tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61587784965517048612024-02-18T20:54:24.777-05:00#ChaosIsGoodSevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.comBlogger61125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-4380612070188061892016-07-10T22:26:00.000-04:002016-07-10T22:26:26.205-04:00Capitalism’s Downfall: Growth for the sake of growth is cancer’s ideology...<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-align: justify;">In the age of Silicon Valley-Capitalism, growth for the sake of growth is the name of the game. Small start-ups are by definition required to grow and grow quickly to survive, raise funds and become profitable. Similarly, human cells (stems cells) grow and proliferate exponentially in the early stages of life. However, in an adult human body, cell growth for the sake of growth is called cancer. </span></div>
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In a normal cell, powerful genetic circuits regulate cell division and cell death. In a cancer cell, these circuits have been broken, unleashing a cell that cannot stop growing. –Siddhartha Mukherjee </blockquote>
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Just like a healthy body requires regulated and limited cell growth and proliferation, a healthy capitalist economy also requires regulated and limited business growth. This may sound counterintuitive from a ‘Wall Street’ capitalist perspective where future growth and market expansion is a way of survival, however, corporate capitalism much like cancer is a threat to our very economic system. Monopolies that are too big to fail with their armies of lobbyists, lawyers and innovation suffocating patent vaults are a threat to free-market capitalism as well as democracy. Much like a healthy cell becomes cancerous if it keeps growing beyond a certain threshold, when companies grow and proliferate exponentially with no limits, their economic and innovation benefits to society begins to plateau as they are forced to rely on marketing, advertising and lobbying to continue growing. What was once an exciting startup or small business with economic and innovation benefits to society, becomes a big, slow and inefficient monopoly hindering competition and innovation. What was once a great idea, is now a big army of lobbyist and marketing agents influencing and manipulating their way into survival and relevance. This was especially evident with banks in the last decades when they not only became too big to fail but they “invented” new unethical schemes to sustain and prolong their growth. The 2008 financial crisis was a symptom of a sick economy full of cancerous banks that not only had grown beyond their means but had infiltrated the economy in such a way that simply letting them fail and die was not an option.</div>
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Healthy cells are programmed per the code in our DNA to limit their growth but how should companies know when they’ve reached the growth threshold beyond which they become an existential threat to the very system that sustains them? <br />
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Growth is a core tenet of success. But we often destroy our greatest innovations by the constant pursuit of growth. An idea emerges, takes hold, crosses the chasm, hits a tipping point, and then starts a meteoric rise with seemingly limitless potential. But more often than not, it implodes, destroying itself in the process. Ideas are consumed just like lichen. Rather than endless growth, the goal should be to grow as quickly as possible—what technologists call hypergrowth—until the breakpoint is reached. Then stop and reap the benefits of scale alongside stability. What is missing—what everyone is missing—is that the unit of measure for progress isn’t size, it’s time. – Jeff Stibel</blockquote>
One other example of systems where growth is limited/regulated is ant colonies. Jeff Stibel, in his latest book Breakingpoint, highlights a study done by Deborah Gordon that concluded that ant colonies don’t grow in size past their fifth year of founding. Stibel calls this the “breakingpoint” beyond which the colony will collapse if it continued to grow. <br />
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The queen lives—and continues to lay eggs—for 15 to 20 years, but the colony doesn’t grow in size past the fifth year. The queen keeps having babies but they either replace older ants (a worker ant only lives for about a year), or they’re sent off into the world to mate and start their own colonies. Ant colonies have a breakpoint. They hit equilibrium during the fifth year and shed off all but about 10,000 ants. Remember, when the colony stops growing, it begins to reproduce—the fertile females and the male ants get sent off to mate and create new colonies. That prevents the original colony from growing too large. At this point, things change for the colony. Much like the neural network of the human brain, the ant colony grows smaller and paradoxically gets wiser. Their reactions to various incidents become quicker, more precise, and more consistent. After completing its explosive growth phase, the colony seems to change its focus from quantity to quality.</blockquote>
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According to Stibel as the size of ant colonies reaches equilibrium and stops growing, the community/network of ants evolves from “quantity to quality” and becomes more intelligent, effective and efficient. This means that in the corporate world there needs to be a limit on the size of each corporation. The goal should be more, smaller corporations as opposed to very large monopolies. But the question still remains: What is the threshold/breakingpoint for corporations? It will obviously be different depending on the type of business and market. But I envision a graph where advertising and marketing begin to be the focus of the company as opposed to R&D and product/service quality. A graph showing the R&D budgets vs. the advertising/marketing budget over time should help us realize whether the particular company has reached its peak in terms of innovation and is now relying heavily on marketing and advertising to sell more products/services. Obviously a certain level of advertising and marketing is necessary for businesses to gain exposure but a company that is relying solely on advertising to sell products is no longer an innovative company but rather a consumption enabler. <span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-1481888080233885292016-03-18T19:30:00.002-04:002016-03-18T19:30:44.818-04:00Time<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEp1wFS5LlESS6BzsSmSvka9RbzlQjTx3bZtlOhUtdJIziA7FZFX_ZTAfRDd2JcuGVTkHxnis2SZpvXw9KeiL15HEP8DLILtM5vZNbnVNiIJR-OPeGPFh_6SCEHQvir9NP59v-a88gF2eQ/s1600/maxresdefault.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEp1wFS5LlESS6BzsSmSvka9RbzlQjTx3bZtlOhUtdJIziA7FZFX_ZTAfRDd2JcuGVTkHxnis2SZpvXw9KeiL15HEP8DLILtM5vZNbnVNiIJR-OPeGPFh_6SCEHQvir9NP59v-a88gF2eQ/s320/maxresdefault.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
What is with time? Nothing about time is a constant. It forces change, heals wounds, mends broken hearts and marinates memories in a soup of nostalgia. What is always true with time though that it passes, good and bad, sober or drunk, happy or sad. The most productive, ambitious and athletic get old and die at the same exact rate as the sad, lonely, and obese. Time is humbling in this sense, emancipatory even. It’s something we all experience and paradoxically can never truly grasp. It’s always fleeting and escaping us.<br /><a name='more'></a>A dimension so foreign, a dimension so familiar. I often travel true space to forget I am traveling through time. I can choose which way to move in space but the stream of time is forced on me with no choice of direction or speed. Imagine a Google maps of sorts for the time dimension. I can pick a time, a memory, an event in the future or past and Google ‘Times” can give me directions to get there. Sometimes I think a version of this imaginary app is at play when I recall an event in the past and attempt to recall emotions associated with this event through smells or songs that stimulate the particular metamemory of the experience.<br /><br />Sometimes, somewhere, somehow, time was born and it never looked back, it never stopped. Every star, molecule, and atom rides the wave of time into the unknown. Change for the sake of change is time’s motto. Time is after all a word, a symbolic reference point to a concept, a dimension, a variable that we can’t comprehend directly. All we know is that it passes or do we pass through it? What is it?<br /><br />I hated time when it diluted my happy times over ‘time’ and I loved time when it helped mend my broken heart over ‘time’. I even wished time could stop or wished it could fast forward. Time humbled me, time angered me, time made me, ‘grow up’. Time even separated my various selves / versions forcing the present self to answer for the past and make decisions for the future. “Remember that time you did this or said that?”<br /><br />Do my cells know time better than I do? What is the clock in my DNA that tells my cells to stop regenerating as I get old?<br /><br />In due time the wave of time that started its journey 15 billion years ago shall take me to the same nothingness that it created me out of with no awareness of my consciousness, fully unconscious of my existence. And time and time again, the universe unfolds in the waves of time as it should in front of our temporary observer gaze.<div>
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“Whatever our status, we are all fated to end up as that most democratic of substances, dust. There is no wealth but life said John Ruskin including all its powers of love, joy and admiration. If there is something strangely calming in the idea that we are all going to die, it’s perhaps because something within us recognizes how many of our worries are bound up with things that are in the widest scheme pretty petty concerns, to consider ourselves from the perspective of a thousands years from now returned to dust in a vault, is to be granted a rare soothing vision of our own insignificance…”<br />-Alain De Botton</blockquote>
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Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-70408622938591087272015-08-04T11:05:00.001-04:002015-11-08T22:55:36.855-05:00Death: When the “real” intrudes into reality<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirPzn9znyFF5DTGK3XHIfKgf1kJynsflB1NpLW6F4nfpKJBVrbMYxVVtKOs3SNY2AKanZ80h-VJ27BMv9vOT9r-hRGERywGUfZpWBBiER-tNvwcW1rra54mN5UMZL9gA55Jp31qgVZgbkW/s1600/French_-_Pendant_with_a_Monk_and_Death_-_Walters_71461.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirPzn9znyFF5DTGK3XHIfKgf1kJynsflB1NpLW6F4nfpKJBVrbMYxVVtKOs3SNY2AKanZ80h-VJ27BMv9vOT9r-hRGERywGUfZpWBBiER-tNvwcW1rra54mN5UMZL9gA55Jp31qgVZgbkW/s320/French_-_Pendant_with_a_Monk_and_Death_-_Walters_71461.jpg" width="256" /></a>Those rare times when the "real" intrudes and disrupts our symbolic reality, the bubble we construct to filter out the chaos of the real dimension of life. The subject makes every effort throughout his or her life to keep the "real" at bay, at a distance, through the symbolic prism of language, making up stories, religions, and memes that give an illusionary order and "meaning" to the chaos of the real [life]. But what's so frightening about the real is that it refuses to be symbolized, understood, or explained. All we can do is to maintain a distance.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Death is the ultimate intrusion of the real into our symbolic reality space. It refuses to be symbolized, explained, and understood. No one is ready for death, not even the religious. I met this "real" when my mom passed away 10 years ago. Holding her cold and lifeless hand in mine, I came face to face with the inevitable, the real, the complete chaos of life that simply refused to be understood, to have meaning, to be explained. The severe emotional pain aside from losing her, what was so disturbing and emotionally unsustainable was indeed this meeting with the extremely brutal and chaotic [real] dimension of life. No religious or self-imagined explanation was adequate to explain that moment away and ease my mind. Some said it was part of a god's plan, others admitted to a lack of explanation but added that there must be a meaning or a higher purpose, "beyond our understanding". To me, these failed attempts to explain death are simply desperate attempts to put death or the "real" back in its place, at a safe distance from our daily reality, beyond the borders of our reality bubble. Through conscious or unconscious self-deception we are able to comfort ourselves, hiding in our own version of Plato's cave away from the chaos of the real outside even if we are fully aware of the inauthentic nature of things in Plato's cave.<br />
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My dad often comforts me about money, health, and work when I talk to him on the phone. What I've begun to realize is that these conversations or even myself for that matter are means to an end. He is rather attempting to comfort himself through me as some kind of external authoritative observer that validates and gives reality to his stories or a mirror of some sort that simply echoes his message back to him. Similarly, we all made up our own stories to convince ourselves that my mom would get better and beat cancer even in her last days, that this was just a temporary hospital stay. The real of course does not care for our stories and illusions and is a sobering reminder of the chaos of reality that is always lurking behind the scenes waiting to intrude. <br />
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I feel like what often is most disturbing for people when visiting a dying person, is the reminder of the real, and that no matter how hard we try to protect our symbolic universe from intrusions by the real, it is only a matter of time before we are faced with the truth that there are no truths or order, but just complete chaos. Deep down, we are all of course resigned to and hence paranoid about the existence of the real, but we must keep up the facade of the symbolic universe to maintain the social order as such. <br />
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Just like classical physics fails to explain the laws of the universe or lack thereof at the quantum level where reality is complete chaos and barely "understandable", our symbolic models and modules fail to help digest death and the real. We have created our own versions of reality, like an onion, made up of layers and layers of stories, dogma, ideology, and false explanations to ensure protection from the chaos of the real. But just like through psychotherapy we learned that there is no conductor behind the curtain of the self at the core of the mental onion, physics, having peeled the layers of reality, informed us that nothing is certain, or explainable at the quantum level, not even nothingness.<br />
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And yet. And yet, the real fascinates us, alludes us, and is constantly gazing at us like the eye of Sauron. We always think about death, love to read or watch movies about death and dying, and obsess about health and disease. Life is a chaotic mess and the self an illusionary social construct maintained on a fragile foundation of stories, identifiers, social networks and belongings that we attach ourselves to, to prolong the illusion that there is an immortal, conscious, subjective observer we call the self. We all enjoy watching the sunset but of course, only at a distance. No one wants to get too close to the sun but one day the sun will get too close to us whether we or our "gods" like it or not. </div>
Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-78894233283553815972015-04-12T09:21:00.001-04:002015-04-12T09:22:45.397-04:00The Case Against The Apple Watch: Silicon Valley’s Latest [Privacy] Killer App<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The Apple Watch is the next frontier of the intrusive Apple ecosystem that is infiltrating our privacy, liberty, and the very sense of self. For most tech start-ups these days, there has been almost an inevitable evolution from passively collecting user data, to using that data for targeted advertising (manipulation) and the Apple Watch is the latest “killer app”, fresh off Silicon Valley’s profit-obsessed assembly line to help the Apple ecosystem further manipulate our consumption choices under the disguise of “efficiency”, cool design, and hype.</div>
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Let’s be honest: Apple is no longer a technology company, it’s an ecosystem [loved by Wall Street and worshiped by consumers] trying to passively manipulate every aspect of our lives and choices through technologies that encourage, facilitate, and nudge more consumption. In this sense, the Apple ecosystem is increasingly resembling a religion or a cult with its ever evolving and advancing sacred hardware/software updates/upgrades, prophet (Steve Jobs), sacred shrine (the new Apple HQ) and obsessive followers.</div>
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After all in today’s secularist world, brands have replaced traditional religions and consumerism/shopping are the new religious traditions and prayer: a repetitive ritual with the illusion of happiness as the end to its means; The irony being: the ritual itself becomes the end and the means since the promised end for religion (god) and consumerism (happiness) are merely illusions. But though our modern day liberal hipster hanging out at a coffee shop near Dolores park in San Francisco will laugh at the notion of god or traditional religions, he has fully immersed himself in the Silicon Valley tech cults with their techno-prophets (Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Uber’s CEO) and saviors, saving the world one app at a time. World hunger and cancer are so yesterday, instant services and the sharing economy with a hint of cause marketing are the emerging chapters in the capitalist bible.</div>
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The Apple Watch makes it easier to buy stuff while tracking my fitness, the best of both worlds. I can be a very healthy and smart consumer. Uber is an uber-capitalist company with no regards for its employed “contractors” or customers but who cares, it makes money via a cool app so its typical liberal hipster consumer is happy and so are the profit-obsessed VC firms that fund Uber. The tech ecosystems are designed for one purpose only, and that’s to make money. Negative side effects may include: inequality, privacy violations, low wages, poverty, debt, and attention-deficit disorder.</div>
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So should I buy the Apple Watch? When I purchase an iPhone, I am no longer just buying a “smartphone” but rather buying into the Apple ecosystem through iCloud, iTunes, Apple Pay, iMessage, and Apple Watch. Just like the god of the bible is always in my head, watching every act, judging every thought and directing every decision, the Apple ecosystem is recording, analyzing, nudging and manipulating every decision, thought or emotion. At least the god of the bible is of my imagination’s own making while the Apple god is real. However, irony has it, that both systems (traditional religions, consumerism) are very much compatible with American liberal democracy. Freedom of expression: please, freedom of choice (free of media/marketing/advertising/political propaganda influence): not so much.</div>
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So what’s my case against the Apple Watch? The Apple Watch is just another unnecessary and annoying “cool” gadget, further intruding and invading our freedom of choice and thinking. I want less information not more. I don't care to be constantly reminded of the weather outside (I want to be surprised), my countless irrelevant business meetings, or annoying reminders that make me feel important or wanted.</div>
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Our relationship with internet technologies and connected devices is increasingly leading to more : 1) Narcissism (I am important because of the attention I receive via email, social media, text messages, etc.) 2) Distraction (I need to distract my self-reflective eye from the “I” not to ponder on my problems, insecurities, and fears by occupying it with viral, entertaining web content).</div>
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I am not naive here to suggest that there was a pre-technology era when life was “authentic” or “meaningful”. No, life has never been meaningful or authentic, whatever those terms even mean (What does it mean for something to mean something anyway?). Life is merely a chaotic and incoherent reality observed through the pattern seeking/obsessed lens of the self, hopelessly attempting to find, create, and project meaning, traditionally through religious stories and now through the miracle of technology and its story telling magic ball of “Big Data”. Measuring my steps every day thanks to my fitbit and observing my progress, I may convince myself of my greatness and athletic abilities but that’s just a temporary illusionary story I tell myself to feed my fragile ego that sustains my illusionary sense of self.</div>
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Maybe it’s too late and I've already baptized myself in the river of techno-consumerism when I purchased my latest iPhone and downloaded my favorite apps. Maybe I should face the reality that there is no escaping the Apple iCloud (god), Watch-ing, recording, and analyzing every choice and action. Maybe I'll eventually buy the Apple Watch to track my technology use and brag to my friend via social media how much I don’t use technology and social media. Maybe giving into Silicon Valley’s manipulative and profit-obsessed ecosystems is only a matter of time but I rather see that time pass by on my analog watch than the Apple’s intrusively watchful Watch.</div>
Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-88152532208283960442014-07-27T12:33:00.001-04:002014-07-27T12:35:27.326-04:00Human Trafficking: A Symptom of Economic and Educational Access InequalityA good friend, who is very passionate about and involved in combatting human trafficking pointed out to me that human trafficking, in most simple terms, can be defined as economic exploitation. That is, to directly or indirectly force someone to perform a service. The transaction lacks appropriate compensation and the subject performing the service by definition, lacks any other choice but to perform the service. In order to neutralize/balance this slave/master relationship, there has to be freedom of choice and fair compensation. But how do we define freedom of choice here? Is it that the subject has the choice to opt out, or that he or she can perform the service for another/different customer/employer?<br />
