Federico-Thesis

A fresh intro: short statement and a little dictionary

Even if in this text I will extensively talk about cosmology and cosmogony, my goal is not at all try to give my idea of universal ones. This text is an attempt to describe a personal idea of myth for telecommunication media, without the burden of time linearity, in order to dig in ancient logos to be able to imagine a new path for develop technologies.

* : everything;
Cosmology: the mythical and metaphysical aspects on which the Cosmo is based, setting decisions of how manage the existence;
Cosmogony: the process of building the cosmology, its performative aspect;
Essence: what something is, the inner hidden ineffable meaning of * ;
Existence: that something is, the explicit empiric presence of *, but without knowing the implicancies;
Gestalt: selections and exclusions of possibilities implied in the "present" structure which act as paradigm;
Hegemony: the (violent) standardization and dogmatization of the power paradigm;
Tele- : from Greek tele "far off, afar, at or to a distance; a practicle prefix.

A fresh Protocol: Magic, Technic, Telepathy, Power

If you start to pay attention to the urban and especially non-urban landscapes, you will start to notice the number of antennas that are out there for our necessity to have always an internet connection on our smartphones, smart cars, smart fridges, smart coffee machines, smart etc..
Further, the constant presence of GPS signals implies there are always direct connections with satellites.
Every WiFi access point nearby our devices is a microcosm, and until your device can reach it, potentially you can inhabit it.
The young IoT technology uses protocols and tools that use frequencies that cover cities, the well-known smart cities.
At any market, store, train station and inside public transport we can find RFID reader where we can easily pay with the contactless technology, not really pervasive in the spectrum of waves but very pervasive in tracking movements.
Let's not forget the radio waves of the radio media: they float constantly as well, in any part of the globe.

In three words, wireless is pervasive.

This pervasiveness is not really obvious, you can't watch the immense traffic of data I mentioned above. It's a naive mystery, a technological mystery driven by radio waves that, again, float around us constantly. But radio waves are not the only things that float constantly around us and in the past a big question in different disciplines, such as philosophy, physic, metaphysics, chemistry, were wondering where the other waves constantly travel in our space.

This long attempt to theorize a possible highway for waves has been called aether, and the wireless media above are just a few examples of the contemporary meaning of it. The aether is "the material that fills the region of the universe beyond the terrestrial sphere", and is lighter than air and is located above it, whereas air is lighter than water, and water is lighter than earth.

We can easily find a common denominator for the concept of aether and for the tools I mentioned above: telecommunication.

The ethymology of aether means "pure, fresh air", and it's in the word "'fresh"' where this little journey starts. Michel Serres, in his book "Angels, a modern Myth", writes "When a sailor says that there's a fresh wind blowing, he is [...] using a word that relates to fractions, fractures and the adjective "fragile": thus fresh doesn't mean cold, but broken down into increasingly minute fragments or particles."
I'm pretty sure that whoever reads this passage can try to imagine the essence of this poetic scene, and thanks to our imagination we can almost feel a pointy breeze on our face skin. A breeze, ethymlogically coming from french "briser", to break: "As the breeze is broken up, it divides into smaller particles. [...] as we see from the surface of the sea, each wave is edged with a multiplicity of smaller waves."

The ancient intuition of the world as a perpetual fight of waves has always been present. Now we are almost sure that our first reason of life, the sun, so the light, has a double nature, in which one is understood as a wave. But this is not a scientific text and the objective truth doesn't want to be contemplated. The Sun, our star, our not-artificial media: gives us life but also gives us the possibility to see, and it's already a matter of communication.

But the empiric knowledge could be thought of as diametrically opposed to the esoteric knowledge, the internal, limited or often personal knowledge, the attempt to understand the entire Cosmo.
But we have to think of them not as opposite points of a 2D figure but of a multidimensional complex object, composed of languages, a wide range of correct and different ideas, belief systems...

