I just lost a friend. In addition to the immense loss of life to Covid-19, we have lost people in other ways over the past year, when the confluence of quarantine, fear, and US-election frenzy tossed our friends and family at the cliffs of radical beliefs.

We are witnessing the beginning of Silicon Valley institutionalizing its religious beliefs.

We are witnessing the beginning of Silicon Valley institutionalizing its religious beliefs.

Daniel Rourke: At Furtherfield on November 22nd 2014 you launched a Beta version of a networked project, 6PM Your Local Time, in collaboration with Fabio Paris, Abandon Normal Devices and Gummy Industries. #6PMYLT uses twitter hashtags as a nexus for distributed art happenings. Could you tell us more about the impetus behind the project? Domenico Quaranta: In September 2012, the Link Art Center launched the Link Point in Brescia: a small project space where, for almost two years, we presented installation projects by local and international artists. The Link Point was, since the beginning, a “dual site”: a space where to invite our local audience, but also a set for photographic documentation meant to be distributed online to a global audience. Fabio Paris’ long experience with his commercial gallery – that used the same space for more than 10 years, persuaded us that this was what we had to offer to the artists invited. So, the space was reduced to a small cube, white from floor to ceiling, with neon lights and a big logo (a kind of analogue watermark) on the back door. Thinking about this project, and the strong presence of the Link Point logo in all the documentation, we realized that the Link Point was actually not bound to that space: as an abstract, highly formalized space, it could actually be everywhere. Take a white cube and place the Link Point logo in it, and that’s the Link Point.

This realization brought us, on the one hand, to close the space in Brescia and to turn the Link Point into a nomad, erratic project, that can resurrect from time to time in other places; and, on the other hand, to conceive 6PM Your Local Time. The idea was simple: if exhibition spaces are all more or less similar; if online documentation has become so important to communicate art events to a wider audience, and if people started perceiving it as not different from primary experience, why not set up an exhibition that takes place in different locations, kept together only by documentation and by the use of the same logo? All the rest came right after, as a natural development from this starting point (and as an adaptation of this idea to reality). Of course, this is a statement as well as a provocation: watching the documentation of the UK Beta Test you can easily realize that exhibition spaces are NOT more or less the same; that attending or participating in an event is different from watching pictures on a screen; that some artworks work well in pictures but many need to be experiences. We want to stress the value of networking and of giving prominence to your network rather than to your individual identity; but if the project would work as a reminder that reality is still different from media representation, it would be successful anyway. Daniel Rourke: There is something of Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones in your proposal. The idea that geographic, economic and/or political boundaries need no longer define the limits of social collective action. We can criticise Bey’s 1991 text now, because in retrospect the Internet and its constitutive protocols have themselves become a breeding ground for corporate and political concerns, even as technology has allowed ever more distributed methods of connectivity. You foreground network identity over individual identity in the 6PM YLT vision, yet the distinction between the individuals that create a network and the corporate hierarchies that make that networkingpossible are less clear. I am of course gesturing towards the use of Twitter as the principal platform of the project, a question that Ruth Catlow brought up at the launch. Do you still believe that TAZs are possible in our hyper-connected, hyper-corporate world? Domenico Quaranta: In its first, raw conceptualization, 6PM YLT had to come with its own smartphone app, that had to be used both to participate in the project and to access the gallery. The decision to aggregate content published on different social platforms came from the realization that people already had the production and distribution tools required to participate in the action, and were already familiar with some gestures: take a photo, apply a filter, add an hashtag, etc. Of course, we could invite participants and audiences to use some specific, open source social network of our choice, but we prefer to tell them: just use the fucking platform of your choice. We want to facilitate and expand participation, not to reduce it; and we are not interested in adding another layer to the project. 6PM YLT is not a TAZ, it’s just a social game that wants to raise some awareness about the importance of documentation, the power of networks, the public availability of what we do with our phones. And it’s a parasitic tool that, as anything else happening online, implies an entire set of corporate frameworks in order to exist: social networks, browsers, operative systems, internet providers, server farms etc. That said, yes, I think TAZs are still possible. The model of TAZ has been designed for an hyper-connected, hyper-corporate world; they are temporary and nomadic; they exist in interstices for a short time. But I agree that believing in them is mostly an act of faith.