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<span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.318561553955078px;"><b>A schematic showing global human trafficking from countries of origin and destination</b></span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/%22%3Ca%20href=%22http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trafficking_of_women,_children_and_men.png#mediaviewer/File:Trafficking_of_women,_children_and_men.png">Trafficking of women, children and men</a>" by <a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:KVDP" title="User:KVDP">KVDP</a> - <span class="int-own-work">Own work</span>. Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0" title="Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0">CC BY-SA 3.0</a> via <a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/">Wikimedia Commons</a>." target="_blank"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Trafficking_of_women%2C_children_and_men.png" height="280" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="A schematic showing global human trafficking from countries of origin and destination" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/%22%3Ca%20href=%22http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trafficking_of_women,_children_and_men.png#mediaviewer/File:Trafficking_of_women,_children_and_men.png">Trafficking of women, children and men</a>" by <a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:KVDP" title="User:KVDP">KVDP</a> - <span class="int-own-work">Own work</span>. Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0" title="Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0">CC BY-SA 3.0</a> via <a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/">Wikimedia Commons</a>." target="_blank">"Trafficking of women, children and men" by KVDP - Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons</a></td></tr>
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If we imagine our subject to be a poor, uneducated, immigrant for example, then obviously, his or her choices are limited to begin with and opting out may not even be an option. Equally, he or she probably lacks the education and awareness to recognize that he or she is being exploited/trafficked. Lastly, any smart cartel of traffickers will form an alliance where though the subject maintains the illusion of choice, all of the "employers" offer identical compensation and working conditions. Here, it is easy to see how the definition of exploitation and trafficking can be expanded to include much of what goes on in our post modern capitalist society. Drug companies have a cartel of lawyers to protect, at all cost, their intellectual property rights and patents on high demand and life saving cancer drugs that they, as a result, can mark up as they wish. Not only they are exploiting cancer patients who have no choice but to pay for these drugs, they set the price extremely high and avoid competition by eliminating any competitors through intellectual property litigation wars. To even take this further, isn't Steve Jobs the biggest trafficker of all? He not only negotiated a secret anti-employee poaching deal with his fellow Silicon Alley tech bros to prevent engineers from earning higher salaries and having the tech giants compete for them, his beloved iPhone is made by overworked and exploited Chinese workers in overcrowded and unsafe factories.<br />
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Isn't the entire capitalist system founded on various forms of market exploitation with the illusion of freedom of choice as its happy-face facade? But what about the alternative? Wasn't the Soviet style communism the greatest example of human exploitation and trafficking? Without money and markets to regulate exchange, don't we fall back into relations of domination and servitude?<br />
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Perhaps, the ultimate remedy to purify this master/slave relationship that trafficking entails, is a fair wage or appropriate compensation. But even here we are lost. We can all agree that when we talk about people being trafficked today, we are talking about people who get paid very little to no money for the services they perform and at least a minimum wage is necessary. But how about the general population? How about you and me? Who is to decide what's fair in terms of compensation? The market? the government? A moral authority? The market fails, because it compensates based on demand, not necessarily level of effort or expertise. We all know Wall Street bankers should not get paid more than doctors, construction workers or teachers but the market couldn't care less. The market promotes, likes and encourages what sells and if trafficking means higher returns, then so be it. What about the government? The government simply makes laws and attempts to enforce them but has no control over setting "fair" wages other than the minimum wage. Governments also are powerless across borders and jurisdictions. <br />
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Okay enough intellectualizing. Where does this leave us? To say that you and I are trafficked because we lack a clear definition of a "fair" wage is misguided and naive. But it does highlight the inadequacy of government and markets to effectively prevent and eliminate trafficking. At the fundamental level, trafficking is a problem of exploitation of the vulnerable : Those who lack the resources, knowledge or skills to 1) Know they are being exploited 2) Can resist or fight back against exploitation 3) Can terminate their relationship with the exploiter without repercussions 4) Have other means for survival. To this end, what is required, is a more equal society, in terms of access to both opportunities and education. Though prosecuting traffickers is necessary, it does not address the fundamental problem of inequality of access to education and opportunities, which is much harder, more complex and nuanced problem. Trafficking is like cancer and just like cancer, it is a product and part of the very system that it threatens. Eliminating traffickers is a temporary solution as long as the system itself is not fundamentally changed to naturally resist trafficking through better education and more opportunities for all both domestically and internationally. <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white;"> </span></span><br />
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Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-31316735492715687852014-07-03T17:49:00.002-04:002014-07-03T17:54:15.276-04:00Ego Therapy: What Gyms Sell<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>Why gyms do more to remedy our fragile egos than work out our muscles</b><br />
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Why do some people become obsessed with going to gyms and working out? To be fit. Why? To be healthy. Why? So they can live an active and happy life. Does it really require lifting heavy weights in a room full of sweaty people making groaning noises to stay healthy? How about going hiking or a long walk outside or doing simple exercises at home? And what is this perfect model of health and fitness anyways? Is it mass body index? Winning CrossFit competitions? Finishing marathons? And which latest “cool” fitness craze/cult has the most believable founding story, pseudo-organic philosophy and covert corporate sponsorship to convince me to join its fitness religion and remedy my fragile ego?<br />
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Does being fit require religiously spending many hours every week in gyms; sweating, lifting, groaning and tracking every set, rep, mile, pound, minute and countless other metrics on the way to becoming our best and fittest self? Do we stop working out when we reach our fitness goals? Is there even such thing as a fitness goal or is “fitness” rather a vague idea rebranded and packaged as a “lifestyle” by marketing gurus to create and hype up the next big exercise craze and associated consumption? Is there a fitness craze out there that was not hijacked, hyped up and heavily marketed by big corporations once it started growing, often undermining its original, grassroots and organic founding? Aren't all these fitness memes and cults (CrossFit, Yoga, Kickboxing, Zumba, etc.) just different marketing schemes of the Fitness Industrial Complex to profit from the insecurities of an individualistic and over-competitive culture? Are we compensating for our lack of confidence and status by tailoring our external and physical features to match that of society’s “perfect” model so others respect and like us through our “society approved” physical identifiers/features? Of course, the sad irony here is that even in the absence of insecurities that motivate some to obsess over their self image, our modern superficial society judges everyone by their looks and external image. So we are in a way forced to participate in this game, even if we don’t believe in it.<br />
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Gyms obviously play a huge role in providing therapeutic help to prop up and maintain our fragile egos. Most of us are by default, insecure about our insignificance in an over-competitively alienating and individualistically shallow and judgmental society, where people are judged by their careers, titles, degrees, wealth and looks. Some are fat but have fancy titles and jobs. Others have fancy degrees and are fit and some are just extremely fit. But the sad and ironic through behind these ego remedies, is that they never actually remedy the deep insecurity within, just mask them temporarily. That’s why the chase to keep our ego remedy glasses full is an infinite struggle for the self, and a consumption gold mine for corporations once rebranded as a “cool lifestyle”.<br />
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If we accept the argument above, then shouldn't we also conclude that, a fat, unemployed and uneducated person who is in peace with him or herself (feeling no envy or jealousy of others’ lives) is a more genuine person? Would we rather not spend more time with this person than an extremely fit, Ivy League graduate lawyer, who will not stop talking about his or her accomplishments, wealth, cars and travels?<br />
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The therapeutic feeling that comforts my ego when I work out in the gym while checking myself out in the mirror, is what gyms sell. Being healthy, physically fit and looking “in shape” are just positive side-effects of the ego remedy we are sold by corporations when we buy into the next fitness craze.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlpR4J8g4-ehNEBCvAiWwgnd8JmqbgEhJw6DxYJ71SJbNH-te3jKTwhQ3CyA_wNdK_A6XdVbnvYewQrKw0f-xk8P3FHIdn4wM9gbXuSGdhi7uhsAYTPqvCfKI_CFfdmRNICT2HFV_OxW-j/s1600/eye.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlpR4J8g4-ehNEBCvAiWwgnd8JmqbgEhJw6DxYJ71SJbNH-te3jKTwhQ3CyA_wNdK_A6XdVbnvYewQrKw0f-xk8P3FHIdn4wM9gbXuSGdhi7uhsAYTPqvCfKI_CFfdmRNICT2HFV_OxW-j/s1600/eye.jpg" /></a>I am not me, but I am I? I am not even sure if “I” exist but “me” does. “I” as the subject is merely a hollow observer of its objectified version “me”. So what I am, is what others perceive “me” to be and “I” am just there to observe “me”, the symbolic reference point to the “I”. </div>
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It’s only in the presence of the “other” that the “I” is objectified into “me” and “me” is born. Since the subject (“I”) is empty and hollow within, it has to rely on the reflection of external identifiers, memes and perceptions in the mirror of the “other” to create the illusion of its unique existence, packaged together as “me”. As such, the “I” is only an “eye”, watching the perception of “me” through the prism of others.</div>
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This is why everything is enjoyed or experienced, not directly by the subject “I”, but rather through its perception prism of “me”. I don't know how to enjoy but “me” does that’s why I post my cool vacation pics on instagram to observe the virtual “me” receive likes and comments to validate and verify the enjoyment of this experience. Why couldn't I simply enjoy the vacation with no pictures or memories to share? Because the “I” is a hollow eye and can only experience things virtually through its objective self: me. “I” doesn’t know who “I” is or what “I” likes but “I” can observe what “me” likes or should like because “I” attempts to shape “me” through societal norms it projects onto “me”. Here, society and our social networks act as the mirror that “me” is defined by/through. It can be said that “me” is a function of societal and social connections, norms and memes. Here social media is the best virtual test environment for the “me”. Social media, however, while it starts out as a sandbox for prototyping and testing the “me”, it evolves often into a permanent venue for the “I” to observe and reprogram its virtual representation “me” and gage people’s perception on social media of this “me” in the making.</div>
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This does not mean that the “me” is the fake societal constructed façade, beyond which the “real” I exists. To the contrary, the “me” is real, the “I” being simply a hollow observer (eye). I am what others make me through their perceptions. There is no “I” per se. It is not ME (our facades and virtual profiles) that hides the real “I” (self) within, it is this very notion that there is a real “I” (self) beyond the simulacrum of “me” that hides its fallacy. The façade that makes up the objective me is the real. The subjective “I” is an illusion beyond its “eye”. As such, I never was me. I've simply been “eyeing” “me”. Only through the mirror of society and the other, the “me” becomes observable to the I’s eye. It is, hence, most disturbingly depressing when in complete alienation and isolation, in the absence of the other and hence the “me” (=objective I), the self or the I’s “eye” is forced to turn its lens on itself and face its own hollowness and emptiness.<br />
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Equally, you = you but “I” does not equal “me”. You = you because I, the “other” created “you” so my perception of you, from I’s perspective, is “you”. When we interact, the subject “you”, is not interacting with the subject “I”, but rather, it’s our “me”s that are tangled in a dance of some sort, while being observed by our subjects that are attempting to build a narrative in memory to capture and symbolize the nature of our relationship.</div>
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Marriage here is the perfect arrangement for the long term survival of the “me”. A man is a man in the presence of a woman where the “I” becomes the objectified, society determined “me” and vise versa. Just like a single adult “me” evolves into a husband “me” upon marriage (because society says so), the husband “me” becomes a father “me” in the presence of a child, the irony being that throughout this evolution, the “I” simply remaining as such: a hollow observer with a flawed memory saying things like: “I am a husband and a father” when what he really means is: “I am watching “me” and in the presence of a child and a woman I cohabit with, society dictates “me” to be a husband and father”, two identifiers that simply have no meaning to the “I” (eye) other than symbolic references to societal models for the “me”.</div>
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Ironically, “I” [beyond the eye] do not exist but “me” does and I am not me. I am just a camera recording “me”.</div>
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Here I am reminded of a story of a competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasios, two painters from the ancient Greece, about who will paint a more convincing illusion. One paints grapes on a wall so real that birds try to eat it. The other paints a curtain on a wall so real that when people see it, they complain: “okay stop bullshiting around and move the curtain so we can see your work”. This is how ideology functions today. Everyone is obsessed with pulling the consciousness curtain and finding their “true” self, the “real” “I” to know their real passions, likes, thoughts and deeper motivations. However, this very search for the “I” beyond the eye hides the reality that the “I’ is a hollow and empty observer, a curtain beyond which there is nothingness. This very self-obsessed struggle to find “meaning” and “passion” becomes the end and means by which the “me” is created, sustained and evolved. God didn't create the “I” because just like the “I”, god is an illusion beyond its facade, however this very facade is necessary to sustain “me”, because “me” needs god as the “<a href="http://eyeslitcrypt.wordpress.com/2008/03/31/lacan-through-zizek-on-the-big-other/">Big Other</a>” to exist and survive.</div>
Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-38447763198005105482014-03-29T19:53:00.002-04:002014-03-29T19:56:21.390-04:00Does the motivator matter as long as it motivates? What the LA (Status-Obsessed) Mindset Taught Me About Motivation and Success...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Does it really matter where motivation comes from as long as it leads to success? Does it matter that a wealthy, successful, entrepreneur who continues to work seven days a week, is motivated by a deep, unconscious, status anxiety, having had a very poor childhood? Does it matter that a nerd becomes a Silicon Valley billionaire simply because of an obsessive drive to earn money, respect and status, motivated by deep childhood insecurities as a lonely, misunderstood, and awkward kid? Does it matter that an extremely fit, and thin athlete stresses constantly about his health and fitness motivated by his deep insecurities about being fat, having been made fun of as an obese child?</div>
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I was in LA last year for a wedding and it was not hard to observe people’s obsession with wealth, status, and “showing off”. It was also fascinating to see how entrepreneurial and business minded everyone was, most with little or no college education. My offer to help a friend who had just graduated college, get a job in corporate America was not even considered. Not surprising of course, considering I didn’t meet anyone who had what you would call a normal “corporate” job. I soon realized that most people in Glendale (near LA) did not have aspirations for degrees, college and intellectual accomplishments. It was all money, cars and fashion. Education and the corporate ladder were too rigid and slow for the hungry, status anxious, entrepreneurial types: I want money and wealth and I want it now before my neighbor buys a nicer car. Of course, as an “intellectual” myself with an Ivy League degree and bookshelves full of “deep” intellectual books (my status symbols?) I quickly rejected this LA “hollow” and “show off” mindset, glad to not live in such a culture. And ever since this trip, I have been reminded of the LA “mindset” everytime I see cousins or friends from LA post things on social media about nice cars, money, and wealth. This compared to my cousins and friends here in DC who have very little footprint on social media.</div>
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My cousins here in DC don't even know much, let alone care about glamour, cars or wealth. In their east coast suburban mindset, the only way to the top is through the risk averse corporate world (not sure they know what “top” means but they are following the herd through the education industrial complex maze). They have had very little exposure to the entrepreneurial/superficial LA mindset. Bottomline: they are not materialistic (thank god) but they also lack motivation, aside from the objective motivation that’s projected onto them by their parents. I wonder what they would do or how they would progress without constant pressure and discipline from their parents. Maybe I am naive here to conclude that they lack motivation in the absence of their parents’ projected motivations.</div>
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To include myself in the mix, couldn’t the desire to become an intellectual through education, degrees, books and this very “intellectual” post itself be motivated by a hopeless struggle to compensate for my own deep insecurities about status, knowledge, and recognition? Aren’t my motivations here and my success so far very similar to the LA “mindset”? Aren’t my bookshelves not also status symbols? I sure too am chasing status here, it’s just that my means to that end is through intellectualism instead of materialism but both are simply means to an identical, self-centered, end, no?</div>
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Now which one would you rather be, if you could choose? Someone with a relatively perfect childhood, growing up in a loving, wealthy, intellectual, and cool family, where you didn’t develop any insecurities to want to compensate for in adulthood hence having very little motivation as an adult, or having a troubled childhood which now motivates you as an adult in the specific insecurity area? Though obviously our motivations have much more complex roots than simply overcompensating for childhood insecurities, it remains true that our social networks, culture and surroundings play a critical role in fostering or hindering our motivations. The ironic tragedy with insecurity driven motivation is that the subject is never able to truly get over that childhood insecurity even if as an adult she or he achieves or overachieves and is able to have everything he or she lacked as a child.</div>
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Those (like myself) who argue that materialistic motivators such as money and wealth are hollow, shallow and empty have to make a convincing argument that there are other “meaningful”, “deep” motivators. There is unfortunately no deeper meaning or reality behind the curtain of all motivators (note to myself). They are just motivators that motivate us for better or worse. But next time we hear bloated, boring and attention obsessed marketing gurus TEDlecture us about motivation, success and merit, we should tweet @ them: Okay boss, cut the crap and tell us which insecurity motivated you to become “successful” and look so constipated so we can instill same insecurity in our kids…</div>
Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-41404326209213364762014-03-04T22:29:00.000-05:002014-04-17T21:21:57.430-04:00What is Life? A Chaotic Mess...<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiZnnLvkM76g3HPLMl96L4w6ircXz-rLra1RSQ4N3cL4GWdQNOoxLiOScMAUV3nAAifMO_4wvHcsPHKILSwB4RCKHA1QMML2hzT4L8RXKuzCxN5jTJlhrgvFVNqO_SO6qOkXIcWu6qJC3R/s1600/560152_327182824069495_1430121007_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiZnnLvkM76g3HPLMl96L4w6ircXz-rLra1RSQ4N3cL4GWdQNOoxLiOScMAUV3nAAifMO_4wvHcsPHKILSwB4RCKHA1QMML2hzT4L8RXKuzCxN5jTJlhrgvFVNqO_SO6qOkXIcWu6qJC3R/s1600/560152_327182824069495_1430121007_n.jpg" height="320" width="265" /></a>What is life but a process of replacing one anxiety or desire with another, one addiction with the next? From babies, trends to jobs and lovers, we jump from one mind occupier to the next, so afraid of “boring” solitude, in the absence of worry or excitement. Even sleep has been hacked and occupied by the desires and worries of the consumerist culture.<br />
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Perhaps solitude is so disturbing because in boredom introspection faces us with the mirror of consciousness, where we find the “I”, lonely, insecure, and confused, fully aware of its mortality and irrelevance, secretly resigned to the emptiness of its existence. But a tweet or an email on a vibrating iPhone quickly rescues us from this depressing twilight zone back to the digital dimension that runs on busy, distractions and attention currency.<br />
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The self is a disruptive, false, and, as such, unnecessary metaphor for the process of awareness and knowing: when we awaken to knowing, we realize that all that goes on in us is a flow of “thoughts without a thinker.” The impossibility of figuring out who or what we really are is inherent, since there is nothing that we “really are,” just a void at the core of our being. — Slavoj Zizek</blockquote>
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What is life then but a modern society enabled distraction and attention casino full of mental stimulations to create the illusion of social attention, sense of control and self importance, in exchange for our money, capital and consumption hungry eyes? What is life but ignorance to shelter us from our deepest and most humbling fear, that is: our irrelevance in an unconscious 15 billion year old cosmos that enabled us, governs us, and will never be conscious of our consciousness, even care for our death or existence? What is life but an endless attempt to overcompensate for and hide our childhood insecurities, shortcomings and parental problems?</div>
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What is life but an endless and hopeless attempt at achieve immortality by holding on to an ever fleeting and escaping time, through biological and artificial memory banks? Is nostalgia really a feeling when remembering a past good experience or a sad reminder of our mortality?</div>
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What is life but a lonely human journey as a hyper-social cyber zombie? What is life but an infinite game of chasing dreams we don’t even understand, with a self that we barely know, following societal norms we never question, to achieve perfect happiness we can't even define, measuring life only through our flawed memories?</div>
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Awakened to life out of the night of unconsciousness, the will finds itself as an individual in an endless and boundless world, among innumerable individuals, all striving, suffering, and erring; and, as if through a troubled dream, it hurries back to the old unconsciousness. “We are not at home in the world, and thus homelessness is a deep truth about our condition. Here, indeed, is the root of original sin: through consciousness, we ‘fall’ into a world where we are strangers. Hence our deep-seated desire to return to “the primordial point of rest”: the landscape of childhood and the safety of the family hearth. -Jim Holt</blockquote>
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What is life but a constant state of nostalgia for childhood, and our earliest memories of love? Love of being cared for in a naked, vulnerable condition. Loved and looked after for who we were, identity in its barest, most stripped-down state, no merit, degrees, job titles, or status required, just pure love.</div>
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Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life. -Edward O. Wilson</blockquote>
What is life but a constant identity struggle between the remembering and experiencing self? Am I my memories, my DNA, my social network or a deeper spiritual soul? Maybe I am just me, an onion, reduced to nothingness with all the layers peeled and stripped away.</div>
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Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me. -Daniel Kahneman</blockquote>
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On his deathbed, Christopher Hitchens said: “To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?”. But he also admitted, “My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends. I can’t eat or drink for pleasure anymore, so when they offer to come it’s only for the blessed chance to talk. For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.”</div>
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Life is being humble in doubt and finding humility in mutual emotions. The emotions I received from my late mom, the most unconditional, the most selfless, the most dear, the most holy and yet simple. Life is chaos of feelings.</div>
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“Whatever our status, we are all fated to end up as that most democratic of substances, dust. There is no wealth but life said John Ruskin including all its powers of love, joy and admiration. If there is something strangely calming in the idea that we are all going to die, it’s perhaps because something within us recognizes how many of our worries are bound up with things that are in the widest scheme pretty petty concerns, to consider ourselves from the perspective of a thousands years from now returned to dust in a vault, is to be granted a rare soothing vision of our own insignificance…” -Alain de Botton</blockquote>
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Physics peeled the layers of reality to find nothingness, no conscious mechanism, no grand theory, no god, just random quantum fluctuations coming in and out of nothingness that give the perception of reality when observed by a conscious observer. Psychoanalysis peeled the layers of the brain to find nothingness, no concrete self, no identity, no person, rather a mix of dynamic and evolving imitations of external memes or the Big Other.</div>
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What is life but uncertainty, chaos and the humility that comes with appreciating and embracing it as such? My mom’s death was the last and most important lesson she ever taught me: That life is a chaotic mess with no answers or user manuals, just different ways of reacting to and looking at life. Life is nothing but an illusion of the existence of a conductor in our brain’s chaotic symphony we call consciousness. A chaotic journey that requires humility that comes from doubt not certainty or blind faith. An experiment that requires seeing people as they are: A chaotic mess with societal forced facades and virtual representations….</div>
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The oddest thing about the upper reaches of a consciousness performance is the conspicuous absence of a conductor before the performance begins, although, as the performance unfolds, the conductor comes into being. For all intents and purposes, the conductor is now leading the orchestra, although the performance has created the conductor — the self — not the other way around. The conductor is cobbled together by feelings and by a narrative brain device, although this fact does not make the conductor any less real. The conductor undeniably exists in our mind, nothing is gained by dismissing it as an illusion. — Antonio Damasio</blockquote>
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Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-57509639560071864722014-01-25T18:43:00.001-05:002014-01-26T11:28:24.165-05:00How Profit-Obsessed Engineers Engineer Ignorance<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk1O-j7lc8cHvlogZ0H77bH0uNK70pFzKPtM0t9Y7cFr7YXhNPY_8cIrWR9ZO_fIXgllDc37R4I9WmRbb-SDOBM6ZCcP9Ayn6aqDBzsD1-nakc7O_0HKKhF3CdMhq2FJ6yGFxmYQEQDHOk/s1600/siliconvalley.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk1O-j7lc8cHvlogZ0H77bH0uNK70pFzKPtM0t9Y7cFr7YXhNPY_8cIrWR9ZO_fIXgllDc37R4I9WmRbb-SDOBM6ZCcP9Ayn6aqDBzsD1-nakc7O_0HKKhF3CdMhq2FJ6yGFxmYQEQDHOk/s1600/siliconvalley.jpg" height="208" width="320" /></a>As an Engineer by academic background, I have always proudly showcased my obsession with recognizing problems and thinking of ways to solve them. Engineering is synonymous with problem solving and efficiency. But what if not all problems or processes should be solved or made efficient? What if these modern-day efficiencies and engineering “hacks” simply hide the moral, ethical and social dilemmas and impacts of our decisions? What if these solutions are also eliminating the element of surprise, curiosity and diversity of experience? What if same-day delivery by Amazon’s drones is a solution to a non-existent problem?</div>
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Of course engineering has revolutionized every corner of our lives to the better from safety, pleasure, comfort to better health and productivity. However, this very increasing disruption or “hacking” of life by engineers that dates back to the early days of human civilizations has its hidden cost: ignorance. To use an extreme example, having access to fresh clean water in the comfort of our homes is way better than having to walk to a river or a lake (often many miles away) everyday to bring water, shower or wash our clothes. Very few people would want to go back to the pre-plumbing days. However, this comfort we enjoy also blinds us from the realities and thoughts of nature and the limited resource that is water. By paying for water in money, it simply allows us the luxury of not having to think about where it comes from and how it gets to us. The same is true for trash. The fact that we can put our trash in a large bin and is collected by city sanitation services (paid for by our taxes) blinds us from how all that trash is truly discarded. As such, very little thought goes through our heads when throwing stuff away. If we did not have this luxury of course, we would be much more mindful of how much we consume, buy, and / or throw away. These advances, though necessary and good, often shield us from personal sacrifice and subjective thinking about the larger impacts of our consumption habits.</div>
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An engineer is a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession">professional</a> practitioner of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering">engineering</a>, concerned with applying <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_knowledge">scientific knowledge</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics">mathematics</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity">ingenuity</a> to develop solutions for technical problems. Engineers design materials, structures, and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality, regulation, safety, and cost.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer#cite_note-bls-1">[1]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer#cite_note-nspe-2">[2]</a>The word engineer is derived from the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin">Latin</a> roots ingeniare (“to contrive, devise”) and ingenium (“cleverness”)</blockquote>
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Also, engineering as a profession has often blindly followed the compulsive and irrational desires of the “free” market, sometimes even sacrificing efficiency and ingenuity in the process, for higher monetary or status returns. For example, instead of making fuel efficient cars, American car companies until recently were building large SUVs (anyone remember the Hummer?), because that’s what the irrational market was demanding at the time until oil prices went up and now all we see are smaller hybrid cars. By “following the money”, engineers have also increasingly focused on solving problems for the wealthy and affluent segments of the population. Further, through over-patenting, the medical engineering industry or Big Pharma have increasingly targeted diseases and conditions with higher Return On Investment (ROI) and ignoring most complex and rare diseases. It’s sad and unfortunate that in America, smarts, ingenuity, solutions and talent will follow only where money and capital go even if it means going against the principles of engineering and making less efficient vehicles and products.</div>
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More alarming is that today’s new generation of Silicon Valley engineers are eroding and replacing the pleasure of surprise fueled by curiosity, imagination and anticipation with the short-lived pleasure of instant gratification flued by compulsive consumption technology and apps. Who wants to have sex these days when they can easily with a few clicks, access millions of porn videos? Who wants to be in a relationship or a real friendship when with one facebook post or tweet we can receive virtual attention or “likes”? Who wants to learn anything when Google has all the answers (my 60 year old former manager who just started dating again, Googled how intimate he should be with his significant other after two months of dating and complained when his current situation with her did not match what Google recommended).</div>
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We need a new generation of Engineers who do not simply follow the money to the casinos of Wall Street, the mind-numbing, efficiency industrial complex of consulting or advertising-hackathon nerd resorts of Silicon Valley. We need a new generation who see problems not from the prism of advertising dollars, instant-gratification-consumption or “cool” apps, but rather, Engineers who tackle problems of need of the majority instead of non-problems of want of the minority elite. The next revolution won't be tweeted or facebooked and the cure for poverty, cancer, education, obesity will sure as hell not come out of Apple’s App store or Silicon Valley’s Ad-Obsessed R&D departments (maybe GoogleX, though i doubt it). Engineering needs to go back to its roots to target complex and fundamental societal problems that often require more than just over-rational and narrow-minded programmers and mathematicians.</div>
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Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-75696718239569163532014-01-02T22:59:00.003-05:002014-01-22T19:55:32.611-05:00Growing Up In The Age of Hypercapitalism: The Making of the Modern Hypercompetitive “Grown-Up” Child<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://www.cambridgenannygroup.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/tumblr_mdxpym5S1l1qzpwk0o1_400-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.cambridgenannygroup.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/tumblr_mdxpym5S1l1qzpwk0o1_400-1.jpg" height="281" width="320" /></a>What happened to childhood? Childhood, when parents allowed kids to be kids, to wonder, to experiment, to simply spend time lost in their imagination? How was childhood before it became disrupted and hacked by the contagion of consumerism and the hypercomeptitive society as a direct result of our western style hypercapitalism? In the age of Silicon Valley’s idolized and worshiped “hippy-capitalist” false prophets (Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerburg) and the economic uncertainties and inequalities caused by the casino that Wall Street has become, it is most critical than ever for parents to raise educated and smart kids with a chance to succeed in the modern day economic jungle.</div>
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<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Adderallrx.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Adderallrx.jpg" height="200" width="198" /></a>In a society where the top 10% collect the top 50% of household income, it is evident how competition becomes way of life. The emergence and popularity of hyperelite schools and private tutoring companies from preschool all the way through college with extremely high tuitions is only one sign of the desperation parents feel trying to prepare their kids for this hypercompetitive society. There is such emphasis on success, grades and “winning” that kids these days have very little time to be kids: to play, to wonder, to not care, to make mistakes and learn from them. What’s most disturbing is how corporations are exploiting and feeding this fear and anxiety parents feel about their kids’ future. As detailed in this <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/health/the-selling-of-attention-deficit-disorder.html?smid=tw-nytimesscience">New York Times article</a> on the overdiagnosis epidemic of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), more than ever drug companies are aggressively marketing ADD drugs to parents, schools and directly to kids, less as a drug with negative side effects and more as a supplement to help kids do well in school and be more “productive”. Very rarely these drug companies openly discuss or disclose all the negative side effects of these drugs and their long term effects on behavior and brain chemistry.</div>
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It is obvious why these drugs are attractive to parents in the age of social media and constant stimulation, who want to help their kids climb up the hypercompetitive education ladder. The irony here is that Big Pharma has turned these drugs into cash cows for its balance sheets by attempting to treat attention disorder which is itself a direct symptom of the age of social media and iPhones, two technologies that are themselves cash cows for Silicon Valley. Parents and kids seem to be caught and financially exploited in the middle of this lucrative cycle of kids being bombarded by stimuli facilitated by Social Media and Advertising companies for their attention while drug companies are offering an expensive and dangerous antidote to Silicon Valley’s attention disruptions. Here both Big Pharma and Silicon Valley win but how about kids and their parents?</div>
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Aside from acting as antidotes to Social Media’s 24/7 attention hacks, these drugs are a necessary evil for parents, most of whom these days are themselves struggling professionally to keep up with this hypercompetitive economy leaving them little time or patience to devote to their kids. And of course we have seen the alternative scenario where for some affluent parents who do have the time and patience, they become obsessive helicopter parents often attempting to overcompensate for their own lack of career with turning parenting into a job and constantly demanding results and accomplishments. This of course is another negative symptom of today’s society where people are judged by their careers and professional accomplishments.</div>
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<a href="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5509/11505023546_67baae3f51_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5509/11505023546_67baae3f51_o.jpg" height="212" width="320" /></a>And what is the result of this onslaught of overmedication, private education, helicopter parenting, and forced learning on kids? What happens when sense of wonder and experimentation is simply either exploited by social media and advertising companies or it has to be suppressed by dangerous ADD drugs? Is there a space in between for kids to get lost in the solitude of their imagination safe from the attention disruptions of Silicon Valley, Big Pharma and for-profit Education? And what happens to these kids when they grow up and do succeed and are able to climb up the education, corporate, financial ladders? How does what they lost: their childhood, impact their adult life?</div>
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My opinion is that kids who never had a childhood (See Michael Jackson and other celebrities) often never truly develop mature social intelligence. They simply grow up to become emotionally distant and socially confused, hypercompetitive and hyperproductive “adults”, often attempting to remedy their loneliness and status anxiety with titles, wealth and status symbols. When everything is seen from capitalism’s prism of competition, then there is very little room for emotional connections, commitments and friendships. Friendships and deep social connections require sacrifice, selflessness and spending time and resources on others.</div>
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Should it surprise us then, that Silicon Valley has one of the biggest thriving escort service markets for all the socially awkward and hypercompetitive geniuses who made it up the education ladder to work for some of the most elite tech companies in the world? Should it disturb us that South Korea with an extremely competitive and capitalist education and economic system has one of the highest suicide rates in the world? Perhaps it is alarming to hear that in Japan with an extremely overworked and over-competitive workforce, there is a thriving business that simply offers attention and cuddling services to lonely, overworked and insecure corporate workers. Of course, capitalism is only a system, it is us the citizens, parents, teachers and students who have to embrace the good, reject the bad, and help improve upon the shortcomings of this system. We must especially be mindful of what kids give up in childhood when they are forced to grow up fast intellectually while they never have the time and space to mature socially. Growing up in the modern world does not have to be so ruthlessly competitive, if we teach kids that friendships and deep social connections are much more valuable than hollow status symbols, wealth and fancy titles.</div>
Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-88789240765147187112013-12-14T14:33:00.001-05:002014-01-22T19:41:24.035-05:00What I am Afraid of: The Fading Emotional Metadata of Memories<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/700/1*DGlbaOT6Iv2k0XthFGVM2Q.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/700/1*DGlbaOT6Iv2k0XthFGVM2Q.jpeg" width="320" /></a>What am I really afraid of? I am afraid of not remembering, I am afraid of not being nostalgic, afraid of being able to live in the present with no connection to the past. Afraid of recalling experiences simply as events instead of feelings, remembering people instead of connections. There was a time a simple song, a sound, a smell or simply a new season would ignite feelings of a certain memory in time. Memories of being comforted by my mom, of playing soccer with friends, eating with family, partying after a hard test, meeting strangers on random travels.</div>
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I wish there was a way to save these feelings. These memory inspired feelings seem to escape into the dimension of time slowly fading. I sometimes have dreams of my mom and I wake the next day with feelings of love, sadness and loss. Feelings that it seems I could never normally access when awake but somehow in the dream world the feeling metadata of memory becomes accessible. Perhaps in dream state the dimension of time disappears giving us access to these feelings laying dormant somewhere in the corners of the unconscious like secret databases that suddenly come online. This is what is so disturbing about getting old. The fading of emotional component of memories.</div>
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Isn't this what motivates most of our adult life decisions: nostalgia? A constant and hopeless attempt to recreate childhood (feeling safe, important, cared for, free) and the school years (partying, friends, connections, emotional roller-coasters). Maybe some of us have better memories with addiction to emotions and develop a fetish for nostalgia, hence, never truly living in the present caught in an endless cycle of attempting to recreate, rehearse, re-enact, replay these good memories hoping the emotions would return.</div>
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Maybe what I should truly be afraid of is being stuck in the past in the blackhole of nostalgia. Maybe my fear comes from ignorance of appreciating present and future emotional experiences. Maybe what really feeds this fear is how emotionally risk averse and boring adult life can be, when everything is judged from the prism of financial success, status and risk management. Maybe it’s time to make babies so I am forced to live in the present, their present and project their emotions on to me and their digital photo memory banks onto you via Social Media.</div>
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Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-18684184087822278712013-11-07T17:47:00.004-05:002014-01-22T19:40:29.754-05:00Why Relationships Require Belief in a Distant Sacred Object <br />
<b>Love? Yes Please, But Only at a Distance</b><br />
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When I was little my dad used to sing a song called "Sunset". It went something like this:<br />
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<i>You are so beautiful you are like the sun<br /> But I must appreciate and love you from a distance<br />Because the sun will burn me if I get too close</i></blockquote>
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The metaphor here is ironic. Because it is not that the lover fears being overwhelmed, heartbroken or "burnt" by the object of his love but rather, paradoxically, the only way for the subject to maintain and sustain his love for her is by maintaining a distance. Here what the "sun" burns is not the lover but love itself in the absence of distance between the subject and the object of this love.</div>
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To elaborate, love as a feeling is often sustained and most intense when the object is beyond reach, unavailable, distant and hence only fantasized about. As such, love lives in one's imagination sustained by a belief in a future where the subject and object of this love unit. The comic tragedy being that as soon as this couple does unit, this "love" that lives in their imagination sustained by belief can no longer exist. For one, there can be no more belief or faith since the goal which the belief was founded on has been achieved. Second, when reality and imagination collide, imagination usually disappears and disappoints since no reality can come close to its virtual version. This is why in order for relationships to survive there always has to be another end or element that sustains belief in the relationship. For some it's sex, some have kids or start a business together and others accumulate status symbols or experiences as a couple. This is also true for careers or academia. In order for people to keep working or studying they have to create an illusionary belief in an end when they become "the boss" or a "founder" with a high salary, respect and power. But of course, for most this is just an illusionary belief that has to be sustained by a distance and illusions of getting closer to that sacred end by meaningless titles and promotions.</div>
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Religion is the best example of this as well. There is a sacred notion (god) and distance (god shows up in afterlife) which belief requires. However this distance is too great with no evidence, this is why in order for religions to sustain this fictional belief, they provide dogma, traditions, social networks and sense of importance that act as fake mile markers on the spiritual highway giving the perception of getting closer to this sacred "god".</div>
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Feelings require belief in a future sacred state that never is fulfilled or achieved with the illusion that one is getting closer to this "sacred" state. Distance is necessary for the sacred to remain as such otherwise the belief is undermined and a third element or party is needed to sustain the belief. As Zizek says, the best way to undermine a belief or an ideology is to over-identify with it or become a fanatic and in doing so eliminating the distance between us and the object of the belief and hence destroying the belief itself.</div>
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It also follows that best experiences are those that are often hard to replicate or recreate. As such they only live in memory as nostalgia but never again in reality. </div>
Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-80261817706193418562013-09-23T00:02:00.000-04:002013-09-23T00:02:07.393-04:00Are Protests Contagious?<div style="text-align: justify;">
The last decade has been extremely volatile and disruptive for many governments around the world. From terrorism and terrorist groups to grassroots anti-establishment movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, the world’s governments are struggling to evolve to this new paradigm. Not only technology has revolutionized the way people are exposed to information and ideas but it has also created new ways to connect, organize and facilitate movements and protests. Some blame or credit social media while others point to the rise of inequality, economic uncertainty and lack of basic freedoms as the major drivers of these movements. Though almost all of the major movements in the past decade do have some of these factors in common, they have paradoxically done very little to change the status quo. Though for example, as a result of the Arab Spring several dictators got ousted, in reality they just got replaced by new dictators with kinder faces and almost no change in the underlying corrupt and oppressive systems. Similarly the Occupy Wall Street movement accomplished very little in terms of what they pointed out as extreme income inequality, greed and corruption enabled by Wall Street and the banking system.</div>
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Observing the viral nature of protests and how they have spread so quickly in the past few years across the world it is important to ask: how do these movements catch on, spread and survive? With Iran’s Green Movement for example following Ahmadinejad’s re-election in 2010, the movement was eventually silenced by the government’s brutal crackdown compared to Egypt where the Military establishment did not mind sacrificing the ailing Mubarak as the symbol of the regime to maintain rule and behind the scene business as usual system. In both cases, however, the initial resistance by the government fueled and motivated the movement to grow and spread. This equally applies to the protesters in Turkey and Brazil. What we can conclude from this observation is that every movement needs an enemy it attempts to confront and defeat to start and grow quickly. In Libya for example, Gaddafi was the symbol of Libya’s oppressive regime and his initial excessive use of force against the opposition only fueled their resistance and determination.</div>
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That said, another factor that is unique to the modern world is the role of technology and social media which almost all of the recent grassroots movements have in common. However, I like to argue here that their role is much more critical in starting the movements as a trigger than the tools social technology provides for organizing and planning protests or meetings. According to the following behavioral model developed by Stanford professor, B.J. Fogg, there are three main drivers to actions or behavior: Motivation, Ability and Trigger. Here I argue that social media facilitates constant trigger by exposing people to other movements, evidence of injustice, oppression or abuse, and inspirational talks or videos. That said, majority of users of social media, at least in the developing countries seem to be younger with the motivation and ability to join a cause or a movement against what they perceive to be an unjust or oppressive enemy. This is partly why the Arab Spring spread so quickly across neighboring countries with similar authoritarian governments, little freedoms and high unemployment. With the majority of the young population unemployed with little economic independence, future prospects or basic freedoms, all it took was an extreme act fueled by social media to trigger protests. A Tunisian man set himself on fire to protest against Police brutality, becoming the symbol and trigger of Arab Spring. The news of his death and what he had done quickly spread via social media across Tunisia and the Arab world and protests quickly began intensifying and spreading.</div>
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Here we arrive at the third important factor which is often overlooked by governments and news media until protests are way under way and evident. That is the slow buildup of anger and frustration within the population over a long period either due to oppression by governments or economic and income inequalities. In Turkey for example, the government was completely surprised when large protests broke out over the demolition of Gezi park. Though the park was a symbol and a trigger, the motivation and ability of the younger and more liberal Turks had been building up due to the recent changes by the Islamic conservative government to push conservative ideals through changes in policy and law. This is also true with Iran’s Green movement where the younger and more educated demographic had long be disillusioned with the Islamic government and the Supreme Leader’s authoritative rule and what they saw as a stolen election fueled their anger and triggered the protests to gain momentum.</div>
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The next factor that is also important to any movement is the social bonding factor. That is, people are by nature drawn to social movements that bring people together through a common cause or purpose. Religions are a great example of how important it is to people to come together and share common beliefs. Of course this longing for social connections has been often abused by terrorist groups by offering lonely and morally confused young men a membership to a group of very close “brothers” with a spiritual blessing against an evil enemy. Below are some additional criterion and variables that based on my analysis play a critical in helping facilitate, initiate and fuel protests.</div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Egypt 2010</span></div>
</td><td style="background-color: #073763; border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Egypt 2013</span></div>
</td><td style="background-color: #073763; border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Brazil </span></div>
</td><td style="background-color: #073763; border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Occupy Wall St</span></div>
</td></tr>
<tr style="height: 0px;"><td style="background-color: #073763; border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: top;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A Clear Antagonist</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ahmadinejad </span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Edrogan</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mubarak</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mursi</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">None</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wall St.</span></div>
</td></tr>
<tr style="height: 0px;"><td style="background-color: #073763; border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Goal</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Regime Change</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Liberal Freedoms</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Regime Change</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Regime Change</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wealth Distribution</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Equality</span></div>
</td></tr>
<tr style="height: 0px;"><td style="background-color: #073763; border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: top;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Strong Resistance</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes</span></div>
</td></tr>
<tr style="height: 0px;"><td style="background-color: #073763; border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: top;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Social Media Meme</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes</span></div>
</td></tr>
<tr style="height: 0px;"><td style="background-color: #073763; border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Trigger</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Election Fraud</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Demolition of Park</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Arab Spring</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Amendment to Constitution</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">World Cup</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Financial Crisis</span></div>
</td></tr>
<tr style="height: 0px;"><td style="background-color: #073763; border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Long Term Cause</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oppression </span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oppression Against Liberalism</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oppression </span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oppression / Exclusion of </span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: top;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Inequality / Poverty</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: top;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Income Inequality </span></div>
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<tr style="height: 0px;"><td style="background-color: #073763; border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Symbol</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Green Color</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Park</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: top;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tahrir Square</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: top;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tahrir Square</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stadiums</span></div>
</td><td style="border: 1px solid #000000; padding: 7px 7px 7px 7px; vertical-align: middle;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wall St.</span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
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Though the criterion above might help explain why and how these recents protests have surfaced and spread, they do not help predict their chances of success or failure. Of course, history will judge the effectiveness of these protests. As stated above some currently argue that these recent protests, especially the Arab Spring only achieved cosmetic changes or victories while the status quo is still alive and well behind the scenes. That said, history also tells us that change does not happen overnight and we should be worried if it does. Even the world’s most efficient systems whether biological or even artificial, take time to adapt and evolve. With this perspective in mind the protests above have achieved their initial goal and success metric. However, as evolution tells us, the external pressures have to remain on the system (political, biological, societal, etc) if it is to evolve, adapt and change over time. It is becoming evident from studying these recent protests that though their decentralized nature makes them especially effective and strong, they require leaders, organization and clear goals if they are to survive and be effective. One of the reasons the Occupy Wall Street movement is often criticized is the vagueness of their goals and ideals and lack of clear leadership. The followers of this movement were often described by the media as unemployed hippies trying to camp and socialize in and around parks by Wall Street and other symbolic locations. In comparison, Iran’s Green Revolution did have clear opposition leaders, with clear goals and organization. However, the Iranian regime was successful in silencing the protests, not only by arresting and silencing these leaders, organizers and influential figures but they shut down all social media and even cellphone services. This lead to a decentralized and leaderless movement with no way to communicate, coordinate and connect against the very well organized and brutal Iranian military and police forces. The Green Revolution perhaps, was a failure but it sent a strong message to the Iranian leadership of the level and size of discontent and opposition. Perhaps it can be argued that the Green movement was a factor in the election of the new more moderate Iranian president Hossein Rouhani.</div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-77db4722-48ae-5c23-b8b2-cf18b287ee0b"><br /></span></div>
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<script src="//www.google.com/trends/embed.js?hl=en-US&q=arab+spring&date=1/2010+37m&cmpt=q&content=1&cid=GEO_MAP_0_0&export=5&w=500&h=530" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="//www.google.com/trends/embed.js?hl=en-US&q=Iran+Green+revolution&date=1/2010+44m&cmpt=q&content=1&cid=TIMESERIES_GRAPH_0&export=5&w=500&h=330" type="text/javascript"></script>Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-34387011362564310182013-09-19T20:45:00.003-04:002014-01-22T19:43:35.507-05:00What If We Had Everything We Ever Wanted?<div style="text-align: justify;">
How boring and pointless would life become if we got and had everything we ever wanted, faced with the ultimate question: “Now What?” usually asked in a sober state by a hungover brain slowly remembering the bad choices made the night before?</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/XgRlrBl-7Yg?rel=0" width="560"></iframe></div>
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<a name='more'></a>The morning-after regret symbolizes a “goal” that once was and is no longer, a “goal” associated with conscious state A (drunk+sexually aroused) which is no longer a goal for conscious state B (sober+sexually satisfied) but rather a nuance. Here conscious states B and A are in conflict joined by a body and brain, separated by time, stimuli and lobbying by certain internal pleasures. The consumerist culture and advertising agencies of course would like to have us believe that wealth and shopping are the ultimate, never expiring happiness conscious states. The truth, however, is that John Doe(A) does not equal John Doe(B) separated by time and hence conscious states. That said, this freedom from responsibility using the scapegoat of time and conscious states (stimulated by stimuli like alcohol and “pleasures”) is dangerous because it leaves John Doe off the hook. However, an intoxicated and let’s say married John Doe(A), having not seen a woman in a year, being stuck in a dark elevator with a very attractive girl finds himself in a conscious state very hard to understand and defend by sober John Doe(B) the next morning. Is it John Doe’s fault now or the particular conscious state for making love to this girl on the elevator?</div>
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Then we shall ask: If John Doe is a dynamic identity and ever changing conscious states dependent on time and external & internal stimuli then who is John Doe? Is there a static John Doe that can be clearly defined, categorized, quantized, labeled, and packaged in memory of others, himself and Silicon Valley’s advertising profiles or does John Doe’s identity require a twitter account to update everyone on its ever changing conscious states and identity versions?</div>
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None of us exists as a solid identity or a personality, we are a combination of conscious states dictated by genetic make-up, social network, memories and how our brain cells are wired + other environment or internal stimuli. As such, we need others (or what <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan">Lacan</a> called the “Big Other”) or society to tell us who we are. Therefore, movements, groups and institutions act as prisms or a narratives that give this noise of random conscious states seem like a signal or a story to ourselves.</div>
