Burning Chrome
You can look up the wiki entry for this phrase, but I’ll just tell you it’s the title of a science fiction story by William Gibson.
Gibson features hackers, so much of his language is tough for a hillbilly; but the title corresponds to an idea that runs through the whole tale, summarized from the story as “…the street has its own use for things…”
In the story, the things for which the street had use were technologies and programs, adapted from their original intent to new purposes.
In his book on strategy and tactics, The Practice of Everyday Life, the heterodox Jesuit Michel de Certeau expands the concept to all of our built environment; and he calls these appropriations bricolage.
We had an earlier round of remarks on strategy and tactics here not long ago, where I cited de Certeau, and long-quoted him fairly shamelessly.
His and Gibson’s theses pay attention to the microverse of our practices. The premise is that this microverse is far more formative of the outcomes in our lives and in society than we give it credit for. First of all, it’s hard to observe or quantify because these practices are irrevocably local and peculiar.
In the act of appropriation one regains some semblance of agency; whether that’s converting a weed-lot into a garden or using your television for something different than its controllers imagine.
All day long, we accomplish victories of a sort, all of us, against the systems that would swallow us into an abyss.
These practices are highly determinative, but poorly understood for what they are; while the macroverse of our practice has captured a great deal of our attention, even though it has proven again and again incapable of controlling the future it influences.
This microverse of practice is actually a reasonable foundation for optimism; while the marcoanalyses of our practice seem bereft of any hope at all.
Just some rainy afternoon pensamientos.
Make a red bumper sticker that says “RAPE” in big white letters. We’ve seen that. You stick in on a stop sign, so it makes a big sign that says “STOP RAPE.” The stop sign is there for its purpose; but you just appropriated it for another purpose.
Bricolage.
DeAnander:
— Mike Davis
This is from our own quote database. I think of it often.
One of the few saving graces of the human condition is that wealth and power make people stupid. The bad thing about this is that stupid people make stupid decisions, which is how empires decay and fall. But the good part is that the lower orders are usually smarter and more ingenious than their lazy, spoilt, slightly deranged masters.
Massive centralised control — whether capitalist or communist style — is unwieldy, ponderous, expensive, and generally incompetent. Vive le hack!
4 November 2010, 6:51 pmStan:
The battle cry of the 21st Century.
4 November 2010, 8:34 pmC.C.:
How incompetent are these massive bureaucratic organizations?
My background is that I am in the military. I see a great blend of incompetency and talent among my co-workers. However, most of that talent is usually wasted on putting out “small fires”. Every once in a while, when the top-down leadership allows just a speck of initiative, real work can get done. But initiative is not possible in top-down and centralized leadership.
But what about businesses? Even though the ratio of incompetent-to-talented employees are similar to that of the military, I have my doubts as to whether the lower order’s creativity is enough to topple the big machine.
I know that De was only trying to be encouraging, but there is a sea of Debbie-Downers within the leftist/anarchist camp (of which I am an ashamed card-carrying member). It seems that the wealthy and powerful forces that control the government and media have a way of nullifying any efforts at change. This, at least to me, is a sign that there exist SOME measure of competency among the wealthy and powerful.
As a side note, I wonder what the effects of popular culture have had on my perception that the big machine is invincible. Pop culture portrays smart, sophisticated, and competent people working in powerful places.
Does anyone have any anecdotes or examples that can dispel this rumor? I have heard that the invincibility of the powerful is indeed a rumor. But it’s hard for me to shake this idea.
Sorry to ruin the fun a little.
Vive le hack!
5 November 2010, 2:25 pmCharles:
I don’t know about competence and smartness ,etc., but the ruling class is more class conscious and unified than the ruled class. When this relative greater consciousness and unity shifts, comes the revolution.
The ruling class is detestable, but unfortunately virtue and smartness are not automatically together.
