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I arrived in Bratislava three weeks ago, tagged just a week before that to assist in top-secret corporate offshore training efforts. Top-secret really only to back office workers in the states who don’t have a clue what the ultimate endgame might be. All we know is that we are getting laid off at a pretty aggressive rate as the company continues to offshore IT services across the Atlantic. For every worker bee offlined in the US, a cheaper, often much less experienced doppelganger is onlined overseas, previously India, and now in Eastern Europe. Obviously, I cannot say who I work for, nor does it really matter: all the big kids are doing it.

But offshoring and outsourcing are old news really. The same thing happened with manufacturing decades ago and we don’t think twice about it today. Conflicted as I may be about globalization, I naturally took this opportunity, which will amount to nearly two months split between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, on the company’s dime, my first veritable international business adventure. If Corporate American IT is well on its way to extinction, perhaps one last hurrah is in order.

Now three weeks in, and currently in Brno (CZ), I have to say it has been an utterly fascinating experience. The opportunity over here immediately reminded me of the late 90s IT boom in America; barely experienced and enthusiastic 20 somethings jumping from company to company searching for the best possible deal. Even the corporate vibe is a throwback to those absurdly exuberant, optimistic, rainbow horizoned times. The growth, the promises, the future is yours…tell your friends…we’re hiring! Brand spanking new half occupied office floors filled with cubicles with dual screen setups waiting for their future tech-savvy tenants. DUAL-SCREEN SETUPS. Gasp…subtle pangs of jealously…

My first instinct is to shake them all awake: FOOLS! RUN AWAY! THIS HAS ALREADY HAPPENED! THEY ARE USING YOU! I can offer this truth because I stand simultaneously at the death of the former cycle and the birth of its replacement. But I don’t. They know this. We all know this. So it’s your time, I say, enjoy it while it lasts, pledge allegiance to no one.

Most of the workforce are young, bright, and hungry to learn, if not inexperienced. Some come from countries in much more dire economic situations than America. They immigrate to these IT centers from all over the EU, something I hadn’t anticipated, and this is precisely the reality that makes offshoring possible. A pool of talent assembled from Greece, Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Portugal, even England. The general low cost of living in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, stable democracy, the integrated EU work policy, and you have the perfect conditions to import cost effective teams of Information Technology go-getters. Only they haven’t been around the block for the most part. So they send us out here to train them. What happens to us after the training is complete remains a mystery. A Great Purge?

Steelworkers of the Information Age…unite!

How fucking kvlt are you? My guess is that while you may dabble in a little weekend corpse paint, you have yet to venture into church burning. So you long for something to consummately up the devotion, fully engaging your creative black energies, but perhaps something more legal. Welcome to Black Metal Theory, the mutual blackening of metal and theory, duh, which is all the trooest rage in the chthonic realms of Continental Philosophy. Two symposiums already, Hideous Gnosis and Melancology, and I am assuming more on the way. Hideous Gnosis is available in paperback in case you missed it. But what the fuck is all this? From Melancology:

Black metal irrupts from a place already divested of nature, a site of extinction…

As such black metal could be described as a negative form of environmental writing; the least Apollonian of genres, it is terrestrial – indeed subterranean and infernal – inhabiting a dead forest that is at once both mythic and real unfolding along an atheological horizon that marks the limit of absolute evil where there are no goods or resources to distribute and therefore no means of power and domination, a mastery of nothing.

A new word is required that conjoins ‘black’ and ‘ecology’: melancology, a word in which can be heard the melancholy affect appropriate to the conjunction.

…

This environment of absolute evil is exactly the same as the absolute good of black metal itself: the expenditure of a sonic drive that propels a blackened self-consciousness, a melancological consciousness without object that is the necessary prior condition to any speculation on or intervention in the environment.

The Black Metal Theory Symposium thus invites speculation and interventions on the blackening of the earth, landscapes of extinction, starless aeon, sempiternal nightmares, black horizons, malign essences, Qliphothic forces from beyond … in a general re-conceptualization of black ecology.

Whoa, dude. You had me at ‘melancology’.

If you can’t wait for another symposium, there is also ‘Helvete · A Journal of Black Metal Theory‘ and their forthcoming inaugural Incipit: Open Issue due in 2012, hopefully before the apocalypse.

Initially I had high, if not unrealistic, hopes for Charlie Sheen’s enigmatic ‘Violent Torpedo of Truth’ appearance. If Sheen was the Übermensch from Mars, as previously postulated, then his alien lexicon certainly must have a metaphysics to match. I hoped for more tirades, phantasmagorical tangents and deeper forays into Warlockian cosmology. Forget petty deliberations about the future of the novel: Sheen’s narrative was poised to inherit the future of postmodernism itself. Alas, it is with regret that I must report that the dude has got no game, as evidenced last Thursday in Atlanta. The Warlock’s curious cosmology now probably rests forever incomplete, perhaps one of the greatest underdeveloped philosophical texts of the 21st century.