Daniel Rourke: The beta-tested, final iteration of 6pm YLT will be launched in the summer of 2015. How will you be rolling out the project in the forthcoming months? How can people get involved? Domenico Quaranta: 6PM Your Local Time has been conceived as an opportunity, for the organizing subject, to bring to visibility its network of relationships and to improve it. It’s not an exhibition with a topic, but a social network turned visible. To put it simply: our identity is defined not just by what we do, but also by the people we hang out with. After organizing 6PM Your Local Time Europe, the Link Art Center would like to take a step back and to offer the platform to other organizing subjects, to allow them to show off their network as well. So, what we are doing now is preparing a long list of institutions, galleries and artists we made love with in the past or we’d like to make love with in the future, and inviting them to participate in the project. We won’t launch an open call, but we already made the event public saying that if anyone is interested to participate, they are allowed to submit a proposal. We won’t accept anybody, but we would be happy to get in touch with people we didn’t know. After finalizing the list of participants, we will work on all the organizational stuff, basically informing them about the basic rules of the game, gathering information about the events, answering questions, etc. On the other hand, we have of course to work on the presentation. While every participant presents an event of her choice, the organizer of a 6PM Your Local Time event has to present to its local audience the platform event, as an ongoing installation / performance. We are from Brescia, Italy, and that’s where we will make our presentation. We made an agreement with MusicalZOO, a local festival of art and electronic music, in order to co-produce the presentation and have access to their audience. This is what determined the date of the event in the first place. Since the festival takes place outdoor during the summer, we are working with them on designing a temporary office where we can coordinate the event, stay in touch with the participants, discuss with the audience, and a video installation in which the live stream of pics and videos will be displayed. Since we are expecting participants from Portugal to the Russian Federation, the event will start around 5 PM, and will follow the various opening events up to late night. One potential reference for this kind of presentation may be those (amazing) telecommunication projects that took place in the Eighties: Robert Adrian’s The World in 24 Hours, organized at Ars Electronica in 1982; the Planetary Network set up in 1986 at the Venice Biennale; and even Nam June Paik’s satellite communication project Good Morning Mr Orwell (1984). Left to Right – Enrico Boccioletti, Kim Asendorf, Ryder Ripps, Kristal South, Evan Roth Daniel Rourke: Your exhibition Unoriginal Genius, featuring the work of 17 leading net and new media artists, was the last project to be hosted in the Carroll/Fletcher Project Space (closing November 22nd, 2014). Could you tell us more about the role you consider ‘genius’ plays in framing contemporary art practice? Domenico Quaranta: The idea of genius still plays an important role in Western culture, and not just in the field of art. Whether we are talking about the Macintosh, Infinite Jest, a space trip or Nymphomaniac, we are always celebrating an individual genius, even if we perfectly know that there is a team and a concerted action behind each of these things. Every art world is grounded in the idea that there are gifted people who, provided specific conditions, can produce special things that are potentially relevant for anybody. This is not a problem in itself – what’s problematic are some corollaries to our traditional idea of genius – namely “originality” and “intellectual property”. The first claims that a good work of creation is new and doesn’t depend on previous work by others; the second claims that an original work belongs to the author. In my opinion, creation never worked this way, and I’m totally unoriginal in saying this: hundreds of people, before and along to me, say that creating consists in taking chunks of available material and assembling them in ways that, in the best situation, allow us to take a small step forward from what came before. But in the meantime, entire legal systems have been built upon such bad beliefs; and what’s happening now is that, while on the one hand the digitalization of the means of production and dissemination allow us to look at this process with unprecedented clarity; on the other hand these regulations have evolved in such a way that they may eventually slow down or stop the regular evolution of culture, which is based on the exchange of ideas. We – and creators in particular – have to fight against this situation. But