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It’s only a secret, secret that the realm that makes up our internal thinking and identity is extremely chaotic. However, some of us have better mental PR and Advertising departments to create a persistent illusion and facade of a solid and “normal” external facing self. Einstein once said, “reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” I think it’s human personality and identity that is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one at least for the luckiest of us considered by society as “normal” or “solid”.</div>
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<b>I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.</b> — <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Daniel-Kahneman/105661499467688?directed_target_id=0">Daniel Kahneman</a></blockquote>
Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-33483555126906711072013-08-16T20:16:00.000-04:002014-01-22T19:44:28.637-05:00The Irony of Fundamentalist Belief: “A fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt” <div style="text-align: justify;">
The irony of religious fundamentalism is not that the fundamentalist believes too much, it’s specifically and ironically that he or she doesn't believe enough. Surely if one truly believes in a cosmic religious destiny and god-like, active actor then every life event has to be part of a bigger plan or destiny, even if it seems unfair at times.</div>
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What a believer merely needs to do then is to practice religious traditions and wait for his or her judgement day. However, to the contrary, the fundamentalist takes things in his or her own hands to make right what he perceives as wrong in society and change what he or she believes god would want changed. As if the fundamentalist just can not wait for god to punish those who are wrong and reward those who are right but he or she has to intervene and render judgement and action. But wait a minute, here belief is reduced to action and hence undermined as such? It is no longer a belief if one has to intervene through action and change what is part of the belief structure itself.</div>
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Once faith is acted upon then it is simply a desire and can no longer function as faith or a belief. Here it is obvious that acts of religious extremism in fact, ironically or paradoxically are extreme attempts to conceal a secret doubt. Extremism is an ‘extreme’ attempt by an individual to conceal and overcompensate for his or her deep doubts in the faith itself. Here it can be argued that the term “fundamentalist belief” is an oxymoron, better understood as a desperate attempt to hide the lack of the very belief, it attempts to represent.</div>
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This is perhaps why fundamentalist are offended the most and threatened when their beliefs are questioned. It is as if they know deep down that they do lack true or 100% belief and any external input that feeds their deep doubts they reject as they are fully aware of their fragile beliefs. After all calling a skinny person fat won’t offend him since it is simply a false statement but someone who is already insecure about their weight and feels fat can be offended by such a statement. It also follows that an obese person might not take offense to being called fat since again the statement is obviously true and there are no conflicts between what the person portrays and feels deep down.</div>
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With religious extremism, the facade is strong religious faith, but only to hide the hollowness of that very belief. It is as if the believer believes in belief itself and god and prophets being a means to that end. As such, similar to the fat example, a true believer will take no offense when their faith is questioned or even insulted since their belief is stronger and above any shallow statements.</div>
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQ3g2zS6Tuk">Zizek</a> On Idealogy of Belief:</div>
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While visiting Bohr, one of his scientist friends, noticing a horseshoe on the door asked how Bohr, a scientist would believe in the superstition that horse shows bring luck, to what Bohr responded: “I also do not believe in it; I have it there because I was told that it works also if one does not believe in it!” </blockquote>
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What this paradox renders clear is the way a belief is a reflexive attitude: it is never a case of simply believing — one has to believe in belief itself. Which is why Kierkegaard was right to claim that we do not really believe (in god), we just believe to believe — and Bohr just confronts us with the logical negative of this reflexivity. </blockquote>
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This is indeed again, how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware of their corrupted nature, but we participate in them, we display our belief in them, because we assume that they work even if we do not believe in them.</blockquote>
Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-36233656056675925442013-07-21T12:03:00.001-04:002014-01-22T19:44:44.689-05:00The Vegas-ification of Society Through Technology<div style="text-align: justify;">
After spending a few days in Vegas I couldn’t help but notice the countless opportunities that exist to spend money on one’s most short-term pleasures from food and sex to gambling and shows. Everything in Vegas seems to have been specifically designed to facilitate, encourage and often unconsciously force consumption. Not only the average person is constantly bombarded by stimuli, from extravagant visuals, sounds, smells, people, architecture and venues to a point of mental paralysis but these stimuli as I found out have been specifically tailored and customized to manipulate people to constantly spend money and consume. As someone I met there who develops software for slot machines and other Casino games told me; the sounds, the visuals, the temperature, the positioning of the slot machine, the signs, the architecture of the Casinos and even the chemicals in the air are all carefully created and adjusted by Casino hired psychologists to make people want to continuously play, gamble and spend.<br />
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But of course this was not a surprise, after all this is Sin City and people know what they sign up for when they come to Vegas. However, what did struck me is that this onslaught of mental stimulation to facilitate consumption that I saw in Vegas is spreading through the rest of the world thanks to technology and the internet. Aren’t most websites these days specifically designed to make people either purchase more online goods or services or be exposed to certain advertising? Aren’t Amazon or Google’s algorithms tailored to make people buy more products or be exposed to more advertising? Facebook in fact is not very different than a virtual Casino, with its nonstop stream of distracting content and media to its social games and of course advertising, all in return for our attention and eyes also known as Facebook’s valued currency. The constant stimulation that technology provides can easily paralyze one’s judgement while manipulative advertising unconsciously nudges us to consume and spend.</div>
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That said, obviously advertising and manipulative sales tactics are not new but their reach and infiltration into our minds and our our daily lives is more extreme than ever. With the evolution of technology and the new trend in wearable gadgets like the Google “Glass”, it’s only a matter of time when advertising-based tech companies have direct and 24/7 access into our brains and eyes. And then what? At what point does the human brain become so saturated and overstimulated by advertising and marketing that it simply becomes paralyzed, overwhelmed and merely functions based on external advertising stimuli? Like a gambling addict in Vegas, the modern human turned 24/7 online consumer will simply be navigating from one online store or service to the next buying and purchasing. At least Vegas is a geographical location and if things get really bad for a gambler, he or she can just leave and avoid more consumption and gambling but how does one escape the internet and technology these days? Is it even possible for someone in today’s America to go through a day without being exposed to advertising or marketing? It is one thing to try to avoid a message and another when the medium is the message and the message is advertising or sponsored content.</div>
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Steve Jobs famously said when his health was declining that he did not want to include “On” and “Off” switches on Apple products because he didn’t want them to have what resembled death and alive states but rather he wanted them to exhibit a constant state of life and aliveness. Perhaps the irony of the metaphor is not lost since constantly “On” technology means certain parts of our brains, especially the parts that handle introspection, deep thoughts and imagination have to remain off. Some credit Steve Jobs with innovation and great technology products and designs. I think he deserves more credit for giving the casino of the consumer industry the ultimate consumption gambling iConsume machines through which we are constantly exposed to marketing and advertising content while these devices get to know and predict our exact consumer type. It’s not too crazy at this point to envision a future where the foundation of society and economic activity is one big virtual version of Las Vegas that we are all constantly connected and addicted to, often by default and not by choice. Some of us who lived in the pre-online consumer 2.0 world might choose to opt out every so often but it is sad for those who are born into and grow up connected to this virtual casino that the internet has become and have no experience of the solitude outside of this overstimulating online shopping mall.</div>
Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-37781660260473817982013-06-23T13:49:00.003-04:002014-01-22T19:45:14.713-05:00Identity In The Age of BigData: Information as Currency<div style="text-align: justify;">
Lacan’s notion of “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan#Other.2Fother">Big Other</a>” became George Orwell’s “Big Brother” in the age of “Big Data”. What this means is that the notion of identity as a free, private self has completely been disrupted in the age of internet, mobile technology and big data. The “I” no longer comes to exist as an identity in relation to others but rather the “I” is a combination of both real and virtual symbolic representations that exist as unforgetting and unforgiving accumulation of bits, algorithms and Big Data. Our Google Search and Gmail history now serve as our identity repositories that we can reference to remember who we are.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>If traditionally our conscious, values and identities were kept in check and guided by our own <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego#Super-ego">Superego</a> / Big Other or our internalizing of a God’s will and presence, now we are faced with the constant analysis of our identities via the prisim of our own data trail. Unlike our dynamic and ever evolving memory, Big Data never forgets. One can even imagine a Google identity dashboard or reporting tool that will tell us how our identity and personality has changed over time and warn us if our current behavior is an extreme deviation from our behavior mean based on our emails, Mobile App data, Google searches and Google+ posts. In fact Google already is doing this, by creating a profile (see yours here: <a href="https://www.google.com/settings/ads/onweb/?sig=ACi0TCj7MoYxdzfpHTgGAUT2R-KPC4cIt0pfxrNP8RSDOamad1fUMuiK0pB01iidynbCAmd4zqJDtwJczuBRfDRQSP63pjJLcfhQLv6jdhWnXOyUHmWAO0gcBLp_FoUoQP6apVl8kIDsP9kNM8kZ_rixGeIPkn88t0xzKQzOz1ddW0bx7aK66GI&hl=en">Ads Preferences</a>) for each user based on Gmail, YouTube and Google Search data. However, this profile is not for our own identity analysis but rather to help Google with targeted advertising. And Google is not alone in this, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, Microsoft and Apple all have their own advertising profile on their users thanks to the miracle of Big Data. No wonder then that Intelligence Agencies as well as various hacker groups would want to have access to these dynamic identity profiles that often disclose and highlight details about our personalities and relationships we don’t even know we exhibit. Though there are some serious concerns from the public about the security and privacy implications of such data being accessed by governments or hackers, the one question that is mostly overlooked is why the likes of Google and Facebook have so much data on people to begin with? The answer is rather simple: People never truly understood the implications of freely giving these for-profit, public tech companies their personal data. Having to be exposed to some advertising in exchange for using free online services seemed like a good deal.</div>
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There must have been a time in the early internet days, especially when AOL first got started that the concept of free web services was probably a strange one. However, with the expansion and emergence of online advertising, the business model of advertising-based web service and social networking companies became the trend and Ad-based Big Data tech companies became Wall Street’s favorite new stocks. As people got used to using free online services in exchange for seeing advertising banners, free became the norm. But of course the irony was indeed lost on the average user that free was not really free, it’s just that the currency paid to these tech companies for their services was our personal data instead of dollars. Information is power and indeed has always been valuable and partly why insider trading is a crime and why the <a href="http://www.cia.gov/">Central Intelligence Agency</a>’s mission is focused on collecting and analyzing information. So information as a form of currency is not a novel or strange idea in the finance or intelligence worlds but not well understood by the general consumer or the online user. Using the iPhone as an example, the average user sees an elegant and powerful device that can do so many things from the touch of their hands. What he or she doesn’t see is all the personal data this iPhone and all the Apps can and do collect and store both on the phone itself and on the cloud.<br />
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Currently, very few tech companies give the user the option to opt out of this massive data collection, analysis and targeted advertising efforts. For example, Google could for a monthly premium, agree to not track user search history and encrypt all email data only accessible to the user as well as not sell or use any user data for advertising purposes. Google can also offer a Google “Delete” button where for a price Google will agree to delete all the data they have on the user from emails to search history. Companies like Spotify do offer the option of no advertising for premium users but they still collect and track user data for recommending new music or album releases. Of course, not all tracking is bad and some tracking improves our lives, for example when Amazon’s algorithms recommend books to us based on our search and purchase history. However, as more and more data is collected and tracked about online user activity, it becomes harder to filter and discriminate so only the appropriate information is being collected for the benefit of the user. Google experienced this when the German government sued it for collecting people’s WiFi information via its Street View cars. As such, how can tech companies be trusted to only collect and track what results in better maps, product recommendations or answers to our questions? We surely don’t seem to trust the government with our data and become outraged when we find out about secret government surveillance programs, but why is it that we are okay with for-profit tech companies having not only access but owing our data they can sell to third parties for targeted advertising purposes? What would happen if a wealthy <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2012/02/08/saudi-investor-prince-alwaleed-meets-with-twitter-execs-citis-ceo-on-busy-new-york-trip/">Saudi Prince who is a major Twitter investor</a> decides he wants access to Twitter data to spy on his business competitors or even Saudi dissidents? </div>
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Big Data is the gift and curse of the modern condition. It has become the hammer to which every societal problem, nuance or inefficiency looks like a nail. It further promises to let us finally get to know our real selves at the cells and neuron level. Thanks to Big Data we can even know how we sleep, how much we dream, how we digest food and track our bathroom habits that can be analyzed and shared on our social networks. The gift of Big Data is however also its curse in that it can only measure what can be reduced to bits of data and analyzed by biased and objective algorithms. Surely, we hope that human interactions, psychology and biology are much more complex than binary systems to be easily quantized, packaged, and quantified into data sets to be analyzed, mined, understood and predicted. Applying Big Data Analytics to complex systems, in attempts to quantification or simplification can lead to more confusion and perception of noise as signal. </div>
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We’re more fooled by noise than ever before, and it’s because of a nasty phenomenon called “big data.” With big data, researchers have brought cherry-picking to an industrial level. Modernity provides too many variables, but too little data per variable. So the spurious relationships grow much, much faster than real information. In other words: Big data may mean more information, but it also means more false information. -<a href="http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/02/big-data-means-big-errors-people/">Nassim Taleb</a></div>
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According to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics">Quantum Theory</a>, quantum particles tend to behave differently depending on if and how they are observed. A particle can act like a wave depending on the presence or absence of an observer or an observing device (See <a href="http://youtu.be/DfPeprQ7oGc">Double-Slit Experiment</a>). Big Data follows a similar logic, where depending on how it is analyzed, the range of data included in the analysis and statistical method or algorithms applied, completely different insights can be concluded or gained. According to the famed Statistician <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/author/nate-silver/">Nate Silver</a> who accurately predicted the <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13510_3-57546161-21/obamas-win-a-big-vindication-for-nate-silver-king-of-the-quants/">U.S. 2012 Presidential Election</a>, it is becoming more critical to know how to ignore data as noise than to gather and analyze more data only very small percentage of it which is actual signal. </div>
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So what has Big Data done to privacy? Privacy from the Latin word “Privatus” means “separated from the rest” which almost is a strange notion in the always-connected world of mobile technology and internet. What this means is that to have privacy, we need to disconnect from Big Data. To rely on and expect corporations or governments to protect our privacy is naive. Both entities will protect our privacy as long as it is aligned with their own interests. We don’t have to sacrifice our freedom and privacy for security if we don’t exchange our data for free online services from the likes of Facebook or Google. What truly requires disruption in our modern economy to help protect our privacy and freedom are the business models of digital advertising and advertising-supported media, journalism and tech industries. As long as advertising is big business, our personal Big Data we give away so freely will be a hot commodity for Silicon Alley to package and sell to Madison Avenue to satisfy Wall Street with very little regard for our privacy. No wonder Silicon Valley’s R&D departments are so hard at work to make us share more from video, text and photo status updates to automatically uploaded Foursquare check-in or health data via the <a href="http://quantifiedself.com/">Quantified Self </a>movement. Under the disguise of self knowledge and millions of different ways of showing off our status to our friends are the algorithms of Silicon Valley that using our data, quantify and categorize us into advertising categories and sell our information to any third party for the right price. At least when the government wants our data they have to go through special procedures and policies as opposed to just knowing the magic password most advertising companies have known for a long time: $. </div>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span>Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-91003922700415184482013-05-25T14:26:00.002-04:002014-01-26T19:33:37.579-05:00What If We Could See The Stars? A Humble-Cosmic Perspective<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<a href="http://vimeo.com/57757618">DEATH VALLEY DREAMLAPSE</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user821379">Sunchaser Pictures</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.</div>
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<a name='more'></a><span style="text-align: justify;">What if we could see the stars as our ancestor could in the dark sky with no artificial lights or pollution? Would that change our perspective and views of life, observing our insignificance and irrelevance as well as our unique and special place in the vast and old universe that has existed long before us and will exist long after we are gone? </span><br />