The evening of the show, outside the Fabulous Fox Theatre in downtown Atlanta, the schadenfreude hung as thick as a humid summer evening in Georgia. A mix of rednecks, fratboys, sycophants, celebritists, disaster tourists, hipsters and detached meta-ironists adorned the streets, curious to experience perhaps the oddest and newest form of popular entertainment: the unhinged celebrity meltdown, live in your hometown! Videographers, bloggers and mainstream TV crews worked the crowds panning for the archetypal caricature of Charlie’s Kids. They had no shortage of wonderful subjects.

One interviewer to a dopey lidded Georgia boy:
“He bombed in Detroit, do you think he will bomb here?”
“Huhu, I hope so.”
Remarks the stoner, in the true spirit of the deprecation of the times.

The show itself was predictably unfocused, persistently heckled and Sheen did very little of the infamous bizarro ranting that initially popularized his meltdown. He mouthed a few catchphrases when he wasn’t smoking, his delivery completely frazzled and bewildered. Vacant and ghostly white, he ambled forward. If it weren’t for Jeff Ross (“how do you roast a meltdown?”), whose roasting intervention literally kept people from walking out, the show would have been an epic disaster. Finally, Sheen’s brief monolog at the end smelled pathetically like a desperate plea to get his TV job back, claiming in reference to his former bosses, that “it’s up them to give the people what they want.” Gone was the fire, gone was the game. Face it Charlie, the drugs don’t work.

Bikes are like cameras. Once you start with them you realize you need a different one for every occasion. BMX, Tarck, Track, 700cmx, road, beach cruiser and dutch city; they all have their time, place and function, none of which overlap very much. I wanted to build something with slightly multiple personalities: the soul of an indestructible sporty commuter, with the simplicity (read: concealed complexity) of an internally geared hub for the heart. Something that could handle the apocalyptic potholes of Atlanta in style, and possibly double up with some light touring. I decided on the Surly Crosscheck built up around an Alfine 8 speed.

As heavy as this thing is (26.5lbs), it has surprising dexterity. Don’t expect to win any races, just man up and get your workout on! It’s my go everywhere and haul everything plus-a-12-pack-of-fat-tire-bottles bike. The frame: build it up as a mountain bike, build it up as a road warrior, fat or skinny tires, risers or drops. The Surly is comfy and effective in any config. This is the beauty of the Crosscheck, the perfect frame for multiple personalities and also one of the few options for the Alfine with 132.5mm rear spacing. The Alfine has lived up to its rep so far. Shifts pretty smooth with correct cable length and aligned properly. Low maint and straight chainline, baby!

(PS: that’s Boris in the background, inspecting the final build.)

CBS need look no further than 1976 satire ‘Network’ in dealing with the Howard Beale Charlie Sheen situation. The world wants solipsistic rant master Charlie Sheen and full televised access to his 24×7 Dionysian revelry. Screw the lame sitcom. Give Charlie Sheen his own fucking show, with all the money and drugs he needs, and let him go nuts with it. It will pay for itself 100x over. This is the new reality TV, why are we afraid to embrace it?

What we love about Sheen’s nihilistic disregard for anything that stands in opposition to His Quest for Winning, is his dogged commitment to the crazy train, full steam ahead, all contrition out the window. There will be no genuflection before the great alter of therapy culture that so desires to process his celebrity meat into acquiescence.

In a way, Sheen recalls a derelict version of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the artist-tyrant, hyper-evolved man above men who has rejected the values of the miserable class and their appeasing mediocrity, to create the world anew.

So alien are ye in your souls to what is great, that to you the Superman would be frightful in his goodness!

And ye wise and knowing ones, ye would flee from the solar-glow of the wisdom in which the Superman joyfully batheth his nakedness!

Ye highest men who have come within my ken! this is my doubt of you, and my secret laughter: I suspect ye would call my Superman—a devil!

— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’

Unfortunately one wouldn’t expect the Übermensch to be doing such crappy sitcoms. But then again…God is dead, Sheen is #winning.

WikiLeaks is much like the Napster of 10 years ago, only with the matured anarchist intention of dismantling Government 1.0. My, how file sharing has grown up. It is ultimately irrelevant whether Julian Assange is a Dr. Doom or a Robin Hood: Pandora’s Box has been opened, and no one will be able to close it, as attempts to stop p2p technology have demonstrated in the past. Shut it down, and a thousand similar services spring up in its wake. Resistance is futile.

Even Donald Rumsfeld sees the writing on the wall and has ironically supplemented his autobiography with enough (de)classified information to ensure cataclysmic global boredom. I imagine we will see lots of the overwhelm-the-people-with-what-they-want strategy. This is the diplomatic political equivalent to a denial of service attack: death by inundation.