Unoriginal Genius shouldn’t be read in such an activist way. It is just a small attempt to show how the process of creation works today, in the shared environment of a networked computer, and to bring this in front of a gallery audience. Left to Right – Kim Asendorf, Ryder Ripps, Kristal South, Evan Roth Daniel Rourke: So much online material ‘created’ today is free-flowing and impossible to trace back to an original author, yet the tendency to attribute images, ideas or ‘works’ to an individual still persists – as it does in Unoriginal Genius. I wonder whether you consider some of the works in the show as more liberated from authorial constraints than others? That is, what are the works that appear to make themselves; floating and mutating regardless of particular human (artist) intentions? Domenico Quaranta: Probably Museum of the Internet is the one that fits best to your description. Everybody can contribute anonymously to it by just dropping images on the webpage; the authors’ names are not available on the website, and there’s no link to their homepage. It’s so simple, so necessary and so pure that one may think that it always existed out there in some way or another. And in a way it did, because the history of the internet is full of projects that invite people to do more or less the same. Left to Right – Brout & Marion, Gervais & Magal, Sara Ludy Daniel Rourke: 2014 was an exciting year for the recognition of digital art cultures, with the appointment of Dragan Espenschied as lead Digital Conservator at Rhizome, the second Paddles On! auction of digital works in London, with names like Hito Steyerl and Ryan Trecartin moving up ArtReview’s power list, and projects like Kenneth Goldsmith’s ‘Printing out the Internet’ highlighting the increasing ubiquity – and therefore arguable fragility – of web-based cultural aggregation. I wondered what you were looking forward to in 2015 – apart from 6PM YLT of course. Where would you like to see the digital/net/new media arts 12 months from now? Domenico Quaranta: On the moon, of course! Out of joke: I agree that 2014 has been a good year for the media arts community, as part of a general positive trend along the last few years. Other highlighs may include, in various order: the September 2013 issue of Artforum, on “Art and Media”, and the discussion sparked by Claire Bishop’s essay; Cory Arcangel discovering and restoring lost Andy Warhol’s digital files from floppy disks; Ben Fino-Radin becoming digital conservator at MoMA, New York; JODI winning the Prix Net Art; the Barbican doing a show on the Digital Revolution with Google. Memes like post internet, post digital and the New Aesthetic had negative side effects, but they helped establishing digital culture in the mainstream contemporary art discourse, and bringing to prominence some artists formerly known as net artists. In 2015, the New Museum Triennial will be curated by Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin, and DIS has been announced to be curator of the 9th Berlin Biennial in 2016. All this looks promising, but one thing that I learned from the past is to be careful with optimistic judgements. The XXI century started with a show called 010101. Art in Technological Times, organized by SFMoMA. The same year, net art entered the Venice Biennale, the Whitney organizedBitstreams and Data Dynamics, the Tate Art and Money Online. Later on, the internet was announced dead, and it took years for the media art community to get some prominence in the art discourse again. The situation now is very different, a lot has been done at all levels (art market, institutions, criticism), and the interest in digital culture and technologies is not (only) the result of the hype and of big money flushed by corporations unto museums. But still, where we really are? The first Paddles On! Auction belongs to history because it helped selling the first website ever on auction; the second one mainly sold digital and analogue paintings. Digital Revolution was welcomed by sentences like: “No one could fault the advances in technology on display, but the art that has emerged out of that technology? Well, on this showing, too much of it seems gimmicky, weak and overly concerned with spectacle rather than meaning, or making a comment on our culture.” (The Telegraph) The upcoming New Museum Triennial will include artists like Ed Atkins, Aleksandra Domanovic, Oliver Laric, K-HOLE, Steve Roggenbuck, but Lauren and Ryan did their best to avoid partisanship. There’s no criticism in this statement, actually I would have done exactly the same, and I’m sure it will be an amazing show that I can’t wait to see. Just, we don’t have to expect too much from this show in terms of “digital art recognition”. So, to put it short: I’m sure digital art and culture is slowly changing the arts, and that this revolution will be dramatic; but it won’t take place in 2015