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As I've blogged about this before <a href="http://www.chaosisgood.com/2010/09/i-dream-therefore-im-human.html">here</a> it is hard not to be humbled by how fortunate we are to be alive and human considering the 14 billion years of universe and all the unique circumstances that made life and eventually humans and specifically us as individuals possible. But of course we often lose perspective on how lucky and insignificant we are at the same time. Our daily routines revolve around satisfying and focusing on our short-term individual needs, wants and desires. Our window to the world is through a self-centered prism shaped by media, technology and sponsored-journalism. We do obviously feel we are special but ironically we've come to feel entitled to be special and not lucky. As we've increasingly tailored nature, technology and our social networks to meet and address our individual needs and desires, we've convinced ourselves of our self-importance and control in our lives. The irony, however, being that we are extremely lucky to just be alive as conscious human beings. </div>
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It seems that these days the only time we are forced to reflect upon moral or existential questions is when we are personally faced with such decisions through personal experiences or news of tragic events. Even in case of sickness or uncertainty we often outsource the big questions to doctors, priests, psychologists, scientists and now Google.</div>
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In today's hyper-stimulated and sensationalism-obsessed society, unfortunately, the big questions are either too boring since there are no exact answers or have been addressed by our respective outsourced moral and existential authority sources of religion, academia or media. We've outsourced all these questions while being shielded from nature and human contact in our urban "caves" over-stimulated by the virtual world of the internet. What we get in our lives then is this cycle of illusions, where there is reality, then there is our perception of that reality through the prisms of popular culture, media, and technology which is merely a virtual representation and then there is our response or mental symbolic impression to these virtual representations. It's obvious that how we incorporate our symbolic understandings of these realities further shape our lives in a way that is very alienated and distanced from reality itself. The irony being here that,this is not very different than our view of the cosmos where there is the real cosmos, there is our limited view of it through our polluted urban skies and then our non-reaction to this anti-climactic view which could not be further away from the real thing. This polluted version further makes us less aware and conscious of our universe since we don't really see it. </div>
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Recent <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/magazine/why-rational-people-buy-into-conspiracy-theories.html">research</a> has shown that, in the face of powerlessness and uncertainty the human brain kicks into analytical overdrive in an attempt to find answers and conclusions, which often lead it to believe in conspiracy theories and dogma. What if instead of over-analyzing simplified facts to answer complex questions, we instead use our right brain and simply appreciate these complexities through curiosity. The anxious brain needs quick answers and will make them up if need be often resulting in bad judgement but the curious brain embraces complexity and makes no preconceived judgements in the face ambiguity.</div>
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The bottom line is that asking the big questions matter even if we don't know the answers because these questions and our lack of answers shape our perspective, hopefully to a more open and humble one. The fact is that, regardless of how the universe, life and human consciousness came to exist, their simple existence is nothing less than extraordinary, humbling and fascinating. Even with our exponentially advancing understanding and tools of science and technology today we are still in the dark ages when it comes to answering the big questions which can only mean that we are living in very interesting and exciting times:</div>
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<li style="text-align: justify;">We only know and observe less than 5% of the universe: According to the<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_%28spacecraft%29#2013_data_release"> Planck mission team</a>, and based on the<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda-CDM_model"> standard model of cosmology</a>, the total<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence"> mass–energy</a> of the<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe"> universe</a> contains 4.9%<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter"> ordinary matter</a>, 26.8% dark matter and 68.3%<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy"> dark energy</a>.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#cite_note-planck_overview-2">[2]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#cite_note-planck_overview2-3">[3]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#cite_note-wmap7parameters-4">[4]</a> Thus, dark matter is estimated to constitute 84.5% of the total matter in the universe.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#cite_note-planckcam-5">[5]</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">We only understand the function of about 5% of our DNA: The amount of noncoding DNA varies greatly among species. For example, over 98% of the<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome"> human genome</a> is noncoding DNA,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noncoding_DNA#cite_note-Elgar_.26_Vavouri-1">[1]</a> while only about 2% of a typical<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_genome_size"> bacterial genome</a> is noncoding DNA.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Our conscious control of our feelings and actions is less than 5%: Numerous cognitive neuroscientists have conducted studies that have revealed that only 5% of our cognitive activities (decisions, emotions, actions, behaviour) is conscious whereas the remaining 95% is generated in a non-conscious manner.</li>
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Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-16964928313586589892013-04-18T22:55:00.001-04:002014-01-25T18:10:44.421-05:00Why Medical Research and Treatment Patents Are Bad for Patients<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i>As the Supreme Court is hearing arguments regarding the patentability of human genes, I like to argue in this post why I believe human genes should not be patentable. Additionally, I’d like to emphasize why over-patenting in medicine has hindered “patient-centric” research and outcomes.</i></div>
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The lawsuit which has lead to today’s Supreme Court hearing was brought by a group of researchers, medical groups and patients against <a href="http://www.myriad.com/">Myriad Genetics</a>, a Utah biotechnology company. Myriad Genetics discovered and isolated the BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 genes which are associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. By being able to patent these genes and discovery, Myriad has been granted a 20-year monopoly over the use of the genes for research, diagnostics and treatment. Myriad and other pharmaceutical companies alike argue that patenting genes encourage innovation and discoveries by ensuring financial rewards through protecting these discoveries from being used by others for free. On the other hand, the opponents of gene patenting argue that these patents hinder innovation and collaborative discoveries by preventing the rest of the medical and research communities to use, apply, utilize and improve upon these discoveries and life-saving treatments. </div>
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<b>What Does Patent Law Say? </b><br />
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As a former Patent Examiner at the <a href="http://www.uspto.gov/">U.S. Patent & Trademark Office</a>, I find it very surprising that these patents (<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/14/us-usa-court-dna-idUSBRE93D08Q20130414">as well as 4000 other patents on human genes</a>) were granted and approved by the <a href="http://www.uspto.gov/">USPTO</a> in the first place. The U.S. Patent Law makes it clear that products or laws of nature can not be patented. So <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/04/15/177035299/supreme-court-asks-can-human-genes-be-patented">for example</a>, “it might have taken Einstein a long time to figure out that E=mc^2, but he couldn’t have patented this law of nature”. In fact, as noted by <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/04/15/177035299/supreme-court-asks-can-human-genes-be-patented">NPR</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk">Dr. Jonas Salk</a> the inventor of the revolutionary polio vaccine, when asked in 1955 if he had a patent on the vaccine, replied, “There is no patent...could you patent the sun?”</div>
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"We do know Myriad did a lot of work," says New York University law professor Rochelle Dreyfuss, a nationally known patent expert who is not associated with either side in this case. But that's not enough, she says, because the court still has to answer this question: "Is the thing that's isolated significantly different from the way that it was when it was in nature?"</blockquote>
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The ambiguity, however, that exists in this case which according to Myriad make their patents valid, is as follows:</div>
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...the 20,000 genes in the human body are part of a 6-foot-long molecule that's "coiled and compacted and stuffed into each cell. What Myriad was able to do is sort through all those 20,000 genes and find the two that were highly linked to hereditary breast and ovarian cancer." The gene is like "a single grain of sand" hidden in a building the size of the Empire State Building, says Gregory Castanias, Myriad's lawyer. He will tell the justices that isolating the two genes justifies a patent because "it is the final step in an extraordinarily complicated set of inventive actions that led to the creation of this molecule, which had never been available to the world before."</blockquote>
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That said, those challenging the patent claim that regardless of the process Myriad went through to discover these genes, the discoveries are products of nature and exist as part of the human DNA. As Christopher Hansen of the <a href="http://www.aclu.org/free-speech-technology-and-liberty-womens-rights/association-molecular-pathology-v-myriad-genetics">American Civil Liberties Union</a> points out, </div>
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It is no different than taking a kidney out of the body. Just because you are the [first] person who takes the kidney out of the body doesn't entitle you to a patent on kidneys. A patent isn't a reward for effort. A patent is a reward for invention. And Myriad didn't invent anything. The gene exists in the body. All Myriad did is find it.</blockquote>
<b>Why Over-Patenting Is Bad for Patients </b><br />
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Aside from the legal and research implication of the <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/14/us-usa-court-dna-idUSBRE93D08Q20130414">case</a> above, I believe that over-patenting in general in the medical field is bad for patients. The pharmaceutical and medical devices industries have argued as noted above that they need to protect and be financially rewarded for their discoveries that they often spend billions of dollars on to research and develop. They view their research projects first as investments measured in terms of financial ROI where patient experience and outcome is only a means to an end of more profits. Obviously, it is possible for both of those incentives to be aligned but pharmaceutical companies, as evaluated by Wall Street, are measured by balance sheets and quarterly statements not necessarily patient impact.</div>
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Gregory Castanias, Myriad's lawyer:<br />
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"At some level it is about money," he says, because "medicine doesn't happen for free. ... If you look at the enormous amount of investment — and not everything works that you invest in — the patent system is critical to medical care" by incentivizing companies to invest in needed scientific research and development.</blockquote>
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However, though big Pharma’s argument does make sense that they deserve financial returns for their expensive R&D efforts, evidence shows that Big Pharma has abused the patent system to create monopolies and therefore profits from patients with little or no discovery to show for it. </div>
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<b>Nexium vs. Prilosec: Twin Drugs Separated by Patent Protection</b><br />
<span style="text-align: justify;">The best example for this is a drug called </span><a href="http://www1.astrazeneca-us.com/pi/Prilosec.pdf" style="text-align: justify;">Prilosec</a><span style="text-align: justify;"> (Omeprazole) made by </span><a href="http://www.astrazeneca.com/Home" style="text-align: justify;">AstraZeneca</a><span style="text-align: justify;"> which is prescribed to patients suffering from Acid Reflux Disease (Heartburn). </span><br />
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<a href="http://beaconstreetusa.com/wp/?p=1039">In early 2001,</a> this branded version of generic omeprazole was available only by prescription–$4.00 per pill. Now the brand name is available for 63¢ each. The generic form is only 40¢. The Prilosec patent ran out in 2001. Until then, AstraZeneca had a monopoly on omeprazole. Demand let them set the price sky-high. But in 2001 they had to scramble to save their cash cow. Generic companies would soon be able to sell the generic form of Prilosec and charge amounts more in line with production costs. One corporate strategy was to develop a replacement drug for Prilosec, rename the drug, and get a new patent. Their R&D team came up with Nexium, an isomer of Prilosec. An isomer is a compound almost identical to the parent compound, with a molecule or two tweaked. Unfortunately, the new drug performed no better than Prilosec. It was basically the same compound with a new name and a higher price.</blockquote>
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By tweaking a few molecules AstraZeneca was able to make a case for a new patent even though these changes had little or no impact on <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2012/01/09/why-no-one-should-take-nexium/">patient experience</a>. As such, currently Nexium is heavily marketed and prescribed by doctors over it’s identical patentless twin Prilosec OTC (<a href="http://www.consumerreports.org/health/best-buy-drugs/heartburn_ppi.htm">costs 10 times less than Nexium</a>). Nexium sales generated $6.3 Billion for AstraZeneca in 2009 alone. </div>
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<b>The Big Pharma Patent Vault</b><br />
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Aside from the dangers of patents being abused as means to create monopolies and controlling prices, the Big Pharma patent vault also holds countless patents on discoveries no longer being pursued or utilized. What this means is that there are millions of patented discoveries and research methods that are sitting on pharma databases, unused and inaccessible to other researchers or scientists that might be able to leverage them to make novel discoveries or findings in other areas. </div>
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<b>Where Patents Don’t Exist: Internet, Food and Fashion</b></div>
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One of the biggest argument by Big Pharma has always been that without patents researchers or drug companies will have very little incentive or motivation to invest in R&D efforts. However, this claim does not hold in industries such as fashion, food and the internet. All web sites or web apps for example, by design are open source and their code and interface design can be viewed and copied. Further, in the food and restaurant industry, patent protection would be awful as chefs always copy and improve upon one another’s recipes and techniques making the restaurant business an extremely competitive and innovative industry. Lastly, the fashion world is extremely vibrant, exciting, dynamic and volatile precisely because the healthy competitive environment that is enabled by the lack of patent protection in fashion. Of course the startup cost of drug development and research is astronomical compared to fashion, web sites or food, however, what these IP-free industries show is that, less patents mean more competition, not less, more collaboration and less monopolies, more volatility and uncertainty for companies but better quality, cost and outcome for consumers.</div>
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<b>Patients vs. Profits</b><br />
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At the end of the day, it is obvious that patent protection is more about protecting financial investments and short and long term profit sources than patient outcome. Of course large investments in money and human capital are needed to research and develop drugs, however, once these drugs are merely viewed as consumer products from the CEO/Wall Street perspective, profits come first and patent law is just a means to an end. The inventor of one of the most revolutionary drugs in history that cured Polio sought neither profits nor patent protection for his discovery. His invested time, money and passion was solely for the purpose of helping patients and curing this disease. It’s not hard to observe such acts of altruism and selflessness by individuals in the medical community today. It is however, those powerful institutions with their outdated business models that often get in the way of patient-centric innovation and research through their Wall Street dictated balance sheet goals and metrics and insecure market position.</div>
Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-72815900383170838152013-04-12T00:14:00.002-04:002014-01-22T19:51:33.149-05:00Welcome To The Age of Inequality <i>This post was inspired by <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/author/jerry-z-muller">Jerry Z. Muller</a>’s article in the Foreign Affairs Magazine titled <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138844/jerry-z-muller/capitalism-and-inequality">Capitalism and Equality</a> with input and great insight from <a href="http://plus.google.com/115159579531522793790">+Andreas Rekdal</a> and <a href="http://plus.google.com/112274140502281704465">+Georgina Hernandez-Norris</a>.</i><span id="internal-source-marker_0.030993279069662094"></span><br />
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For the most part, we live in one of the most democratic, technologically advanced and connected times in the history of humanity. Though many autocratic governments remain with little appetite for total freedom or equality for their people, technology is making it easier for people to gain exposure to diverse ideas as well as to express themselves. Further, the age of technology and big data has democratized information across governments and corporations and allowed for voices of consumers and citizens to be heard and considered. It is all good news, but. But, for various reasons, what is emerging is a widening gap between the rich and the poor, the educated and the uneducated, the fit and the obese, the techie and the less technical person. Some, like <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/author/jerry-z-muller" target="_blank">Jerry Z. Muller</a> of the Foreign Affairs Magazine argue that inequality is an inevitable consequence of capitalism:</div>
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"Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it -- because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords. Despite what many on the right think, however, this is a problem for everybody, not just those who are doing poorly or those who are ideologically committed to egalitarianism -- because if left unaddressed, rising inequality and economic insecurity can erode social order and generate a populist backlash against the capitalist system at </div>
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large." Via<i> <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138844/jerry-z-muller/capitalism-and-inequality" target="_blank">Foreign Affairs Magazine </a></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Income</b></span><br />
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As the video above and the chart below clearly demonstrate, income inequality between the poor and the rich or the top 1% in America has been growing exponentially. This trend has gotten even more extreme as a result of the financial crisis of 2008 where job loss and income stagnation has affected the middle class and the poor the most while the stockmarket is enjoying all time highs. As we will observe in the sections below, income inequality is the biggest driver of other inequalities in societies, especially education and rate of kids' success in school.</div>
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"As the economist Friedrich Hayek pointed out half a century ago in The Constitution of Liberty, the main impediment to true equality of opportunity is that there is no substitute for intelligent parents or for an emotionally and culturally nurturing family. In the words of a recent study by the economists Pedro Carneiro and James Heckman, "Differences in levels of cognitive and noncognitive skills by family income and family background emerge early </div>
and persist. If anything, schooling widens these early differences." <br />
Via<i> <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138844/jerry-z-muller/capitalism-and-inequality" target="_blank">Foreign Affairs Magazine </a></i></blockquote>
