Meditations in Fast Times: 35. The Lord GOD set a seal

Note to Readers: “Meditations in Fast Times” is a devotional writing experiment for the Season of Lent. Each day during the season, I am writing a poem as a meditation on, taking as my inspiration and intertextual basis, T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, as well as incorporating the daily office, current events, and other readings—some the same as those Eliot used while composing his seminal work and others.

                35.

The Lord GOD set a seal

Upon this, my trembling heart;

Beneath such healing hands, I feel

Compassion and love—the Healer's art

—Resolving this turmoil and tangle apart.

Healed from confusion back to ease
By the touch of this Master Nurse

Whose constant care is to bring release,

From those bitter dreams that threaten to curse,

And to insure our sickness not grow worse;

We realize the earth is our hospital,

Fostered by the careless billionaire,

Who would prefer it if we take ill and fall,

To succumb to an expensive paternal care

That persist in costing the highest fees anywhere.

Warmth ascends from feet to heart,

The healed soul, moved by gratitude, inspires
Those who seek better ways and art
Than what the billionaire’s business requires,

Adding to the ranks of the healthy by building tuneful choirs.

Wine, mixed with fresh water, to drink,

Organic produce and homemade bread for food,

In spite all we have been told to think,

We are more sound, and more enhanced is our mood
—But we are more aware now, how dis-ease is brewed.

© 2014 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Groupon, Coupon, or Poupon: Super-Sizing, Discounts and Our Twisted Notions of Value

I live in a small town that has a Parent’s Network List Serv. Being on a list serv like this is a wonderful way to find out things by email. For example, I found out that there has been a sharp increase in stolen vehicles in recent weeks, and what neighborhoods have been hit. Dogs manage to escape from their yards at unusual rates; the nice thing is, if you are on the network and you have seen the announcement, then later spot the dog (while out and about) you can do a rescue and be a material part of the happy ending.

Today, one of the members of the network posted about Groupon “deals.” She had seen one for the local theater, and thought about using it, until she looked at the limitations (can’t use on weekends and can’t use in first three days of a new screening, as well as some others). What it boiled down to was there was not that much in the way of savings and these savings could not be had at a times that would work for her and her family, and so it was hardly with the effort to use.

The internet has to earn its keep to an extent more than social networking and electronic gaming, and the primary way is through advertisements and offers, such as Groupon. Most of the time, these offers are for things, events or services I would never actually be interested in, and that has made me wonder how many people actually avail themselves of such offers. If offers are of a type that no one would use, there is really no sacrifice actually being put forward by the business making the offer—so the Groupon is not really a discount coupon, just a cheap way of making yet another advertisement for the business. Either that, or the offers of discounts are not really discounts, at all, as the critical thinker discovered when she thought about the theater Groupon.

Whether or not what I have just said is true, I think the more important issue is the systematic psychological training of the public toward a certain slants on “value”; namely (1) no one should pay full value for something or (2) it is better to get more for the money you do pay because more is better. So, this is why the pizza joint offers free breadsticks with your pizza order; you get more dough for your dough… Of course, for everything that is really important, we are forced to pay what we are told is full value; when was the last time you saw discounted offers on medical, dental, veterinary, banking, investment or accounting services? Conversely, since when did medical, dental, veterinary, banking, investing or accounting services get super-sized?

The societal trend toward “devaluing” almost everything has ultimately made it difficult (or even impossible) for the average person to receive decent wages or have health coverage or be accorded basic dignity and respect. This devaluation has extended so deeply into, for example, the realm of education that the entire system is being destroyed. The need to make a profit comes before the need to care about or for people. Conversely, the trend of demanding more for less has promoted all that is unhealthy and unsustainable; all you get is junk (junk food, cheap plastic toys, watered down drinks, flimsy products and incentive gifts that go to landfill); this is also a devaluation.

It is not such a huge leap to say that people have come to respect stuff more than people. I found a colleague recently expressing shame that he didn’t have an iPhone. I was appalled that a person would use stuff as a yardstick of self-worth. I can only hope that this highly intelligent and talented man was joking when he made the comment…

It should be no surprise to anyone that a public that says “I want more for less” is also a public that says “no fees; no taxes.” The meta-message is “we do not value ______ [fill in the blank] enough to contribute as a community to keep ______ available so that everyone can enjoy or otherwise benefit from it.”

Disturbingly, you could fit the word  “people” in those blanks, and if you do, it gives one additional food for serious thought about business trends and value. Particularly since the biggest businesses have been at least partially subsidized (both visibly and not so visibly) by our tax dollars for generations, and most people who say “no fees; no taxes” have likewise, each and every one, benefited from at least one, if not dozens of, publicly funded programs.

I like to find deals when it makes sense to do so, but I also love our public libraries, our parks, our vibrant arts programs and museums... I don't mind paying a few cents more for the French mustard I like, and I don't mind paying taxes.

More importantly, I value people, and I wish everyone did.

Aggregation Aggravation

The "Brave New World" of internet aggregation is upon us! Rejoice and be glad for all the freedom we now have!