http://www.6pmyourlocaltime.com/

“Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments and to integrate the individual into a technological world” (Ellul xvii).

How might future research into digital culture approach a purported “post-digital” age? How might this be understood?

1.

A problem comes from the discourse of ‘the digital’ itself: a moniker which points towards units of Base-2 arbitrary configuration, impersonal architectures of code, massive extensions of modern communication and ruptures in post-modern identity. Terms are messy, and it has never been easy to establish a ‘post’ from something, when pre-discourse definitions continue to hang in the air. As Florian Cramer has articulated so well, ‘post-digital’ is something of a loose, ‘hedge your bets’ term, denoting a general tendency to criticise the digital revolution as a modern innovation (Cramer).

Perhaps it might be aligned with what some have dubbed “solutionism” (Morozov) or “computationalism” (Berry 129; Golumbia 8): the former critiquing a Silicon Valley-led ideology oriented towards solving liberalised problems through efficient computerised means. The latter establishing the notion (and critique thereof) that the mind is inherently computable, and everything associated with it. In both cases, digital technology is no longer just a business that privatises information, but the business of extending efficient, innovative logic to all corners of society and human knowledge, condemning everything else through a cultural logic of efficiency.

In fact, there is a good reason why ‘digital’ might as well be an synonym for ‘efficiency’. Before any consideration is assigned to digital media objects (i.e. platforms, operating systems, networks), consider the inception of ‘the digital’ inception as such: that is information theory. If information was a loose, shabby, inefficient method of vagueness specific to various mediums of communication, Claude Shannon compressed all forms of communication into a universal system with absolute mathematical precision (Shannon). Once information became digital, the conceptual leap of determined symbolic logic was set into motion, and with it, the ‘digital’ became synonymous with an ideology of effectivity. No longer would miscommunication be subject to human finitude, nor be subject to matters of distance and time, but only the limits of entropy and the matter of automating messages through the support of alternating ‘true’ or ‘false’ relay systems.

However, it would be quite difficult to envisage any ‘post-computational’ break from such discourses – and with good reason: Shannon’s breakthrough was only systematically effective through the logic of computation. So the old missed encounter goes: Shannon presupposed Alan Turing’s mathematical idea of computation to transmit digital information, and Turing presupposed Shannon’s information theory to understand what his Universal Turing Machines were actually transmitting. The basic theories of both have not changed, but the materials affording greater processing power, extensive server infrastructure and larger storage space have simply increased the means for these ideas to proliferate, irrespective of what Turing and Shannon actually thought of them (some historians even speculate that Turing may have made the link between information and entropy two years before Bell Labs did) (Good).

Thus a ‘post-digital’ reference point might encompass the historical acknowledgment of Shannon’s digital efficiency, and Turing’s logic but by the same measure, open up a space for critical reflection, and how such efficiencies have transformed not only work, life and culture but also artistic praxis and aesthetics. This is not to say that digital culture is reducibly predicated on efforts made in computer science, but instead fully acknowledges these structures and accounts for how ideologies propagate reactionary attitudes and beliefs within them, whilst restricting other alternatives which do not fit their ‘vision’. Hence, the post-digital ‘task’ set for us nowadays might consist in critiquing digital efficiency and how it has come to work against commonality, despite transforming the majority of Western infrastructure in its wake.

The purpose of these notes is to outline how computation has imparted an unwarranted effect of totalised efficiency, and to label this effect the type of description it deserves: propaganda. The fact that Shannon and Turing had multiple lunches together at Bell labs in 1943, held conversations and exchanged ideas, but not detailed methods of cryptanalysis (Price & Shannon) provides a nice contextual allegory for how digital informatics strategies fail to be transparent.

But in saying this, I do not mean that companies only use digital networks for propagative means (although that happens), but that the very means of computing a real concrete function is constitutively propagative. In this sense, propaganda resembles a post-digital understanding of what it means to be integrated into an ecology of efficiency, and how technical artefacts are literally enacted as propagative decisions. Digital information often deceives us into accepting its transparency, and of holding it to that account: yet in reality it does the complete opposite, with no given range of judgements available to detect manipulation from education, or persuasion from smear. It is the procedural act of interacting with someone else’s automated conceptual principles, embedding pre-determined decisions which not only generate but pre-determine ones ability to make choices about such decisions, like propaganda.

This might consist in distancing ideological definitions of false consciousness as an epistemological limit to knowing alternatives within thought, to engaging with a real programmable systems which embeds such limits concretely, withholding the means to transform them. In other words, propaganda incorporates how ‘decisional structures’ structure other decisions, either conceptually or systematically.