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The inequality that exists in education today is ironically caused by the very meritocratic system that was designed to ensure equal opportunity. For example by making school admissions criterion based solely on merit, this system assumes that everyone starts out with all the right or equal resources and life circumstances. Such that success or being smart is now only a function of willpower, studying habits and talent for a certain subject. This assumption is however not true since income, geography, social networks (by choice or born into), life situations and access play instrumental roles, most of which fall outside of one’s control. As a result, meritocracy often favors the privileged or the rich, whom can create and provide those ideal life circumstances for their kids to become successful in life. Of course there are always those who overcome their unfortunate life circumstances to become great academics, businessmen or politicians but statistics tells us that the odds are against them. This type of inequality is especially dangerous because it can lead to other inequalities in health, income, quality of life and a complete disconnect between the smart elite and the less educated parts of society.</div>
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My personal experience is that the biggest driver of success is motivation and being around other smart and passionate people or mentors is one of the strongest of motivations. What this means is that often those who do poorly in high school and hence never make it to college, merely lack the motivation to be smart. A smart and supportive social network or mentoring system would help motivate disadvantaged students to study and learn. A merit-based college admissions criterion prevents those who have the talent but lack the motivation to be around smart people and hence gain the motivation to be passionate about school and learning.</div>
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"Low-income students with above-average scores on eighth grade tests have a college graduation rate of 26 percent — lower than more affluent students with worse test scores. Thirty years ago, there was a 31 percentage point difference in the share of affluent and poor students who earned a college degree. Now the gap is 45 points. The gap has also grown in college entrance rates and spending per child on tutors, sports, music and other enrichment activities." Via <i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/12/22/education/Affluent-Students-Have-an-Advantage-and-the-Gap-Is-Widening.html?ref=education" target="_blank">The New York Times</a></i></blockquote>
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<span id="internal-source-marker_0.030993279069662094"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.030993279069662094"><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px; line-height: 16.988636016845703px; text-align: left;">Sources: College graduation rates by family income and test scores: analysis of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 by Matthew M. Chingos, Brookings Institution; share of students who enter and complete college: analysis of National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 and 1997 by Susan Dynarski and Martha Bailey, University of Michigan, in “Whither Opportunity: Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances,” edited by Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane;” enrichment spending: Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane, “Whither Opportunity.”</span></span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Health</span></b><br />
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Inequality in health is most evident as one travels through different parts of the country. The more affluent urban areas seem to have fitness, yoga or CrossFit centers as well as Whole Foods Market stores in every corner challenging Starbucks for urban real estate dominance. In contrast, more rural or low income urban areas and neighborhoods not only have very few fitness centers or healthy food supermarkets but rather are full of fast food restaurants. In addition, the inequality of access and use of technology and the internet when it comes to health related information between different demographics creates another inequality factor. Lastly, the inequality of patient care and access to health insurance is a major factor between those who do not receive proper or preventive care versus those who receive proper or even sometimes too much care. Now-days it’s only a bit ironic to observe the CrossFit phenomenon that’s sweeping across the country and creating superfit individuals while constantly hearing about the obesity epidemic and crisis.</div>
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Unfortunately, while technology has democratized information and data, its rapid evolution has also created inequalities in many other areas. From the job market to simple daily functions there is a widening gap emerging between techies and those whom are falling behind the accelerating technology curve. Not only the tech-savvy use technology and the internet to their advantage but they also know how to protect themselves against its evils. As such, the average non-technical person is handicapped in this environment, struggling to keep up. This is especially evident in the job market where as <a href="http://qz.com/author/cmimsqz/">Christopher Mims</a> points out, quoting Marc Andreessen in his article (<a href="http://qz.com/67323/how-the-internet-made-us-poor/">How The Internet is Making Us Poor</a>) that in the near future there will be two job categories: “People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.” Of course the difference in average income between these two categories will be extreme. We can already observe the increasing concentration of venture capital and wealth in Silicon Valley, the hub of internet and big data technology companies, while other parts of the country and sectors are struggling with stagnant job markets and wages. Additionally, as technology attempts to make every process as efficient as possible, it eliminates many jobs that humans traditionally have performed.</div>
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What’s obvious from all the inequalities mentioned above is that they are all related. Someone with disadvantaged and challenging life circumstances will less likely be able to attend school regularly and concentrate on learning. He or she will at the same time be less likely to have access to proper food, healthcare, technology and the internet as well as successful role models or mentors. This disadvantage can haunt one as unfortunate life situations lead to poor school performance and education, low wage jobs, health problems due to cheap junk food which might further prevent the person from achieving their potential. The black hole of inequality is such that in an extremely competitive and individualistic society as ours once one starts from a disadvantaged position, there are so many obstacles that prevent one from breaking out of this black hole and becoming successful. In a society where access to good education, healthcare and technology is a function of money, inequality becomes part of its DNA to a point where people become resigned to it and never question the system as such, just themselves and their parents for their lucky or unlucky life circumstances.</div>
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"The inequality that exists today, therefore, derives less from the unequal availability of opportunity than it does from the unequal ability to exploit opportunity. And that unequal ability, in turn, stems from differences in the inherent human potential that individuals begin with and in the ways that families and communities enable and encourage that human potential to flourish." Via <i><a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138844/jerry-z-muller/capitalism-and-inequality" target="_blank">Foreign Affairs Magazine</a></i></blockquote>
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<br />Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-68999047986316706222013-03-26T00:37:00.005-04:002014-01-22T19:46:18.524-05:00How Advertising Undermines Freemarket Capitalism & Liberty<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i>This article attempts to argue that advertising, by creating an unequal playing field and entry point, leads to corporate capitalism and inequality for businesses. The advertising phenomenon in the age of Google and Facebook also jeopardizes liberty through consumer decision tracking and manipulation and undermines democracy through turning political campaigns into fundraising and advertising competitions.</i></div>
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It is hard to ignore the impact of advertising in an age where Google, Facebook and other advertising-supported tech companies are worth more than the annual budgets of many developing countries combined. Aside from the economic benefits of the coming together of tech, media, advertising and corporate sectors to dissect, mine, categorize, target, nudge and commodify every consumer decision-making data point, this evolution has great implications for our economy, liberty and democracy. </div>
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<b>The Myth of Supply & Demand Theory: Information Asymmetry</b><br />
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One of the implications of this shift is the evolving definition of the<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand"> Supply and Demand</a> theory, one of the cornerstones of<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Free-market_capitalism"> freemarket capitalism</a>. This theory as traditionally understood, assumes commodity prices are simply a function of supply and demand, and the access to information by both consumers and sellers is equal and symmetric. This is simply not the case. The supply and demand equilibrium has an 'information' variable that often favors suppliers or sellers and big business. Not only businesses can withhold certain negative information about their products but they can also exaggerate and overstate the positive aspects through advertising and marketing. Additionally, the seller has always had the upper hand in terms of having access to information that the buyer never had. As such sellers use this asymmetric advantage to sell their product at a higher price dependent somewhat on demand but more so on what the buyer doesn't know (information advantage) or is advertised (information manipulation). So simply put the Supply and Demand theory would be correct if and only if everyone had access to the same information or data, which is simply not the case. </div>
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<b>Big Data: The Confused Consumer</b><br />
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But wait a minute, the internet has democratized information (See Yelp, Amazon reviews, CNet, etc). Yes, true, but just like the internet has given a platform for consumers to share information and review products, it has also become an advertising and marketing heaven for 'sellers'. Now advertising banners follow us across the web and thanks to all the cookies stored in our browsers, advertising agencies have profiles on each person to best tailor ads to match our consumption and browsing history. Additionally, even in the absence of advertising, with access to information being equal, corporations have access to advanced and complex data analytics and mining software and algorithms to make sense of Big Data, while the consumer is handicapped and constantly overwhelmed by information.</div>
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<b>The Advertising Variable And The Rise of Corporate Capitalism</b><br />
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It is obvious then, that the advertising industry has changed demand from being just a function of scarcity of a product or service that consumers need or desire to how much and how well a product is advertised or marketed with a popular meme to create a demand that was never there to begin with. By increasing advertising and marketing of a certain product, demand goes up and as such prices can be set by the seller as the entity who controls the demand through advertising. This evolution is dangerous to freemarket capitalism because as described above, the advertising epidemic tends to favor big businesses with bigger marketing and advertising budgets while drowning out the smaller businesses with possibly more superior products or services. In this new<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_capitalism"> Corporate Capitalism</a> environment, then we must ask: How can a small business get the word out about its products when the highway of mainstream media is dominated by the voices of the big corporations? Perhaps<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Gain-Disorder/dp/1400067820"> Nassim Taleb</a> is correct to suggest that if a produce or service is good and needed it does not need to be advertised: </div>
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I wonder why people don't realize that, by definition, what is being marketed is necessarily inferior, otherwise it would not be advertised. As the saying goes, it is hardest to be a great man to one’s chambermaid. And marketing beyond conveying information is insecurity. We accept that people who boast are boastful and turn people off. How about companies? Why aren’t we turned off by companies that advertise how great they are? We have three layers of violations: First layer, the mild violation: companies are shamelessly self-promotional, like the man on the British Air flight, and it only harms them. Second layer, the more serious violation: companies trying to represent themselves in the most favorable light possible, hiding the defects of their products—still harmless, as we tend to expect it and rely on the opinion of users. Third layer, the even more serious violation: companies trying to misrepresent the product they sell by playing with our cognitive biases, our unconscious associations, and that’s sneaky.</blockquote>
<b>The Advertising Market: Consumer's Attention Span As a Traded Commodity</b><br />
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Aside from the inequality and monopolies advertising can lead to by creating an unequal entry point to mainstream media, this epidemic is reaching a crisis of its own, that is the consumers' ever limited and scarce attention span. In the mobile and social media age, with so much content, information and advertising that each consumer is exposed to, the consumer attention span or Facebook Newsfeed become very valuable commodities or real estate for advertisers and businesses. As such, as companies compete for this scarce resource they have to continuously outdo one another to get our attention and often have to invoke and excite some of our worst unconscious instincts. The rise of Reality-Drama TV is a great examples of how the advertising-profit-hungry media has captured the attention of millions of viewers by mediocre but sensational content, repackaged this attention and sold it as a commodity to big corporations. In this case Reality and extreme opinion-based talk shows only cater to our lowest common denominator (extreme emotions) with no intellectual or rational thinking required. What the junk food industry has done to our stomachs, health and waste lines, the advertising industry attempts to do to our brains and attention with cheap, unhealthy but tasty content. This trend is also evident in Silicon Valley's technology-focused / advertising-dependent business mindset where 'cool' Apps or social networks (Facebook) attract users (their attention) just to sell their feeds, information and attention to advertisers. It is no longer, "build it and they will come" but rather "create a hype, they will come so you can bombard them with advertising and make money". Attention [as a commodity] trading is the new housing bubble. </div>
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<b>The Over-Advertised Consumer: A Passive, Unintellectual Society</b><br />
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It's evident that advertising is not going away anytime soon and it shouldn't. It's a form of free speech and people and corporations should be able to express themselves as they like. The problem is when competition between marketers and advertisers leads to ever more extreme attention grabbing-content and media with hidden marketing pitches for a product or an ideology What happens when in desperation, corporations invoke unreasonable fear to sell their products? (i.e. Defense contractor paying journalists to write articles to emphasize the dangers of unrealistic threats that next generation of weapons will protect us from). What happens when banks advertise loans, credit cards and debt as a means to more consumption and happiness? What happens when food or soft-drinks are advertised as a means to a joyful experience? What happens when the pharmaceutical industry advertises prescription drugs as magic pills that will cure all of our ills?</div>
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<b>The Over-Advertised Citizen: The Myth of Freedom of Choice</b><br />
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The problem with an advertising-based economy is that citizens turned consumers now become passive attention spans to be targeted, manipulated and profiled to nudge them to purchase products and services they might not need or can even afford with every little rational thinking or logic. Most importantly, how free is our so called American 'Freedom' when our every decision is manipulated by for-profit media and advertising agencies? Here I like to echo<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek"> Slavoj Zizek</a> to say that: "We ‘feel free’ because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom." We accept advertising as part of our freedom because we don't know what's it's like to experience a world without advertising. Yes we are free to think as we like but can we imagine total freedom, from corporate, political and media advertising and hidden agendas? And what about elections for political office, especially in the age<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Election_Commission"> Citizens United</a>? Most candidates these days base their decision to enter a race not so much on polling data but rather on how much money they think they can raise to fund their advertising campaigns. Not only advertising budget is a critical factor in winning elections, the funding itself can come from various anonymous and undisclosed sources. It's not, hence, surprising that both Obama 2008 and<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/07/tech/web/obama-campaign-tech-team"> 2012</a> winning campaigns became known for their level of fundraising, smart advertising and targeting and advanced data analytics. Professor David Parry's op-ed in<a href="http://techpresident.com/"> TechPresident</a> is a great reminder of how advertising has completely undermined democratic elections with the help of technology and neuroscience, with a most appropriate title: <a href="http://techpresident.com/news/22466/op-ed-big-data-what-happens-when-elections-become-social-engineering-competitions">Big Data: What Happens When Elections Become Social Engineering Competitions</a>.</div>
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Maybe Thomas Jefferson knew this all along:<br />
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Wealth acquired under capitalism is in and of itself no enemy of democracy, but wealth armed with political power – power to shake off opportunities for others to rise – is a proven danger.</blockquote>
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As I was writing this article I shared some of my thoughts with a few friends who are either currently in Business School or involved with tech startups. They all seemed to agree that though advertising can be abused as a tool in the wrong hands, it is necessary, to connect consumers with their desired or needed products or services. Advertising, especially for most online-only stores has in fact become the language of commerce today, without which brands are simply mute and excluded from conversations. It’s obvious then that advertising is here to stay but seeing all the great inventions that started out cool and became annoying thanks to advertising (Journalism: Content Marketing, Mail: Junk Mail, Email: Spam, Myspace: Spam, Facebook: Supported Posts, Twitter: Spam/Following to be Followed, etc.) I wonder if there is a better way to communicate information without overwhelming the consumer's attention span with spam to manipulate their decision-making and eroding their trust in content.</div>
Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-81020590821059303072013-02-15T22:36:00.000-05:002014-01-22T19:48:20.710-05:00Does Freedom of Thought & Expression Lead to More Conformity? <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<i>These thoughts were inspired by the excerpt below from Zizek's <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=N4ZOTlBZieoC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=blue+ink+letter+friend+in+siberia&source=bl&ots=kvQQnmomg2&sig=q48msebBRAFby2aJecXdViQhKNo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=2h4UUYLZAtGL0QGD8oEI&ved=0CEsQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: center;" target="_blank">Welcome To the Desert of The Real</a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">: </span></i></div>
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<b>We ‘feel free’ because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.</b></div>
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<b>The only way to secure social servitude is through freedom of thought.</b></div>
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In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by the censors, he tells his friends: 'Let's establish a code: if a letter you get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it's true; if it's written in red ink, it's false.' After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink:</div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><i>'Everything is wonderful here: the shops are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, cinemas show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair - the only thing you can't get is red ink.'</i></span> </div>
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One starts by agreeing that one has all the freedoms one wants - then one merely adds that the only thing missing is the 'red ink': we 'feel free' because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. </div>
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A 100 years ago, in his emphasis on the acceptance of some fixed dogma as the condition of demanding actual freedom, Gilbert Keith Chesterton perspicaciously detected the antidemocratic potential of the very principle of freedom of thought:</div>