5 November 2010, 2:58 pmDeAnander:
The ruling class is smart in the sociopathic skills of manipulation, clique-formation, discipline by shunning and ganging-up-on, bullying, cheating, clever lying, etc. Kind of self-selected that way — though I’m not saying those skills aren’t found in full bloom at other levels of the financial food chain.
But in general they are not smart at bricolage, creative adaptation, quick changes of tactics, improvisation, making-do — because they’ve never had to. This is my anecdotal observation based on the very small sample of fairly wealthy spoilt people I’ve known. Fixing stuff with baling wire, string, and duct tape just isn’t how they think. They tend to want to do things “right” by approved methods with prefabricated parts and tools, because that’s “how it’s done.” In this tiny crack — lack of imagination and flexibility — might be found the only advantage for David facing Goliath.
I’m not usually known for my cheery optimism — maybe I’m clutching at straws here — but I would say (despite my aversion to the general carnage) that the success of low-cost IEDs in intimidating and confounding the Greatest Army On Earth (TM) in Iraq and Afghanistan is one illustration of the bricoleurs having a tactical advantage over the shrinkwrap, 3-ring-binder gang. Maybe.
Couldn’t agree more with Charles though about the unity of self-interest and chumminess among the Dons. For one thing — ironically — there are fewer of them, so their little cliques at the top come closer to the Dunbar number: a cosy little social scene full of intermarriage and fraternity ties. Their very elitism gives them the organisational advantage because they have to organise so few people to have large impacts — just think of the odious Koch Bros and the remarkable feats of social engineering they have achieved as a team of two.
The proles, by contrast, number in the billions (literally) and come from widely different backgrounds and circumstances. We don’t have the unifying transnational “culture of the rich” to smoothe over our ethnic, situational and cultural differences: and the genuine differences between us are constantly prodded, magnified, and exacerbated by the ruler-owned media. The overclass never yet kicked any of its members out of the club for being queer, for example; they may have gossiped and sneered, but power and wealth count for more than any “private peccadilloes” so long as a thin veneer of conformity is maintained for public consumption. I mean, J Edgar Hoover for chrissakes… No, it’s the proles who are encouraged to hate and despise each other in “culture wars” while the class war goes on almost unfought by the losing side.
War, war, war, I wish we could get away from the metaphor. Predation maybe: the class predation goes on almost unresisted by the prey population: we don’t even have the smarts to form swirling baitballs to confuse the sharks and seals.
5 November 2010, 5:18 pmStan:
More free-associative thinking on da-hack, bricolage, etc.
I know we are attracted to it as an idea, especially where the creativity of it is openly subversive of norms we dislike.
But the ways people hack their day-to-day are not always intentionally subversive, and may well serve to perpetuate many problems. It’s the fact that bricolage consumes the best part of our day-to-day that makes it important. We don’t measure our every bricolage decision against a higher cause… we meaning most people. We are just adapting to circumstances as best we can, given the mental and material resources at hand.
Thinking of De’s remarks on Hornborg – and how inaccessible he is to many. Hornborg is involved in a philosophical project, he is trying to re-map an ontology. Not surprisingly, people who like that kind of thing – including some of us – are also macro-thinkers; and we can unconsciously privilege the determinative role of our macroverses.
Historical Materialism 101 – applied: Day to day practice exerts a more powerful formative influence over individuals than ideas that are not widely expressed in practice. If bricolage is forming individuals, then it is in some regard formative of society as well.
Looking more closely at people’s hacks, folks don’t over-plan them, they reach for them as creative opportunities, by reaching for what is at hand… what appears in front of them serendipitously in sync with a felt need.
Strategy would have people unite and move like an army, defined by their enemy – and eventually indefinable in the enemy’s absence.
Organizing is better served, imo, by providing practical solutions (hacks) to problems that are acutely felt, and placing the hacks in the path of as many people as possible.
I guess I’m saying that de Certeau and Gibson are doing more than describing a political practice (subversion), but they are describing something about human nature. If that is the case, and they are correct, then the implications for institutionalized strategies are pretty powerful.
