. This general idea of making up on the outside what is missing on the inside makes sense to Andy Clark, a cognitive scientist and professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh. “Brains don’t care whether stuff gets done on the inside or on the outside, just as long as it gets done,” he says. If using a prosthesis allows a more efficient use of resources, the brain jumps at the chance. Using calculators or search engines does not leave the human mind uncomfortable; it is just a convenient outsourcing. Ethan’s replacement of his entire missing cerebellum with services from other parts of his brain and family may not even be that extreme, Mr Clark suggests. “We don’t think of the successful poet or artist, ‘Oh, poor thing, they can’t do that in their heads, they need pens and paper and software’,” he says. How might one prove that this is more than a figure of speech—prove it in the way a brain scan proves things? Not by measuring which data from the environment are linked to what process in the brain, Mr Clark says, at least not with today’s technology. But there is other corroborating evidence for the distributed self. Look at the way people with retrograde amnesia, who cannot remember events before an injury, use their phones to carry on healthy social lives. “They rely on trails they lay down in software space to remind themselves of what they’re doing and why they care.” Their lives are shaped by a structure they have built outside their brains.

“The family of a boy without a cerebellum found out how to take its place“ from The Economist 

[thecunninglinguists]

Oh god

It appears people reblogged that last post of mine. I don't know if they realised it was a blog post for a media course but there it goes, into the blue nowhere.

(This is another one. Whatever else I post today or tomorrow will probably fall under that heading too.)

Normally, the content I produce stays right where I leave it, but this time someone, somewhere, who isn't my tutor, read it. Voluntarily. People took the time to share it and add a comment about how they were reblogging for the picture mostly (faith in humanity rising). However little is read or distributed beyond myself and my networks, a whole lot is produced. If I ever do anything interesting with my life the record of my youth and beyond is going to be dragged up from the depths of my Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and a bunch of old Myspaces, Xangas, etc I have attempted to delete or hide. I google myself every so often to perform image-reconnaissance and have found digital petitions I signed when I was around 10 to get rid of Bonsai Kitten or save the rainforest or something. That's a solid record of my life, actions, feelings, beliefs, hopes, fears, and problems over the last seven years; the tumultuousity (now a word) of mid-to-late teens and young adulthood.

That doesn’t even consider what kind of data third parties are recording, but here were are, living life as data among data. Doesn’t it just seem so much easier than real life? There are rules for online communication that strike me as so much clearer than the rules of social etiquette which, above all, require live performance. Maybe that’s why so many of us prefer to do our socialising online. The restraints of temporality and location are minimized, replaced by restrictions of network access, with an increased compulsion to moderate oneself in the reality of automatic logging.

What we interpret in daily physical interactions, we interpret through sights, sounds: information we perceive. What we interpret online is nonetheless information, but in the form of raw data. Take the number of hits your page gets, determine where they came from and how long was spent there, whether they stayed on your site, followed a link of yours, commented, and track where else they go online. Watch who shares, likes, retweets, reblogs, reports, complains about, or links to your content. See how it’s remixed. Interpret those numbers, and suddenly we’ve quantified social relations.

This is what I believe to be my most popular tweet. It was favourite by 5 people and retweeted 10 times, including once by Derryn Hynch. The current total followers of myself and all retweeters is 31,672, so when I tweeted it on March 30th it might have had a potential reach of ~27,000 twitterers and might have been seen by ~2000 people (both estimates). I doubt anything I’ve ever communicated has had that reach. People facebooked me to tell me about it. It was exciting and a little disconcerting, in the same way as the reblogging of my last post.

We can map our distribution simply using a number of tools, some of which are ridiculous. Klout rates your content's popularity and it is so, so douchey, but aren’t you just aching to see your number? I have so far resisted. I have, however, used Klouchebag to determine that I was a bit of a douchebag but have now been downgraded to a bit of a prat. More serious analytic tools include Google Analytics, Clicky, Piwik, and Site Meter, and I expect I’ll use them if my traffic seems to pick up, but right now I’m pretty comfortable with the knowledge that it’s mainly my friends who are interested in what I distribute online.