That's why I have to propose a personal constellation to attempt to outline a possible different cosmology to read technology. The choice to focus and analyze telecommunication is because I think tele-tools are covered, from my perception, with a kind of magic, full of dramaturgic cues. The way of how I will propose the case studies will lay not on the mere use of some gadgets but on mythological resonations and relations: let's think of our world as a stage and telecommunication as part of the set-design, as a kind of hidden but in a full sightseen landscape: this affects the characters, their beliefs and their approach to the world.
For a human deficit, the impossibility to watch directly without eyes the exchange of data through wireless generates an almost imputable aura of mystery and I think, paradoxically, trust.

These tools have the capacity to affect physical reality at a distance, and the link to a telepathy desire is strong: using our devices as a natural extension of our body in the best cyber-tradition, from a communication point of view, this desire for telepathy is fully committed.

The main questions are: why this research and how can we get the essence of tele?
The first answer is quite tangible: this research would be a way to understand, in a personal perspective, how to deal with queering technology; It's an issue of gestalt and hegemony, two terms that can be overlapped: if wireless media are pervasive, how can we accept their role in the Complexity apparatus of the contemporary world?

The answer to the second question will be the core engine of the thesis, and it will not be a mere technical analysis of everyday gadgets. We need another set of points of view that must not be merely technical. Like the capitalist hegemony, the hegemony of technic is something that is with us, and like any good hegemony, it's really difficult to think from any different perspective.

The existence of technology is admitted by its direct heritage to technic, and since essence and existence are inextricably bound to each other, we have to dig deep into a set of mythical observations in order to propose another existence.
The philosopher Federico Campagna describe Reality as “a weave made of essence and existence, like warp and weft, and the event of its undoing requires a [magician] that is capable of interlacing the two back together, regardless of the specific forms and colours that each of them can take.”
The reality I'm talking about can't be thought of as the whole reality but as the radio spectrum cosmo we dwell daily. There won't be any fixed answer, and in a metaphor, I want to think of this as a dream inside a nightmare, where the dream is our attempt to imagine another way to inhabit technology and the nightmare is our fixed neo-liberal hegemony.
The research on the tele-essence will start now defining the current hegemonic cosmogony, the technic one, and then propose another cosmogony.

Are you ready? I'm not.

To be able to overcome one's slavery towards someone or something or oneself, or to overcome slavery in general, whether, in a concrete or figurative sense, it is not enough to appeal to indefinable entities such as justice or exchange currencies such as the rights because the only result would be to pass under the control of a different slaveholder.

To overcome one's slavery, one must reconsider and redesign one's single person completely. A system that has taken thousands of years to stratify will take thousands of years to deconstruct.

What this translated passage of the song Divenire Seguire Animale from the Italian spoken-word duo Uochi Toki suggests, is that any hegemonic order (that I really feel in any way is a kind of slavery) has to be deconstructed with an esoteric research that could come from a swing between ancient knowledge, collective chaos, individual introspection and new myths.

The slavery that I'm talking about takes contemporary wireless media as weapons.
We have to think of this techno-queering act as a perpetual action of shifting from standard/heteronormativity to an inclusive but especially different array of political action, technological agency, interventions, conceptual experiments and social-abilities.

Let's embrace the archetype of catastrophe: on our stage, the background will change, the landscape is altered, the fragility of reality is exposed. What it was taken for grant in our reality is resigned, followed by its descent into the darkness of chaos. When we wait for the void to be filled, a new cosmology, a new order is going to rise up. Yet, the landscape has to be thought of as a character, with its double nature of constant and variable element, and the hidden tele-elements I was talking about above change existence but not the essence.

Fire Fresh Stories

A common characteristic of any media is its relation to the power.
Ownership, management and maintenance of communication networks by organized society have a big importance in their spread and expansion. This makes clear that we are using and developing technologies because we are in a certain path, the path of Technic.