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<i>We may say broadly that free thought is the best of all safeguards against freedom. Managed in a modern style, the emancipation of the slave's mind is the best way of preventing the emancipation of the slave. Teach him to worry about whether he wants to be free, and he will not free himself.</i></blockquote>
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Following up on the excerpt above I like to argue not against or for Zizek/Chesterton's notion of freedom as a function of language but rather question freedom itself. That is: Do people really want ultimate, total 'Freedom' or just the perception of it? My argument here is that freedom of thought and expression tends to lead to more conformity than diversity, more herd-like behavior than independent thinking or questioning, more group-think or belief than individual thought-process or thinking. But why? Why are people in the 'Free' West more trusting of authority and institutions while people in the oppressed East more trusting of close social circles and very skeptical of authority, media, viral memes and institutions? Is it that 'Freedom' is always appreciated and celebrated only as a sacred notion that one can even fully posses but never to fully exercise? Does this hindrance that prevents the ultimate experience and exercise of 'Freedom' guarantee its status as the sacred notion of desire? Is experiencing and exercising total 'Freedom' "too much" for people to handle? How would people behave in a totally 'Free' world with no institutions or legal structures to constrain or guide behaviors? </div>
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Here I agree with Eric Hoffer that people will by default seek conformity and create institutions to minimize the overwhelming feeling of anxiety and confusion that might come with making choices in the absence of institutions and legal and cultural norms and rules. Then perhaps here Zizek is right to state that people only care about the perception of 'Freedom' "through freedom of thought" while unconsciously their decisions are being governed and manipulated by social, cultural and legal norms, rules and memes. In this sense in the "Free" western democratic-capitalist societies we are always presented with options and choices of commodities which give us the perception that we are free to "choose" while our choices are, unbeknownst to our consciousness, being unconsciously driven by advertising, media and social memes that make us more conformist than 'Free'. Here the person purchasing a home security system after seeing the advertising on CNN right after a news of a house robbery or theft thinks he is making a free, conscious decision while being unconsciously driven by his or her fear of theft triggered by the news+advertising input. There are of course those 'rebels' as known as "Entrepreneurs" in capitalist societies who when faced with these choices do dream of options that don't exist and say what not? But even these "Entrepreneurs" tend to merge around certain ideas or sectors that are more "popular" with the most financial reward. In this case, even they are prone to herd-like mentally and mindset in their pursuit to disrupt current models and consumption habits only to start new capital-generating machines.</div>
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To reemphasize my argument here, it's as if 'Freedom' is too radical or too much to be subjectively experienced but can only be objectively believed as a notion. Here I am reminded of a talk I attended about the future of journalism where a Reuters VP (<a href="http://blogs.reuters.com/chrystia-freeland/" target="_blank">Chrystia Freeland</a>) mentioned with a bit of exaggeration that early in her career (as a reporter in Ukraine during the Soviet era with very little freedom of press or media) she would often see people on the metro reading great Russian literature and novels by Tolstoy, Kafka or Dostoevsky. However, as soon as Communism collapsed, she began noticing that people started reading tabloids, porn and sports magazines. Obviously she was not advocating for Communism style oppressive regimes but her observation points out the paradox of freedom and human nature. As Freud put it humans unconsciously or by nature desire things that are unhealthy for a functioning society as a collective: </div>
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In this seminal book, Sigmund <span class="il">Freud</span> propounds
his perspective by enumerating what he sees as the fundamental tensions
between civilization and the individual. The primary friction, he
asserts, stems from the individual's quest for instinctual freedom and
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repression. Many of humankind's primitive instincts are
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civilization creates laws that prohibit killing, rape, and adultery, and
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process, argues <span class="il">Freud</span>, is an inherent quality of civilization that instills perpetual feelings of discontent in its citizens. Via <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/100123345029543043288" target="_blank">+Wikipedia</a> </div>
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As such conformity is almost a necessity for the functioning of the collective. This is one reason religions evolved and have been such a vital part of human history and evolution. Through their stories, traditions and rituals, religions provide a set of laws and norms to guide and tame human nature to be able to exist and live as a collective. As such we circle back to where we started and the paradox of freedom vs. conformity. Those who live under oppression seek freedom and those who have freedom seek conformity. The best and ideal balance humanity has come up with so far as practiced in the west is freedom of expression while conforming to societal memes or ideologies. The problem though with the free conformist society is that it tends to facilitate inequality. As people seek different memes and ideologies to conform to, they further isolate themselves from the rest of society, ideas, thoughts and experiences. </div>
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Some recent social networking analysis studies have in fact shown that even in the free internet and across social media platforms people tend to gravitate around specific ideologies or beliefs instead of being randomly spread out across a range of beliefs or ideals as we would expect from "free" and "independent thinking" individuals. This is where the modern human mind stands: It wants the freedom to think about everything but secretly limits itself to certain ideas or beliefs. Here we observe a reversal of the philosopher in Plato's cave theory:</div>
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Plato describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not make up reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners. Via <a class="g-profile" href="http://plus.google.com/100123345029543043288" target="_blank">+Wikipedia</a> </blockquote>
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The free mind lives outside of the cave but having been overwhelmed by reality and freedom of the outside world, seeks shelter in the conformity of the cave even though inside the cave the images are merely shadows of reality. </div>
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Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-4481948769064271552013-02-14T15:52:00.003-05:002014-01-22T19:55:15.200-05:00Why We Must Embrace Chaos and Uncertainty <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
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Why is Chaos Good? Or a better question is: What do we mean by chaos, at least for the purposes of this blog? From my perspective chaos is everything that does not follow a specific pattern or set of laws or processes. However in the face of complex and chaotic systems, we as humans are pattern-seeking animals obsessed with control and predictions. That said, the truth is that much of what we perceive as patterns, order or signal is just noise in the chaos of life. The same goes for control, where our perception of control is only just that and often reality of our situations are much more chaotic and unpredictable than we'd like to admit. Here the modern human being lives in a paradox where he or she thrives on chaos but seeks order, comes alive in unpredictable environments but attempts to predict every situation, is a result of chaotic mutations and evolutionary forces but attempts to control every aspect of his or her bodily functions and exposures. The irony is also interesting in that humans are a result of and have evolved from chaos while modern society can only function if we seek order and predictability.</div>
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<a name='more'></a>Looking back at history, humans have evolved in unpredictable and chaotic hunter-gatherer environments where food, health, safety, security and sex came and went unpredictably. There were days of famine and days of feasts, days of prosperity and days of death and dying due to disease or being attacked by animals or other tribes and countless mating opportunities or dying with no offsprings. However, to function in today's world, we have been consciously convinced that we need safety, security, and predictability while we unconsciously desire and thrive in uncertainty and chaos. We've been chasing the corporate dream job while we thrive and enjoy the chaotic environments of small businesses, start-ups, artisan or skilled work (handyman, restaurant, carpenter, etc). <span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;">It seems that the aim of modern society, economy and technology is to
make life as predictable as possible by making every aspect of life
measurable, controllable, easy to forecast and manipulate for the sake of comfort. Surprises are
becoming too anxiety-provoking for people. We depend on information to
just function. We now exactly know ahead of the time the weather
forecast (the weather channel), our weekly meeting
forecast (iCal / Outlook), future dates (<a href="http://match.com/" target="_blank">match.com</a>),
and quality of products and services we are yet to receive (Yelp,
Amazon, etc). Information has left very little to chance, coincidence
and surprise. Even most of what we do for work has been reduced down to
standardized processes with user manuals and step by step guides
leaving very little room for brainstorming, autonomy or Thinking. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;">The hope of this blog is not a return to the days of our hunter-gatherer ancestors but to emphasize the need to appreciate and accept the chaos that is life. Our obsession with control and predictions narrow our vision and prevent us from seeing more possibilities and outcomes, or considering other points of view or data that disagree with our ideologies or egos. We use the magic of statistics and the miracle of Big Data to justify preconceived notions or ideas instead of admitting that much of what we perceive is noise. Here the financial crisis of 2008 is a great example of how Big Data + Complex Algorithms and Statistics were used to justify what everyone secretly knew to be not true: the infinite rise of housing prices. In this sense, statistics and data analytics are the old tools we have to survive in the age of Big Data but these same tools can easily be used to justify an illusionary end depending on the data set we choose (garbage in garbage out). Appreciating and acknowledging chaos is good because it makes us humble to the fact that even our most sophisticated statistics equations or computer algorithms are inadequate in measuring and predicting life with its countless variables and complex network of connections. Chaos is good because chaos enables life and chaos is what we thrive on when we are most engaged, curious and alive. As much as some of us like to convince ourselves that we need order and comfort our brains are wired for chaos and surprises and we easily get bored and lose interest when faced with chronic order. Chaos is interesting and our lives should be as well. Here are some great minds elaborating on the notion of chaos and life: </span></div>
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I would say about individuals, an individual dies when he ceases to be surprised. I am surprised every morning that I see the sunshine again. When I see an act of evil, I'm not accommodated. I don't accommodate myself to the violence that goes on everywhere; I'm still surprised. That's why I'm against it, why I can hope against it. We must learn how to be surprised. Not to adjust ourselves. I am the most maladjusted person in society.</div>
-Abraham Joshua Heschel, <a href="http://www.onbeing.org/program/spiritual-audacity-abraham-joshua-heschel/227" target="_blank"><i>The Spiritual Audacity of Abraham Heschel</i></a></blockquote>
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This 'goal-driven' attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self...If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead...This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.</div>
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-Nassim Taleb, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Gain-Disorder/dp/1400067820" target="_blank">Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder</a></i></div>
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Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.</div>
-Edward O. Wilson, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Social-Conquest-Earth-Edward-Wilson/dp/0871404133" target="_blank">The Social Conquest of Earth</a></i></blockquote>
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In these confused and restless zones in which present blends with future in a world of upheaval, we stand face to face with all the grandeur, the unprecedented grandeur, of The Phenomenon of Man What has made us so different from our forebears, so ambitious too, and so worried, is not merely that we have discovered and mastered other forces of nature. It is that we have become conscious of the movement which is carrying us along.</div>
-Teilhard de Chardin, <i><a href="http://www.onbeing.org/program/teilhard-de-chardins-planetary-mind-and-our-spiritual-evolution/4965" target="_blank">Planetary Mind & Our Spiritual Evolution</a></i></blockquote>
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Awakened to life out of the night of unconsciousness, the will finds itself as an individual in an endless and boundless world, among innumerable individuals, all striving, suffering, and erring; and, as if through a troubled dream, it hurries back to the old unconsciousness. "We are not at home in the world, and thus homelessness is a deep truth about our condition. Here, indeed, is the root of original sin: through consciousness, we ‘fall’ into a world where we are strangers. Hence our deep-seated desire to return to “the primordial point of rest”: the landscape of childhood and the safety of the family hearth.</div>
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-Jim Holt, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-World-Exist-Existential/dp/0871404095" target="_blank">Why Does the World Exist</a></i></div>
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We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.<br />
-Jean Baudrillard, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Simulacra-Simulation-Body-Theory-Materialism/dp/0472065211" target="_blank">Simulacra And Simulation</a></i></blockquote>
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I accept the chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me.<br />
-Bob Dylan</blockquote>
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Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.<br />
-Voltaire</blockquote>
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Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6158778496551704861.post-90155227645282472352013-02-12T18:59:00.001-05:002014-01-22T19:47:54.222-05:00How The 'Foodie' Hype Is Undermining Food<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJTIaMLc5WgIfLGd4P1jkHgziAlYllnXOPGeF8dWlKHSlaJyjpWmcqaU3CWZri8cfcIrLsVehjUQuQuyHrk7BH4kMy2e-40bt9mKSVG76Mm7JoXaiMa5UgF2mCQRpFwF7vSlN8uREyPdGv/s1600/taking+photographs+of+food.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJTIaMLc5WgIfLGd4P1jkHgziAlYllnXOPGeF8dWlKHSlaJyjpWmcqaU3CWZri8cfcIrLsVehjUQuQuyHrk7BH4kMy2e-40bt9mKSVG76Mm7JoXaiMa5UgF2mCQRpFwF7vSlN8uREyPdGv/s320/taking+photographs+of+food.jpg" height="237" width="320" /></a><i>These thoughts were inspired by my debates with my chef-in-the-making girlfriend over ("Yelp Pre-Approved but Not Post-Instagramed") sushi as well as during our car rides every night I pick her up from her Restaurant. </i><br />
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Here I like to argue that the minute the term 'Foodie' became a viral meme and a lifestyle, it marked the demise of "real" cooking and eating. What the Porn industry did to sex, the Recording Industry did to artists, Big Media did to news, the Entertainment industry did to sports, the Advertising industry did to trust, the Food-Media Industry will do to cooking and eating.<br />
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These days it's hard and almost sacrilegious not to be excited about food. In our politically correct society, other than sports and weather, food and food shows are all that's left to talk about in most professional social settings. Further, thanks to the "Foodie" blogsphere and Yelp everyone is a food expert or chef / food blogger "wannabe". These things are "cool" now and who can resist not jumping on the bandwagon, it is food we are talking about, not some crazy religious cult, right? We must all now know where to find good 'Food', how to make it, and most importantly report it on Instagram and to our work colleagues the next day. </div>
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<a href="http://digisavvy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/yelp-love.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="http://digisavvy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/yelp-love.jpg" border="0" class="decoded" src="http://digisavvy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/yelp-love.jpg" height="200" width="197" /></a>Going to a new restaurant before checking it out on Yelp is now as anxiety provoking as going on a blind date and not instagramming a 'Foodie' faux pas. </div>
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The obvious irony here is that much like the wine tasting meme-wagon, most people don't possess sophisticated enough pallets to truly appreciate every single taste or ingredient (I don't either), but rather it's the meme and hype that they subscribe to when they become 'Foodies'. Not to take away from the subjective ‘Foodie’ experience here but let’s call it what it is (hype) and what it’s not (Food).</div>
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Here some might argue that the 'Foodie' meme or hype has done much good in terms of bringing attention to the quality of food and its health effects. It has also inspired many to pursue culinary professions. Ok, yes, I agree, now we have Whole Foods Market, fancier restaurants and the Organic Industrial Complex but we should be under no illusion about the intentions of these industries. Prior to the pop-ifying of food, the Food Industrial Complex was mostly made up of fast food giants like McDonald's. They made money by making food as cheap as possible with the lowest quality possible and billion dollar advertising and marketing campaigns. Then, finally after many decades, people are starting to realize the hidden costs of cheap-fast food (obesity, diabetes, etc.). So the next evolution or version of the food industry saw an opportunity, not to improve the quality of "Fast Food" but to create a new industry or market for the more affluent and younger generation. As they correctly assumed, the poor will still consume low quality, fast food because they simply have no other options but the affluent-young generation is demanding more choices and better quality. To respond to this demand and new market the Media and Food industries came together to add some “spice” to traditional cooking shows. They took the traditional Julia Childs instructional cooking model and “RealityTV-ified” it by adding competitions, drama, hype, heroes and losers into these cooking spectacles.</div>
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<a href="http://thetangential.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Chopped-Show.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://thetangential.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Chopped-Show.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a>And of course the minute cooking shows became ‘Reality TV’, they became the reality of the average media consumer turned 'Foodie'. This new type of consumer now wants to reenact the cooking shows and characters he or she idolizes and identifies with (i.e. Anthony Bordain, Rachel Ray, etc). Again, the intention is relating to a story, hype, a movement, a cult, and food itself a secondary aim. Of course, the modern Food Industry knows this and fuels the game through their own media outlets while now making billions from both poor consumers (Fast-Food) and the younger more affluent "Socially-Conscious" and "Yelp-Educated" Foodies. <br />
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Additionally, more and more fancy or cool restaurants are owned by large Restaurant Group monopolies as opposed to independent chefs. The result is more wealth for the food and food-media industries while the inequality of food quality and choices widening between the poor and the “Socially and Yelp Conscious' affluent demographic. This all happens while close to a billion people in the world go hungry every day. </div>
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An evolutionary theory I read while ago suggests that language and social interactions evolved when humans discovered fire and cooking. The coming together of people around fire as they cooked and ate facilitated verbal communication and social interactions. If true, then perhaps the real joy of food in addition to being a nutritional necessity for survival is that it facilitates social contact, story-telling and communication.</div>
Sevanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00624466505406065655noreply@blogger.com19