Freedom. Hmmm. Freedom of information? Well, that is the "product" that we have been sold (hook, line and sinker). But is it really ours? And is it really free? Are there unseen costs associated with this freedom?

These questions are too big for a little blogger to answer. But I will endeavor to give us all some food for thought.

I recently finished reading "You Are Not A Gadget; a manifesto" by Jaron Lanier. (Some of you may remember that I had read an article in the London Review of Books that referred to this book; see the November 21st blog entry from this year, entitled Reflections on Social Networking By Computer.) I found Lanier’s writing voice to be awkward, in that computerese/geeky way that gizmo folk have. However, when I got past that, the ultimate message he was trying to impart was vivid and riveting, on many levels.

Lanier gives MIDI coding and technology as an example of what is limiting our creativity, in the world of computing.

Before MIDI, a musical note was a bottomless idea that transcended absolute definition. 

It was a way for a musician to think, or a way to teach and document music. It was a mental tool 

distinguishable from the music itself...

After MIDI, a musical note was no longer just an idea, but a rigid, mandatory structure 

you couldn‟t avoid in the aspects of life that had gone digital. The process of lock-in is like a 

wave gradually washing over the rulebook of life, culling the ambiguities of flexible thoughts as 

more and more thought structures are solidified into effectively permanent reality. 

This notion of computer code "lock-in" is developed by Lanier, throughout his book, as being the great weakness in all of computing. If you know what a MIDI file is, and have ever heard MIDI files, they are music that is not musical, but probably the tinniest representations of music imaginable. MIDI, because it is low level, is the base on which all digital music is founded. MIDI, Lanier suggests, is one of the factors of modern computing that limits human creativity, and he lists many others.

Having worked for a company that wrote proprietary software used in direct mail marketing, I know what he is talking about when he speaks of "lock-in" from the standpoint of limiting the way people can think, as well as limiting what they can do. The programming department wanted to create programs that the users could not use. The programmers did not want users to understand what the programs were doing because they wanted the users to use the programs in only one way. The programmers did not want the users to think, only to do, and do things only the way that the programmers wanted things done.

As a consequence of so much of our computing being based on what I might call codes of limitations, we are now into the second and third generation of people using computers and other electronic products that are frustrating because they do not work at the speed of our thoughts, nor with the naturalness of our body movements.


I want you to think on this, particularly as you consider the many products that you have purchased in the past few years, or even over the recent holidays, that all contain proprietary software and proprietary hardware and yet one more power cord that you have to keep track of (and have an available power source socket to plug into), because it is different from all the power cords you have in your house.

As you think on this, turn your attention to the internet and to social networking, information and marketing. Wow! That is a big shift, and a lot to consider at a crack, isn’t it?

Think about anytime recently when you have used a search engine on the internet to look up specific information.  I have noticed a few disturbing things about internet information: first, it is superficial; it is either completely contradictory from article to or it is nearly verbatim the same from article to article. The rush to fill up bandwidth with content from everyone and their extended families has meant a lot of copying as in duplicating and as in not original work. Lots and lots of useless and repetitive or even incorrect information is available for free all over the place. But you have to pay, just as you always did, for the in depth, likely more accurate information via a subscription service.

And what about all those ads that are festooned all over the articles you try to wade through? What is that all about? Well, this is called monetization, but you can seriously doubt that people are really making any money. I could, for example, be monetizing this blog, but that is not the point of this blog. I don’t want to be a product; I want to be a person. But there are web URLs that are trying to get my attention (can you believe it?), perhaps as a subtle bid to get me to put up their ads.

These aggregation tools are all over the place, every time you use the internet to find a product or even to look up articles, your use of the internet is tabulated, categorized and parsed, then used to send you ads on Facebook, Amazon, AOL or any of the many services where you have a sign-in account.

I commend Jaron Lanier’s book to you, which you can read via the link below, or check out from your local library, or purchase in hardcopy. I also include a link to a white paper put out by a consulting firm, a mere five years ago, called Re-Inventing Aggregation. This paper reveals, with simplistic brevity, the thinking behind modern aggregation (and also causes me to wonder how much work was put into it and how much money was made off of it).

My point in this article is to get us all to think about all the ways in which the world is getting small. We need to consider whether the information available to us is limiting. We need to consider whether our personal creativity is being limited by all that is electronic. We need to consider the role of the internet in terms of privacy, creative ownership, marketing and finance. Wars are waged and people die over the energy and resources the internet sucks from our environment. I believe that the freedom, creativity and privacy of us all hangs in the balance of this fragmentary, aggregate world of internet, and I ask you to think on all this, long and hard.

//

Lanier, Jaron.  You Are Not A Gadget. 2010. http://r-u-ins.org/resource/pdfs/YouAreNotAGadget-A_Manifesto.pdf

Electronic Publishing Services  Ltd, in association with Peter Sefton-Williams. Re-Inventing Aggregation. 2005. http://www.verisign.com/stellent/groups/public/documents/white_paper/dev035582.pdf