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;
Hypostasis: the incarnation of the essence;
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.

Defining cosmogonies

I do not have anything against technic itself - or at least, nothing against the common conception of technic, the practical, often manual, side of making or dealing with *. For example, if we want to print a book, is not only necessary the flow of words of the author but also it's necessary to deal with the paper, the ink, printing and binding machines. This is the practical side, indeed. The example I above takes anyway into account the essence of the cosmogony of technic, because the book, as an object, has core seriality.

What does seriality mean in this context? I think everyone gets its meaning of seriality, you can imagine this with sounds, visual, but probably with any sense: the repetition ad infinitum of *. The hegemonic sense of seriality in technic's cosmogony can be understood as a method to take * and put it in the big machine of production, at service of capital expansion. Looping continuously actions. We can image this sick and perpetual process as a spiral frame: when something is put into serial production, all its material and immaterial implicancies are stuck in the spiral.

It's about an accumulated instrumental value of * and this also sounds like the essence of capitalism. If we think of the role of Technic by looking at the contemporary world we can see that "all the different political/economic/religious systems competing against each other for global supremacy, invariably invested in the expansion of their technological apparatus as their main competitive edge. Consumed by the agonistic imperative to win, they promoted such expansion to the point that this eventually became their sole (and thus, paradoxically, shared) goal." An absolute instrumentality: everything is merely a means to an end, an end that points to the limitless expansion of the ability of production.

Now, if we think of any common contemporary technology we can easily find this pattern of absolute instrumentality. It doesn't provoke concerns, it's just incarnated in our way of living. The pervasiveness of contemporary telecommunications are just generated from this attitude given by this cosmogony - and let me be clear, it's extremely difficult to imagine another way to deal with those tools. The frame in which we live, we study, we have fun, we cry, we (have to) compete, etc... is all about absolute instrumentality.

But since we can be magicians we can try to unstitch the given existence of the tools in analysis and their essence.

I will try to ask help to another cosmology to temporary see out of the hegemonic frame of technic, out of the seriality, out of the burden of the politics, embracing something that I just recently start to understand: I will ask help to the Magic, another cosmogony order.

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.

Interlude: hot 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.

TELE-HYPOSTASIS

FIRST TELE-HYPOSTASIS: THE HOTSPOT
INCARNATION: THE MENHIR

The horizontal line pushes us towards the matter
the vertical one towards the spirit.
Franco Battiato - inneres auge

Ephemeral and device-less techniques such as smoke signals and whistle language are very ancient disciplines that often belong to the inner culture of a community.

I would like to focus on the menhir.

The desire that pushes humans to elevate a rock in order to spread the meaning of existence has an interesting symbolic connotation. A desire to stabilize the vertical dimension, a way to feel a connection to up there. In the horizontal dimension, the stones were signals which revealed the geography of the place, serving to describe its physical structure and its productive and/or mystical-religious utilization.

A static example is the menhir, a stone changed from its original settlement by a human force: the simplest objects, but with the greatest density of meaning, of the entire Stone Age.

Menhir is the first situated object, the first artificial element in space: one of the first examples of architecture, an artifact aimed to be hotspots for communities. Its inner symbolic meaning is metonymic, the information of its existence is spread thanks to the menhir itself, thanks to its size in its artificial settlement.

A menhir is a basic beacon: it sends one signal, its existence.

People can set variables in form of attributes and in form of devices:

• attributes as auratic power, the force capable to set a shared of ineffable understanding of the common good;
• devices as a middle physical medium that perform a protocol, such as flags.

Menhir as hotspots for community

A clear evolution of menhir is the beacon: beacons have been quite important in the history of communication, as soon variables have been added to them, and protocols as well, beacons became semaphores, a multi-signal device with incredible inner power. Semaphor means, from Greek, signal (sema) bearer (phoros): its etymology already suggests its obvious use: transmit messages between two points. This apparatus can be performed with different middle devices: usually fire, lights, flags, water and moving arms.

SECOND TELE-HYPOSTASIS: THE FLOATING PROTOCOL
INCARNATION: THE (ARCH)ANGEL

THIRD TELE-HYPOSTASIS: THE JAMMER
INCARNATION: THE FOG

On June 18th, 1815 Napoleon was defeated by the British in the battle of Waterloo. The same day, around Waterloo, there was very thick fog as well. Communication between Belgium and the UK was impossible that day: to communicate, they used optical telegraphers, a system invented by Claude Chappe in 1794. It consists of a series of signalers in elevated positions that acted as repeaters, allowing the signals to travel hundreds of kilometers. A smart artifact that unfortunately doesn't work when the weather is... completely foggy, like that day in that part of Europe.

The key-character of this story is Nathan Rothschild, the person who basically was in control of the financial system of the UK. Actually, I have to correct myself: the key character is a carrier pigeon. Rothschild was in the possession of carrier-pigeons and they are faster than the optical telegrapher or any horse messenger. The pigeon brought him the news to London. Rothschild was the first to know (at least in London, 360km away from Waterloo) that the French were defeated, but in London he released the rumor of a fulminating French victory. This created a fall in share prices of the UK debt's bonds, because investors trusted Rothschild since he was always well-informed. But in this way, Rothschild misled the market by selling bonds and assets. Later he bought the shares back for dump prices. That pigeon, used as a p2p medium, can be thought of as knowledge's bearer and as power-maker.

LAST TELE-HYPOSTASIS: EVERYWHERE, EVERYTHING
INCARNATION: ॐ