What if we oughtn’t try to change minds? What if we ought to change practices, one hack at a time? Once you got the practice in the harness, the mind follows.
6 November 2010, 9:38 amDeAnander:
“it is far easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than it is to think your way into a new way of acting”
??
6 November 2010, 2:40 pmvictor:
In Gibson the use the street finds for something is often just as sociopathic as the system’s intended use. Gibson understood the street as the ground floor of social darwinism, rather than some kind of alternative. Where I live the street has found a new use for cold medicine. A poison worse than crack. This stuff cuts both ways.
6 November 2010, 6:56 pmcabdriver:
De, I think that Stan is speaking in terms of process: that once you begin acting, you’ve by definition overcome that insidious obstacle, apathy. By committing to effort, you’ve taken agency and responsibility. And this in turn invigorates thought.
In contrast, as long as someone is merely limiting themselves to contemplation, there’s a temptation to be satisfied with remaining at the level of The Imagined Future. The Dream.
Meanwhile, moments pass, conditions change- and opportunities beckon, loom and recede. And if one is content merely to continue to contemplate, they may eventually learn the hard way that all too many dreams actually have a limited shelf life- one with an expiration date.
While thinking can be in some sense considered to be an “act” in and of itself, it isn’t a performative action. Performative actions have a kinesthetic dimension. They speed up metabolism, engage the nervous system beyond the bounds of the cranium, move muscles around.
To provide an example of what Stan is getting at: consider the acts associated with rising in the morning after a night’s sleep. If you stay in your bedclothes, it’s often a temptation to simply return to bed, to idly and think (groggily, as a rule) about what you could be doing if you were actually fully awake. Whereas if you continue in action to shower and get fully dressed, you beckon the “new way of thinking”- alert wakefulness- with your performative acts.
For me, the activity of getting my shoes on acts like a stimulant. It signifies that I’m leaving the threshold of my house, to go out, greet the day (or night) and engage with the outside world. And I feel sharper and more alert, just in the course of lacing up and tying my shoes.
6 November 2010, 7:24 pmStan:
@ victor
Agreed. That’s part of my premise I think, that this characteristic is just that – a powerful form of human behavior, in which that power can serve good or ill.
But thinking now like an organizer, if you identify the need that demands the hack, you can identify the hack the meets the need. Then you are the go-to. You’re there with the hack that works. You are, in a word, credible.
Been throwing DIY hacks up on facebook for a couple of days. MacGiver stuff, bunches of handy-geeky, design-oriented, innovators. No confrontations to speak of, but dozens of little, interstitial projects that grab the things within arms reach to solve problems. While everyone else is arguing, they are creating hundreds of facts on the ground.
More rambling….
And I like cb’s riff, tho I meant what De said. We’ve batted this one around before.
6 November 2010, 9:04 pmM. D.:
“we don’t even have the smarts to form swirling baitballs to confuse the sharks and seals.”
Proles are organized into self-serving cabals of cruelty and deception, too. If the hyper-elite were gone tomorrow, prole cabals would simply surface to take their place.
Proles kill just as many honeybees and wild pollinators as Bayer Crop Science.
But I’d give you this. The only reason it’s this way, is because prole minds are occupied territory.
6 November 2010, 11:10 pmDeAnander:
Yes when elites are deposed, it seems a new elite grows in their place — the many headed hydra of domination… which drives would-be revolutionaries to despair.
Historians often refer to a “power vacuum” that occurs when authoritarian structures collapse. As in “nature abhors a vacuum,” as in… some new structure of domination and violence “must inevitably” arise to fill the “need” or “lack.”
I’ve been wondering though. What if we *wanted* to live in a power vacuum, in a state where there was not concentrated power?