2.

Two years before Shannon’s famous Masters thesis, Turing published what would be a theoretical basis for computation in his 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” The focus of the paper was to establish the idea of computation within a formal system of logic, which when automated would solve particular mathematical problems put into function (Turing, An Application). What is not necessarily taken into account is the mathematical context to that idea: for the foundations of mathematics were already precarious, way before Turing outlined anything in 1936. Contra the efficiency of the digital, this is a precariousness built-in to computation from its very inception: the precariousness of solving all problems in mathematics.

The key word of that paper, its key focus, was on the Entscheidungsproblem, or decision problem. Originating from David Hilbert’s mathematical school of formalism, ‘decision’ means something more rigorous than the sorts of decisions in daily life. It really means a ‘proof theory’, or how analytic problems in number theory and geometry could be formalised, and thus efficiently solved (Hilbert 3). Solving a theorem is simply finding a provable ‘winning position’ in a game. Similar to Shannon, ‘decision’ is what happens when an automated system of function is constructed in such a sufficiently complex way, that an algorithm can always ‘decide’ a binary, yes or no answer to a mathematical problem, when given an arbitrary input, in a sufficient amount of time. It does not require ingenuity, intuition or heuristic gambles, just a combination of simple consistent formal rules and a careful avoidance of contradiction.

The two key words there are ‘always’ and ‘decide’. The progressive end-game of twentieth century mathematicians who, like Hilbert, sought after a simple totalising conceptual system to decide every mathematical problem and work towards absolute knowledge. All Turing had to do was make explicit Hilbert’s implicit computational treatment of formal rules, manipulate symbol strings and automate them using an ’effective’ or “systematic method” (Turing, Solvable and Unsolvable Problems 584) encoded into a machine. This is what Turing’s thesis meant (discovered independently to Alonzo Church’s equivalent thesis (Church)): any systematic algorithm solved by a mathematical theorem can be computed by a Turing machine (Turing, An Application), or in Robin Gandy’s words, “[e]very effectively calculable function is a computable function” (Gandy).

Thus effective procedures decide problems, and they resolve puzzles providing winning positions (like theorems) in the game of functional rules and formal symbols. In Turing’s words, “a systematic procedure is just a puzzle in which there is never more than one possible move in any of the positions which arise and in which some significance is attached to the final result” (Turing, Solvable and Unsolvable Problems 590). The significance, or the winning position, becomes the crux of the matter for the decision: what puzzles or problems are to be decided? This is what formalism attempted to do: encode everything through the regime of formalised efficiency, so that all of mathematically inefficient problems are, in principle, ready to be solved. Programs are simply proofs: if it could be demonstrated mathematically, it could be automated.

In 1936, Turing had showed some complex mathematical concepts of effective procedures could simulate the functional decisions of all the other effective procedures (such as the Universal Turing Machine). Ten years later, Turing and John von Neumann would independently show how physical general purpose computers, offered the same thing and from that moment on, efficient digital decisions manifested themselves in the cultural application of physical materials. Before Shannon’s information theory offered the precision of transmitting information, Hilbert and Turing developed the structure of its transmission in the underlying regime of formal decision.

Yet, there was also a non-computational importance here, for Turing was also fascinated by what decisions couldn’t compute. His thesis was quite precise, so as to elucidate that if no mathematical problem could be proved, a computer was not of any use. In fact, the entire focus of his 1936 paper, often neglected by Silicon Valley cohorts, was to show that Hilbert’s particular decision problem could not be solved. Unlike Hilbert, Turing was not interested in using computation to solve every problem, but as a curious endeavour for surprising intuitive behaviour. The most important of all, Turing’s halting, or printing problem was influential, precisely as it was undecidable; a decision problem which couldn’t be decided.

We can all picture the halting problem, even obliquely. Picture the frustrated programmer or mathematician starting at their screen, waiting to know when an algorithm will either halt and spit out a result, or provide no answer. The computer itself has already determined the answer for us, the programmer just has to know when to give up. But this is a myth, inherited with a bias towards human knowledge, and a demented understanding of machines as infinite calculating engines, rather than concrete entities of decision. For reasons that escape word space, Turing didn’t understand the halting problem in this way: instead he understood it as a contradictory example of computational decisions failing to decide on each other, on the account that there could never be one totalising decision or effective procedure. There is no guaranteed effective procedure to decide on all the others, and any attempt to build one (or invest in a view which might help build one), either has too much investment in absolute formal reason, or it ends up with ineffective procedures.

