Federico-Thesis

Structure

{-1} A short statement

{0} Introduction[500] I would like to introduce my thesis by talking about the fascination I have for wireless and then explain the intention and the writing method of the text: between anecdotes, historical facts, alchemic bullshits outline and define how the development of the different (micro-)cosmologies happened and investigate what they caused.

{1} The Protocol: Magic, Technic, Telepathy, Power [2500] An overview about the metaphysical and political line of the text. From the ineffable nature of magic to the instrumentality essence' of technic, and the myth of the ether and the telepathy desire, a great combination for power abuses. The protocol I will use is aimed to attempt to analyse such stories with a cosmological and investigative attitutude, taking into account contemporary critiques to the historical and lingustic meaning of technic.

{2} Interlude: Phryctoria [500]

{3} Auretic Knowledge, Auretic Power [2500]

Having a table of tools with their protocols and historical/metaphysical implicancies would be the goal to imagine a new cosmogny.

• BEACON > menhir
• Protocol > angels
• JAMMER > ...
• waves and aether

{4} Conclusion - an ethereal world-building [1500] I will evoke the archetype of the catastrophe to imagine an hypotesis for a post-technic community. Low-technophilism instead of technopositivism, we would reassemble the world from the obsolete rubbish. An artificial mithological order should born, or a multitude of orders with ineffable perspectives, built - transformed - hereticized traditions shared collectively in a ultra-territorial environment.

A short statement

Even if in this text I will extensively talk baout cosmology and cosmogony, my goal is not at all try to give my idea of universal cosmology. This text is anattempt to describe a personal idea of myth for wireless media, without the burden of time linearity.

Introduction

Borders are symbols of protection and protection is an announce of death A. Bonanno

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.

That pigeon, in my personal constellation of fun facts, is the original sin that created two layers in the array of layers in Complexity.

• A layer that contains the stock exchange dynamics, made by running people, animals, algorithms, (not anymore) noisy market "squares" and noisy data centers.

• A layer in which wireless media and all their implicancies inhabit in it, from the contactless payment system to the deep space network, which in the middle there is an ocean of waves (literally, lol)

• An archetypic layer, the scheming man archetype, who exploits (for profit) and consequently get more power.

In this thesis, I will focus on the second layer, the layer of the invisible, the layer of definable magic and of ineffable knowledge.

Media and medium are the engine of communication, every communication tool shapes in a different way the knowledge' flow and consequently the power' flow. Who got the best infrastructures has faster information and then more knowledge. Then the application of power has different faces, usually, it's forcing something (like the forced fall of the value of a country, as it happened in the UK thanks to Rothschild, or the standardization of any device) or it's pervasive (like gps-tracking nowadays for capitalist purposes, or the pop-up disciplines of the notifications). Wireless media are covered, from my perception, with a kind of magic, full of dramaturgic cues. For a human deficit, the impossibility to watch with sightseen 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.

I would like to explore in the first part of the text the metaphysical origin, from my modest perspective, of the meaning of wireless, so much before the idea of "wires", even before the hegemonic state of the "technic".

The meaning of the last sentence will be extensively explained in the {1}, it will be a little journey in a personal costellation, a theoretical cot to read differently the pervasiveness of the tools we built and use daily.

the {2} is an interesting example, in my constellation, of the first use of a media protocol.

In the {3} I will propose some rereadings of ...

Finally, the {4} is a proposal for a post-technical...

The Protocol: Magic, Technic, Telepathy, Power

Wireless is pervasive.

The GPS signal means that there are always connections with satellite;
Every WiFi nearby our devices is a microcosm, and until your device can reach it, potentially you are in it;
The young IoT technology uses protocols and tools that uses 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 paying with the contact less technology, not really pervasive in the spectrum of waves but very pervasive in tracking movements.
And what about all the 4G/5G antennas around us?
If you start to paying attention on the urban and especially not-urban landscapes, you will start to notice the quantity of antennas that are there for our necessity to have always an internet connection on our smartphones.