I’m sleepy enough that a bizarre riff is running in the back of my brain about concentration: concentration, refinement, the mining metaphor again. Concentrated “better” drugs, white flour, white sugar, number one jet fuel, the concentrated biomass and sunlight in fossil fuel that we’re slurping up so recklessly. Concentrated power, concentration of wealth in fewer hands, “efficiency of scale,” monster technologies, a thousand acres farmed by one guy with a robot tractor; concentrated crops, a tiny handful of “commercially viable,” fragile species dominating millions of hectares… concentration and “purity” (uniformity, sterility) enforced — at gunpoint and by poison — over diversity, robustness, diffuseness: the straight line and the rectangle against the infinitely detailed curves of the fractal… and concentrated, pure, refined power in the hands of the State, vs the unruly babel of a million little village democracies, Vermont town hall meetings, etc.
6 November 2010, 11:35 pmJon:
For Gibson, the street’s own use sometimes takes on religious overtones that are quite thematic. In his first three novels (The Sprawl trilogy; Neuromancer [1984], Count Zero [1986] and Mona Lisa Overdrive [1988]) a background element is that artificial intelligences which he projects to exist in the near future on corporate mainframes. Gibson imagines these entities as having gained the rights of citizenship in his dystopiac city of the eastern former United States.
The AIs themselves however view their existence as gods, Voudoun Loa to be precise.
BTW, the short story “Burning Chrome” was written before any before any of his novels and was later published in a collection of short stories by the same name.
7 November 2010, 8:49 amM. D.:
DeAnander, I like your model, and it would work, but only with a well-educated public. I live in a town where the activities of the local cabal would make your toes curl, and I like that the county and state step in every once in a while to tell them, no, you can’t do that. Here, the high school (a Munde school, IB, btw, so that tells you the level of affluence here) still teaches sex discrimination, has a significant big box church influence… you should see the civics text books. Everyone just voted for school district mil levy increase, but they still have military recruiters in the lobby. Some safe zone. The cabal owns the local paper and is able to manage tyranny of the majority by it, is always, always pro-development, pro-bidness development, regardless of impact on quality of life or wildlife/ecosystems, pro tra-la-la into hell. All in a highly privileged community.
7 November 2010, 9:12 pmM. D.:
For Stan: I’m pretty sure the teacher in Palestine 2000 years ago was teaching anarchy. Render unto Caeser, but then otherwise, live YOUR life. Be lillies of the field, little sparrows. And the Israelites were told time and again by Yahweh not to look for a ruler, a king, but they begged for one anyway.
7 November 2010, 9:20 pmM. D.:
“and placing the hacks in the path of as many people as possible.
“I guess I’m saying that de Certeau and Gibson are doing more than describing a political practice (subversion), but they are describing something about human nature. If that is the case, and they are correct, then the implications for institutionalized strategies are pretty powerful.
“What if we oughtn’t try to change minds? What if we ought to change practices, one hack at a time? Once you got the practice in the harness, the mind follows.”
Isn’t that what the Nader campaigns are all about?
So, you have to do stuff that the media can’t get a hold of, before individuals get a hold of the practice. Start quiet little “fads” that nobody notices until after the practice is embedded.
7 November 2010, 9:43 pmCurt:
DeAnander,
8 November 2010, 4:50 amWith this system of localness who will stop huge factory ships from over fishing the oceans? Who will stop gold mining companies from dumping mercury in to the local streams?
I think it was sometime in the the late 1990s that I heard about this organization in Europe that was promoting some kind of political agenda for Europe and by extension the world that had what appeared to me the right organizational idea in a broad sense. The idea is that problems get solved by the lowest level of political administration that can solve them. With so many problems that are regional and global in scale it is totally unrealistic to expect things for the human species to work out well with out national and supra national governments. Of course we can see that having national governments and supra national institutions does not guarantee things will work out well.
But without these institutions I myself can not imagine how reasonable human beings could win even some of the time when they would not even be allowed on to the playing field.