Undecidable computation might be looked at as a dystopian counterpart against the efficiency of Shannon’s ‘digital information’ theory. A base 2 binary system of information resembling one of two possible states, whereby a system can communicate with one digit, only in virtue of the fact that there is one other digit alternative to it. Yet the perfect transmission of that information, is only subject to a system which can ‘decide’ on the digits in question, and establish a proof to calculate a success rate. If there is no mathematical proof to decide a problem, then transmitting information becomes problematic for establishing a solution.

3.

What has become clear is that our world is no longer simply accountable to human decision alone. Decisions are no longer limited to the borders of human decisions and ‘culture’ is no longer simply guided by a collective whole of social human decisions. Nor is it reducible to one harmonious ‘natural’ collective decision which prompts and pre-empts everything else. Instead we seem to exist in an ecology of decisions: or better yet decisional ecologies. Before there was ever the networked protocol (Galloway), there was the computational decision. Decision ecologies are already set up before we enter the world, implicitly coterminous with our lives: explicitly determining a quantified or bureaucratic landscape upon which an individual has limited manoeuvrability.

Decisions are not just digital, they are continuous as computers can be: yet decisions are at their most efficient when digitally transferred. Decisions are everywhere and in everything. Look around. We are constantly told by governments and states that are they making tough decisions in the face of austerity. CEOs and Directors make tough decisions for the future of their companies and ‘great’ leaders are revered for being ‘great decisive leaders’: not just making decisions quickly and effectively, but also settling issues and producing definite results.

Even the word ‘decide’, comes from the Latin origin of ‘decidere’, which means to determine something and ‘to cut off.’ Algorithms in financial trading know not of value, but of decision: whether something is marked by profit or loss. Drones know not of human ambiguity, but can only decide between kill and ignore, cutting off anything in-between. Constructing a system which decides between one of two digital values, even repeatedly, means cutting off and excluding all other possible variables, leaving a final result at the end of the encoded message. Making a decision, or building a system to decide a particular ideal or judgement must force other alternatives outside of it. Decisions are always-already embedded into the framework of digital action, always already deciding what is to be done, how it can be done or what is threatening to be done. It would make little sense to suggest that these entities ‘make decisions’ or ‘have decisions’, it would be better to say that they are decisions and ecologies are constitutively constructed by them.

The importance of neo-liberal digital transmissions are not that they become innovative, or worthy of a zeitgeist break: but that they demonstrably decide problems whose predominant significance is beneficial for self-individual efficiency and accumulation of capital. Digital efficiency is simply about the expansion of automating decisions and what sort of formalised significances must be propagated to solve social and economic problems, which creates new problems in a vicious circle.

The question can no longer simply be ‘who decides’, but now, ‘what decides?’ Is it the cafe menu board, the dinner party etiquette, the NASDAQ share price, Google Pagerank, railway network delays, unmanned combat drones, the newspaper crossword, the javascript regular expression or the differential calculus? It’s not quite right to say that algorithms rule the world, whether in algo-trading or in data capture, but the uncomfortable realisation that real entities are built to determine provable outcomes time and time again: most notably ones for cumulating profit and extracting revenue from multiple resources.

One pertinent example: consider George Dantzig’s simplex algorithm: this effective procedure (whose origins began in multidimensional geometry) can always decide solutions for large scale optimisation problems which continually affect multi-national corporations. The simplex algorithm’s proliferation and effectiveness has been critical since its first commercial application in 1952, when Abraham Charnes and William Cooper used it to decide how best to optimally blend four different petroleum products at the Gulf Oil Company (Elwes 35; Gass & Assad 79). Since then the simplex algorithm has had years of successful commercial use, deciding almost everything from bus timetables and work shift patterns to trade shares and Amazon warehouse configurations. According to the optimisation specialist Jacek Gondzio, the simplex algorithm runs at “tens, probably hundreds of thousands of calls every minute” (35), always deciding the most efficient method of extracting optimisation.