Let's dig into the classic western culture references system, let's see where technic come from greek mythology. A key character here is Prometheus, the Titan that challenged the gods stealing fire from heaven. Titans are sons of Uranus, the starry sky, and Gaea, the Mother Earth: they constitute already telecommunication between the matter and the spirit, in a vertical line between the land and the unreachable holy. Prometheus is the protector of the human race and further is a friend of Athena, goddess of wisdom, who transmits her knowledge to him: architecture, astronomy and the art of working metals.* Prometheus' story is well-known in the Mediterrean scholar tradition, the narration in which the Titan brings fire to humans, but often the entire story is not well known.

The myth tells that is Prometheus who created the human race. Tired of seeing the earth populated only by animals, he shapes some statues with clay, in the image and likeness of the gods.
Athena blows on the statues and gives them life.
Both humans and animals, however, are naked and helpless.
Epimetheus, brother of Prometheus, is tasked with distributing qualities to the animals that can be used for survival.

Epimetheus just forgot humans.

Zeus, king of the gods, thinks the human race is too weak to survive, without qualities. He then decides to give humans the coup de grace: to starve them, he demands from them the best parts of hunted animals. Prometheus, moved with compassion, intervenes in defense of the human species.

The Titan kills a bull. He then puts the bones in a bag, hidden by a layer of fat, and the good meat to eat in another bag. He then asks Zeus to choose one of the two bags. The content will be what men will have to sacrifice for eternity. Zeus, deceived by the layer of fat, chooses the bag with the bones. From that moment, only the bones of animals will be sacrificed to him during sacred ceremonies.

When he realizes that he has been deceived, Zeus was furious and decides to take the fire out of the men. Prometheus runs to their aid again. He steals an ember from the forge of Hephaestus, the god of fire, hides it in a fennel stalk and secretly brings it to earth.

This power and artfulness – the Greek tekhnē[...] – is thus in humankind the result of a double fault: forgetfulness and theft. The name of Epimetheus translates to 'after teaching', in other words, hindsight. Forgetfulness, errors and foolishness produce hindsight. Epimetheus is the god of overconfidence in his own means, of presumption: its error is the original sin of technic.

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An ancient well-documented fire-based semaphore is the Phryctoria, used in Ancient Greece.

The phryctoriae were towers built on certain top of hills so that one tower would be visible to the next. The system is easy: the protocol of the Phryctoriae is based on the use of two groups of torches, left side and right side, from one to five torches on each side. The encryption/decryption is just based on the letters of the Greek alphabet which are listed on a table, then the coordinate of each letter was communicated through the game of torch: column/row for left/right. The table is based on the Polybius square, if you want to communicate the Delta, you will have on the left hand one torch and on the right hand four torches.

In the tragedy Agamemnon, Aeschylus describes how the message for the fall of Troy arrived at Mycenae using phryctoriae:

Chorus But what herald could get here so quickly?

Clytaemestra The great god of fire himself, Hephaistos! He has sent a bright light from Mount Ida, in Troy. Then, torch to torch, like a human herald, this light first shone in Trojan Ida, then on Mount Hermes in Lemnos and from that island, the third torch arrived at Zeus’ Rock at Mount Athos. Then with a huge leap over the great sea, the flame travelled hard but happily and, like the sun, transferred its rays through the watchtowers of Makistos.
   
From there, without delay, like a good herald, refuting sleep, conquering sleep flew far to the streams of Evripos where it tells the news to the guards of MountMessapios, in Evoea... [...]

Chorus Madam, I shall thank the gods later but first, let me enjoy the story even more while you’re telling it again. 

Clytaemestra answers to the question how was possible to know if the Achaeans won against the trojans, as it was impossible for a courier to have travelled just in a night. "The great god of fire himself", Aeschylus writes, configuring, through this formula, the god Hephaistos in the device in question. The medium I'm talking about was a state-of-art artifact: the geographical establishment, ownership, management and maintenance of these communication networks by the ancient Greek culture was of great importance in their spread and expansion.