In Assange’s view, authoritarian regimes depend on and operate in a mode of conspiracy, which depends on secret information being kept secret. Introducing mechanisms to expose these secrets can thus impair the proper functioning of the regime.

How can we reduce the ability of a conspiracy to act?
We can marginalise a conspiracy’s ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to, its environment.

Furthermore, Assange attributes the ontology of conspiracy as computational in nature.

What does a conspiracy compute? It computes the next action of the conspiracy.

Coming from a somewhat infamous hacking and programming background, Assange has not surprisingly architected Wikileaks to mimic the effects of a DoS attack. If computation is the core method by which conspiracy operates, then simply disrupting the computation will defeat the system. It is of no minor coincidence that Assange coded the first open source port scanner, Strobe. Port scanners peruse systems for listening ports, which can then be subjected to exploits. Wikileaks works by the exact philosophical inversion of this process: imagine if the vulnerabilities voluntarily presented themselves to the port scanner. Wikileaks is a simple fly paper that attracts these vulnerabilities, luring them to publish themselves in the form of classified documents. Voilà, no hacking necessary yet the exploit is accomplished.

On another level, while Wikileaks succeeds to varying degrees with each exposed revelation, it succeeds to a much higher degree in demonstrating that the accountability of a system can be successfully questioned from outside the system, hence questioning the integrity of the system itself, as Slavoj Žižek (referencing Saroj Giri) takes note of :

What WikiLeaks threatens is the formal functioning of power. The true targets here weren’t the dirty details and the individuals responsible for them; not those in power, in other words, so much as power itself, its structure. We shouldn’t forget that power comprises not only institutions and their rules, but also legitimate (‘normal’) ways of challenging it (an independent press, NGOs etc) – as the Indian academic Saroj Giri put it, WikiLeaks ‘challenged power by challenging the normal channels of challenging power and revealing the truth’.[*] The aim of the WikiLeaks revelations was not just to embarrass those in power but to lead us to mobilise ourselves to bring about a different functioning of power that might reach beyond the limits of representative democracy.

Hence the outrage. Status quoticians do not like when the status quo itself is threatened.

In celebration of the possible Bank of America wikileaks takedown, I offer one of my own unpublished wikileaks: an old Bank of America customer service chat with “Emmanuel.” This is for reals.

Emmanuel: How may I assist you today?
You: I closed my account over a month ago and just received a service charge.
You: I need the account FULLY closed and the service charge refunded.
Emmanuel: I understand that you want to close the account.
Emmanuel: May I have the last four digits of the account concerned?
You: It should already be closed.
Emmanuel: Thank you for the information
Emmanuel: Please be with me.
You: I will be with you.
Emmanuel: Thank you.
Emmanuel: I appreciate your time and patience to chat with me.
You: I enjoy our time together.
Emmanuel: Please bear with me for me minute.
Emmanuel: Thank you,
(several minutes pass)
You: You still there? I had a bubble bath while waiting.
Emmanuel: I sincerely apologize to keep you waiting.
Emmanuel: I see that I am successfully placed the request for closing
the account.
You: And the $8.95 charge will be refunded?
Emmanuel: I request you not to make any activity on the account
othewise the account will get active . The account will take 3-5
business days to close the account . I was able to refund the fee as
well.
Emmanuel: Is there anything else I may assist you today?
You: I haven’t made any activity on the account before, but they still
charged me. How do I know it won’t happen again?
Emmanuel: I see that the monthly maintenance fee was assessed to the account .
You: That’s the problem.
Emmanuel: It will occur in a month .
Emmanuel: I apologize and do regret the trouble you had to face today.
Emmanuel: I assure that you will not get this trouble again!
You: What will occur? I don’t want to get charged for an account I have closed.
You: So it is COMPLETELY closed now?
You: No more service charge?
Emmanuel: Yes!
Emmanuel: It will be closed!
Emmanuel: Is there anything else I may assist you today?
You: Yes, BoA has repaid the government bailout loans, so when do we get
reimbursement checks?
Emmanuel: I wish I could have answered but unfortunately my scope is
limited to Savings and Checking accounts.]
Emmanuel: I will help you with the contact details to get the query resolved
Emmanuel: Please contact us at: 1.800.432.1000. We are available from
7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday
and Sunday, Local Time.
You: Ah, I see. Ok, thanks. Back to my bubble bath.
Emmanuel: Sure!
Emmanuel: It was a pleasure assisting you today. Have a pleasant day
and take care.
You: I enjoyed our time together.
Emmanuel: Bye and Have a great day ahead!