Stan:
Actually the “render unto Caesar” has been widely reinterpreted by authoritarians to claim this meant to pay your taxes. Not so.
The story is, there were three groups keeping their eyes on this dude, because he was picking up followers in the middle of a lot of political turmoil: the religious isolationists, the colonial-collaborator priests, and the Roman occupiers. They all had their issues with each other, and there were armed insurgents in the mix to boot.
He’s slipped out of their grasp a few times by playing the crowd, and now they wanted to trap him legally for an arrest. So two groups who disliked each other made common cause to trap him.
The zealot sympathy was for defying the Romans (and not paying taxes), and the occupying authorities’ surrogates were prepared to pounce on him if he said “Don’t pay taxes,” an incitement to break the law. So he loses support if he appears pro-Roman, and he gets arrested if he says to defy the Romans.
They corner him in public, and put the question to him, “Can an observant Jew pay taxes to Rome?”
This is one of those “Do you still beat your wife?” questions, no good answer.
So he says, “Hand me that coin you have there.” He looks at it, hands it back, and asks, “Whose picture is on that coin?”
Little background. The coins were minted with Ceasar’s image and said, “Caesar Augustus Tiberius, son of the Divine Augustus.”
A graven image of a man claiming to be god. This is idolatry for the observant Jew!
“Whose picture is on that coin?” he asked.
“Caesar’s,” they reply, by now suspecting he’s up to something again.
Paraphrasing, he said, “Well, it must be his then. Give these coins to Ceasar, but give God what is God’s,” i.e, your true loyalty and obedience.
The story is a trickster story, because Jesus flips the script on his interrogators. He doesn’t make the incriminating answer, but leaves them with this bit of political satire – one of his specialties.
8 November 2010, 6:26 amStan:
Short lecture I used to give my own units about tactical operations. There are a few basic contingencies we need to include in every plan. Aside from them, never get started spinning out “what if” scenarios. Soldiers love to what-if a thing to death.
The number of hypothetical situations is infinite, and this is a recipe for inaction. Plan your dive, and dive your plan, and deal with contingencies as they arise. No plan does everything, or anticipates everything.
Quit eating the trawler fish for starters. That lowers demand. Someone, who is near where they fish, will have to figure out how to stop them.
Right now, we don’t even have the power to say no to agribiz, because we’d starve without them and the money to play their game.
8 November 2010, 6:37 amCurt:
Duh, I guess I was WUI. (Writing Under the Influence)
8 November 2010, 10:42 amCharles:
Below is some history of use of “bricolage” in left social theory. I first became familiar with it in Levi-Strauss.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss
The Savage Mind: Bricoleur and Engineer
Lévi-Strauss developed the comparison of the Bricoleur and Engineer in The Savage Mind. “Bricoleur” has its origin in the old French verb bricoler, which originally referred to extraneous movements in ball games, billiards, hunting, shooting and riding, but which today means building or repairing things with the tools and materials on hand, puttering or tinkering as it were. In comparison to the true craftsman, whom Lévi-Strauss calls the Engineer, The Bricoleur is adept at many tasks and at putting preexisting things together in new ways, adapting his project to a finite stock of materials and tools. The Engineer deals with projects in their entirety, conceiving and procuring all the necessary materials and tools to suit his project. The Bricoleur approximates “the savage mind” and the Engineer approximates the scientific mind. Lévi-Strauss says that the universe of the Bricoleur is closed, and he often is forced to make do with whatever is at hand, whereas the universe of the Engineer is open in that he is able to create new tools and materials. But both live within a restrictive reality, and so the Engineer is forced to consider the preexisting set of theoretical and practical knowledge, of technical means, in a similar way to the Bricoleur.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage
Philosophy
In his book The Savage Mind’ (1962, English translation 1966), French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used the word bricolage to describe any spontaneous action, further extending this to include the characteristic patterns of mythological thought. The reasoning here being that, since mythological thought is all generated by human imagination, it is based on personal experience, and so the images and entities generated through ‘mythological thought’ rise from pre-existing things in the imaginer’s mind.[2]
Jacques Derrida extends this notion to any discourse. “If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concept from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur.” [3]
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus, identify bricolage as the characteristic mode of production of the schizophrenic producer.[4]
8 November 2010, 1:46 pmStan:
I hear voices.