Those are just a few examples of the contemporary meaning of the ether: "the material that fills the region of the universe beyond the terrestrial sphere."
The ethimology of aether means "pure, fresh air", and it's in the word "fresh" that this little journey starts.
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."
A breeze, ethimilogically 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 perpetual waves has been always present. Surely, now we are almost sure that our first reason of life, the sun, so the light, has a double nature, in which one is the light as wave.
But this is not a scientific text for sure and the objective truth doesn't want to be contemplated.
I would like to think a moment about the sun, our star, that is, I think, our not-artificial media: gives us life, but also gives us the possibility to see, and it's already a matter of communication. Photons are the quantum elements which reaveal us the world, that brings the original empiric knowledge. {carlo rovelli to quote?}

But the empiric knowledge could be thought as the diametrically opposed to the esoteric knowledge, the internal, personal knowledge (or the understanding) of the entire cosmo. But we have to think them not as opposite points of a 2D figure but of a multidimensional complex object.

Coming back on communication, we can think, for example, "Angels as messengers. The angels of the monotheis tradition [..] are invisible-but are capable of becoming visible."
This example that will be unpacked in the third chapter, can let us think of the pre technic ideas of the wireless.
We are already travelling back in time to understand how and why those kind of medium are made in this way.
Again, I feel that 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 as any good hegemony, we are not able to think to any different perspective.

“According to Heidegger, Technic’s method of ‘unveiling’ consists fundamentally in presenting every thing as entirely reducible to its instrumental value in view of its mobilization within the productive apparatus – where such apparatus itself is in turn just another standing-reserve ready to be employed in the service of its own expansion, and so on ad infinitum, along the endless spiral that constitutes Technic’s cosmological structure.” [p.48] [to continue]

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 political, embracing something that I just recently start to understand:
I will ask help to the Magic, another cosmogony order.

As any artist (or wizard), I have to deal with struggles. And any of 'us' is just a not very lucky dude that has to share its bad lucky. My personal enigma nowadays is indeed the ineffable.
What is the ineffable?

"“the notion of the ‘ineffable’ constitutes within Magic’s cosmogony the first and original principle – in specular opposition to the principle of ‘absolute language’ in Technic. The ineffable dimension of existence is that which cannot be captured by descriptive language, and which escapes all attempts to put it to ‘work’ – either in the economic series of production, or in those of citizenship, technology, science, social roles and so on.” [p.27] [to continue]

My question is, now, can't we try to reread the wireless media, a mysterious media per se, in a post-technical way? This is part of a big array of questions about future-building and how embrace a probable imminent catastrophe.

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 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 essoteric research that comes firstly from the individual.

• I have anarchist roots

The slavery that I'm talking about takes contemporary wireless media as weapons.
Let's embrace the archetype of catastrophe...

Interlude: Phryctoria

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

p 249 bridle

la storia di Epimetheus’ error is the original sin of technology.

he stole the fire: here we arrive to the etimology of magic.

fire, shadows, repetition, seriality.

phryctoria - the heavy shift to the technical cosmogony

An ancient well-documented fire-based semaphor 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 torchs, left side and right side, from one to five torches each side. The encryption/decription 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.

Polybius square

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 talkin 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.

Auretic Knowledge, Auretic Power

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

But I would like to focus on the menhir.

The desire that push humans to elevate a rock in order to spread meaning of existance 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 settlment 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 artifect aimed to be hotspots for communities. Its inner symbolic meaning is methonimic, the information of its existance is spread thanks to the menhir itself, thanks to its size in its artificial settlment. A menhir it's subsequently a basic beacon: it sends one signal, its existance. People can set variables in form of attributes and in form of devices:

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

A clear evolution of menhir is the beacon: beacons has been quite important in history of communication, as soon variables has been added to them, and protocols as well, beacons became semaphors, a multi-signal device with an incredible inner power. Semaphor means, from Greek, signal (sema) bearer (phoros): its etimology already suggest 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.

Protocol > angels
JAMMER > ...
contemporary waves and aether

Conclusion - an ethereal world-building

I will evoke the archetype of the catastrophe to imagine an hypotesis for a post-technic community. Low-technophilism instead of technopositivism, we would reassemble the world from the obsolete rubbish. An artificial mithological order should born, or a multitude of orders with ineffable perspectives, built - transformed - hereticized traditions shared collectively in a ultra-territorial environment.