While it is amusing to see some psych-research pains taken to quantify nebulous existential entities such as ‘meaningfulness’ and their underlying sociology, I take issue with this egregious conflation of indifference and apathy:

The existentially indifferent appear to live a life of complacency, with few highs and little or no introspection. As Schnell puts it, “Without commitment to sources of meaning, life remains superficial. But superficiality is not necessarily a state of suffering.” They aren’t classified as having “psychological stress,” but they “can hardly be viewed as living a life of health and well-being,” according to Schnell. An existentialist would say they are asleep.

“Existential philosophers and psychologists, from Heidegger to Frankl … have discussed distinctions between an authentic, complex life and a shallow, ‘everydayness’ mode of existence,” Schnell comments. The existentially indifferent characterize this “everyday” mode of existence, and as if to defy existentialism, are perfectly fine with it. To replace meaningful pursuits, they have a wide array of superficial weaponry. “Surrogates for meaningful commitment abound: They range from material possessions to pleasure seeking, from busy-ness to sexuality.”

Problem: there are at least two kinds of existential indifference. What these researchers seem to be taking for indifference is the kind nefariously in bed with apathy. But not caring about meaning is not at all the same thing as being indifferent to meaning once it has been considered: indifference that is in fact a response to consideration. Apathy implies a blatant lack of concern before meaningfulness is even properly considered, or at least a lack of concern despite what ‘meaningfulness’ might even be. However, if life’s meaningfulness is considered, and deemed an epistemological dead end, then this warrants further speciation of those considered existentially indifferent. This variant of the existential indifferents consider the question of meaningfulness, unlike their cohorts the apathetics, but treat the problem itself with epistemological skepticism (can we really even know what meaningfulness is? does Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle apply? ) and may choose to shelve it with other categories of unanswerables like religion.

There is a learned secular pragmatism to this type of indifference: if the problem is at least possibly unsolvable, why waste time engaging it? A parallel of this situation can be observed in the sundry and fruitless religious debates we are all forced to occasionally tolerate. If I can’t prove my religious views are objectifiably true (I cannot), and you can’t prove your religious views are objectifiably true (you cannot), then why are we discussing it? Time waster.

Meaningfulness is an elusive quality like happiness or spirituality and perhaps not necessarily best dealt with head on. The true existential indifferents are just going about their lives, hoping perhaps that meaningfulness will catch up with them at a later date. This is not nihilism or apathy. The idea here is that it is not easily quantifiable (if at all), and as such, should not be obsessed over. And note that this is not categorical indifference, but simply indifference to the epistemologically impossible task of accurately defining meaningfulness. When those hedonistic indifferents play video games and have sex as opposed to sitting around tallying up all the meaning their lives lack (presumably in Quicken’s Meaning Calculator), it is because they have better things to do than spinning wheels over impossible philosophical terrain, things that may one day result in meaningfulness actually being achieved. Quit trying so hard, people.

Episode two of how not to fix things properly. This week we delve into home disimprovement. I am going to explain how to break your windows and then repair them, manunderstress style.

First, break a window while trying to kick a shoe off somewhere inside your home. Next, board up the window and leave glass on the floor so that you track it all over the house to properly receive glass splinters over the next few months. After that, board up windows and let house take on the vintage glamor of a craftsman era crack house. Now, wait a month or two before getting around to measuring windows. When inertia loosens its hold, take your measurements, but make sure they are put where they will be easily misplaced. Wait two weeks to make sure that measurements are completely lost in the disarray that is your life. Remeasure windows. Go to the magic glass cutting place and get replacement panes (optional: make incorrect measurements ensuring that the pane won’t fit.) Place pane into window making sure to cut yourself at least once, and glaze with that glazing shit. Leave it on lumpy for a long time. Finally, shape the glaze with a putty knife and wait 3 years to paint, or never paint.

This was the first D*Con that I actually bought a badge for, although admittedly too late and only for one day. Peachtree Center food court still I think the best place to get great candids of Troopers windin’ down, getting their Gyro on, etc. Also should have started watching the parade from Woodruff, not the Hyatt, too crowded. We managed to take in a couple of panels, although the Geisha dancing was canceled. Nerd fest. Regrets: missed the Apocalyptic Writing workshop and “Frodo: the Reluctant Hero.” Only at D*Con! Looked in on the Thriller dance, hilarious but I had no desire to be a part of that. ARC attack Masquerade was slammed, too slammed to get in, or spend too much time trying to get in. Lots of steampunk action. Saw the 30 rock guy. Lou Ferrigno. Drank Sweet Carolina Tea vodka out of the bike bag. It still kills me that they only let badged people into the merchandise rooms. Do they just not need the money? In the works for next year, Gatchaman costumes, getting a large group of people to share a room at the Marriott for a base. This would make resting, drinking, downtime that much easier while cavorting with the freaks and geeks…