8 November 2010, 6:03 pmCharles:
Smile
I should add that Levi-Strauss’ whole thesis is very pro”Savage Mind”. It is an argument that pre-modern thought is as rational as modern thought. So, he is “pro-Bricoleur” . When you read it, you kind of want to try bricolage.
I’m not a Derrida, Deleuze person, but since they were mentioned in the item, I quoted it.
R.D. Laing was famous for championing the value of schizophrenic thinking (smile) Then there’s the old European thingy about the thin line between insanity and genius. There was a lot of exploration of this type of thing in the “60′s”. Then there was of course LSD , Timothy Leary, the Beatles, altered-states of consciousness, etc., etc. searching altered states of consciousness for profound insights. I guess I digress.
9 November 2010, 4:44 pmM. D.:
[I hope somebody can get that last post deleted. I have no idea why that happened. Schizophrenic keyboard? Here it is again, more sane...)
I think schizophrenia was a popular catch-all for a variety of thinking. Like diabetes and dementia (now partially parsed out into Alzheimer's). Today, some forms of schizophrenia are associated with cell-membrane permeability, and macromolecules (those that weren't broken down by enzymes - which is genetic, btw - or the body hasn't developed the capacity to recognize them, as in the case of pesticides and gmo protein sub-components.
So, schizophrenia can be an "allergic" reaction, with behavior altered as if on drugs. The immune system goes haywire.
Around the world, different individuals are intolerant to things like grains that they didn't "evolve" with or grow up with. Because allergies and addictions have a lot in common, we see, for example, the Irish "allergic" to certain grain alcohols and not others; same for Native Americans. They're not "alcoholics". Their bodies have just come across something they hadn't co-evolved with, to be able to metabolize it.
Maybe we say, “brainstorming,” today.
10 November 2010, 10:41 pmM. D.:
re: render unto Caesar/Palestine
Yes, and although everyone has to play along with empire formations, hierarchies, externally, they can maintain a sort of anarchic ideal in their heads when it comes to how they relate to and treat other human beings, laterally, say. No domination, but respect and reverence. …Sometimes underground railroads.
Sparrows overhead and lilies of the field don’t mass accumulate stuff as an antidote to unhappiness or provision against (very real) things they’re afraid of. They just live however and wherever they find themselves, as best they can. And sometimes, to be successful, survive, and thrive in a particular environment, they have to be bricoleurs.
Archetypically, Lily = Mercy throughout the ages.
Sparrow = Adaptive.
Just a quick look at the public domain on animal totems (assume “significance to the human subscious”):
Sparrow aids in opening the eyes to our self-worth and instills dignity en empowerment. He teaches the importance of voice and communication and the timing of exertion and retreat. It is time to sing your song in all that you do. Sparrow teaches cooperation and sharing responsibilities whether at home or work. Are you helping or should you be helping or working more in some area of your life? Sparrow aids in survival instincts by sharpening intuition to make appropriate situational choices. He will bring to awareness any old tendencies so that you can realize the newer more conducive means of being. Sparrow teaches assertion so that you may survive in spite of any circumstances with the balance of joy and empowerment.
Or see this: http://www.linsdomain.com/totems/pages/sparrow.htm
11 November 2010, 9:13 amC.C.:
Can anyone think of definitive criterias for what can be considered a necessary contingency as opposed to a superfluous “what if” contingency?
OR
Does the fact that I have a hard time coming up with those definitive criterias a sign that no such criterias exist (nor should they exist because these general criterias themselves would stifle adaptation)?
16 November 2010, 10:10 pm