<nettime> are you 0 or 1 ?

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

The article below examines what could be the essence of issues we're 
facing today, the issues of hidden workings of things around us. It 
shows how communication revolutions are revolutions of reductions.

It's time to realize that increasing efficiency, reducing waste, growing 
productivity, etc., is a death knell. We can only exist within the 
noise, leakage, overhead, wear, slipping, redundancy.

The case can be made against general purpose computers. Maybe they 
should be outlawed. Each thing does one function, like can opener or 
scissors, and its 'instruction set' is interpretable by humans. Each 
'program' will contain few instructions obvious to almost anyone (no 
more binary encoding, instead use sexagesimal system - radix 60 - as 
Sumerians did.)  No need for abstracting higher level languages, as 
humans will find the 'machine languages' palatable. Embodying function 
in an object will make clandestine functionality impossible.

The point is that making workings of the technology obvious makes the 
whole ecosystem of deception disappear. Is this realistic? In most 
civilized places you cannot walk on he street wearing a mask. Contracts 
have to use certain language. So there may be precedence in legalizing 
transparency, at the very base level. Do not confuse this with ToS, 
various 'directives' and similar bs., when someone pretends to tell you 
what is going on or what must be going on.

[ machine translation from 
https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Kommunikation-Was-zeichnet-Code-Revolutionen-aus-4246072.html 
]

Communication: What distinguishes code revolutions?

December 30, 2018
Günther Orend

Theses on the genealogy of communication and introduction of 
communicative transcendence

Thesis 1: Digitization is a turning point in human cultural development, 
as is the shift from iconography to phonetics.

One knows the general place that the digitization represents a 
comparable to the invention of the book printing. This is too short and 
on closer inspection superficial. Our previous code consisted of 26 
letters and 10 numbers. In fact, not only has a new system for the 
reproduction of code been created, but a new code has been introduced 
which gives our culture a great advantage. This new code is binary, that 
is, it comes with two symbols: 1 and 0.

Thesis 2: Digitalization and its potential have been enormously 
underestimated so far. The full extent of the consequences was not 
recognized. This digital revolution is not just about theories, but 
about what's really possible. The amount of conceivable and the amount 
of feasible will approach each other rapidly.

Thesis 3: The essential advantage that Jewish culture has gained over 
others was based on the very early introduction of a phonetic 
transcription (consonant writing). Just as Asian equestrians were able 
to conquer the physical world very early on by inventing the stirrup, 
the Jews conquered the spirit world with the invention of phonetic 
spelling - in that most peoples adopted phonetic transcriptions. The 
simultaneous transmission of religious content to the Torah is at least 
close, because existing examples must have been used to illustrate the 
new communication principle.

For this we have to take a closer look at the advantages of phonetic 
transcription compared to the old icon font. Hebrew letters have come 
from icons:

Aleph was the icon that depicted a bull's head and referred to it.

Beth was the icon that represented and referred to a house.

Gimel was the icon that represented a camel and reported on it.

etc.

Today's Hebrew letters are abstracted icons. So Jewish culture must have 
known a variety of icons at one time in its history, like the Egyptian 
ones. Over time, however, there was a reduction to 24 icons, all of 
which were reduced to an initial consonant. Thus, the former icons no 
longer referred to references in the world but became references to 
sounds of language. Through this first case of self-referentiality of 
communication, the potential of writing was increased enormously. These 
icons were eventually reduced to pure symbols that form today's Hebrew 
alphabet. display

Thesis 4: The respective benefit of a new code revolution versus an old 
one has to be exponentially increased.

Thesis 5: Digital communication has a higher potential than our 
reproductive biology, because life is reproduced using a 4-character code.

At this point, the transcendent concept of communication has to be 
introduced. To illustrate, I have chosen a sphere model. Because the 
development of human communication was in spheres.

The first sphere of communication was the inarticulate sounds of the 
first monkey humans. This was followed by the second sphere of the 
voiced and sung proto-language, which could already refer to more in the 
world. The third sphere represented the articulated language, which in 
turn was another empowerment of man over the world. In the fourth 
sphere, the first icons were published that made communication 
independent of place and time and again extended the human radius.

In the fifth sphere came the phonetic transcription, which by means of 
linguistic self-referentiality - signs stand for speech sounds and not 
for signified in the world - made possible a considerable abstraction in 
thought, which considerably extended the intellectual and communicative 
horizon of man. In the sixth sphere, finally, the digitization took 
place, which, by means of further character reduction and 
telecommunication, made the individual human beings in his communication 
independent of time and place. Each extension of one communicative 
sphere to another represented an act of communicative transcendence. 
Metaphorically, each of these acts grew into the space that encompassed 
this sphere. In this case, the space stands for the amount of the 
expressible, conceivable and feasible.

Ludwig Wittgenstein had an immanent communication image in his Tractatus 
logico-philosophicus. So he concludes his famous essay: "What you can 
not talk about, you have to be silent about that." The purpose of this 
article is to introduce a transcendent communication model. As history 
shows, human communication has always outgrown itself. Therefore, I 
would like to supplement Wittgenstein as follows: "What you can not talk 
about yet, you have to be silent about that."

The space of communication is not static, as Wittgenstein suggested, but 
dynamic. There is a limit to communication, but it is not fixed but 
expandable, and as Wittgenstein rightly concluded, "The limits of my 
language are the limits of my world."

Paradoxically, the number of characters needed with each new sphere of 
communication decreases. Even the icon font had fewer signs than the 
articulated language, the phonetic transcription with fewer characters 
than the icon font, and the digital code with fewer characters than the 
alphabetic-numeric code.

Conclusion: The whole potential of communicative transcendence lies not 
in the diversity of signs, but in the reduction and limitation to the 
essential.


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