In contemporary times, nearly all decision ecologies work in this way, accompanying and facilitating neo-liberal methods of self-regulation and processing all resources through a standardised efficiency: from bureaucratic methods of formal standardisation, banal forms ready to be analysed one central system, to big-data initiatives and simple procedural methods of measurement and calculation. The technique of decision is a propagative method of embedding knowledge, optimisation and standardisation techniques in order to solve problems and an urge to solve the most unsolvable ones, including us.

Google do not build into their services an option to pay for the privilege of protecting privacy: the entire point of providing a free service which purports to improve daily life, is that it primarily benefits the interests of shareholders and extend commercial agendas. James Grimmelmann gave a heavily detailed exposition on Google’s own ‘net neutrality’ algorithms and how biased they happen to be. In short, PageRank does not simply decide relevant results, it decides visitor numbers and he concluded on this note.

With disturbing frequency, though, websites are not users’ friends. Sometimes they are, but often, the websites want visitors, and will be willing to do what it takes to grab them (Grimmelmann 458).

If the post-digital stands for the self-criticality of digitalisation already underpinning contemporary regimes of digital consumption and production, then its saliency lies in understanding the logic of decision inherent to such regimes. The reality of the post-digital, shows that machines remain curiously efficient whether we relish in cynicism or not. Such regimes of standardisation and determined results, were already ‘mistakenly built in’ to the theories which developed digital methods and means, irrespective of what computers can or cannot compute.

4.

Why then should such post-digital actors be understood as instantiations of propaganda? The familiarity of propaganda is manifestly evident in religious and political acts of ideological persuasion: brainwashing, war activity, political spin, mind control techniques, subliminal messages, political campaigns, cartoons, belief indoctrination, media bias, advertising or news reports. A definition of propaganda might follow from all of these examples: namely, the systematic social indoctrination of biased information that persuades the masses to take action on something which is neither beneficial to them, nor in their best interests: or as Peter Kenez writes, propaganda is “the attempt to transmit social and political values in the hope of affecting people’s thinking, emotions, and thereby behaviour” (Kenez 4) Following Stanley B. Cunningham’s watered down definition, propaganda might also denote a helpful and pragmatic “shorthand statement about the quality of information transmitted and received in the twentieth century” (Cunningham 3).

But propaganda isn’t as clear as this general definition makes out: in fact what makes propaganda studies such a provoking topic is that nearly every scholar agrees that no stable definition exists. Propaganda moves beyond simple ‘manipulation’ and ‘lies’ or derogatory, jingoistic representation of an unsubtle mood – propaganda is as much about the paradox of constructing truth, and the irrational spread of emotional pleas, as well as endorsing rational reason. As the master propagandist William J. Daugherty wrote;

It is a complete delusion to think of the brilliant propagandist as being a professional liar. The brilliant propagandist […] tells the truth, or that selection of the truth which is requisite for his purpose, and tells it in such a way that the recipient does not think that he is receiving any propaganda…. (Daugherty 39).

Propaganda, like ideology works by being inherently implicit and social. In the same way that post-ideology apologists ignore their symptom, propaganda is also ignored. It isn’t to be taken as a shadowy fringe activity, blown apart by the democratising fairy-dust of ‘the Internet’. As many others have noted, the purported ‘decentralising’ power of online networks, offer new methods for propagative techniques, or ‘spinternet’ strategies, evident in China (Brady). Iran’s recent investment into video game technology only makes sense, only when you discover that 70% of Iran’s population are under 30 years of age, underscoring a suitable contemporary method of dissemination. Similarly in 2011, the New York City video game developer Kuma Games was mired in controversy when it was discovered that an alleged CIA agent, Amir Mirza Hekmati, had been recruited to make an episodic video game series intending to “change the public opinion’s mindset in the Middle East.” (Tehran Times). The game in question, Kuma\War (2006 – 2011) was a free-to-play First-Person Shooter series, delivered in episodic chunks, the format of which attempted to simulate biased re-enactments of real-life conflicts, shortly after they reached public consciousness.

Despite his unremarkable leanings towards Christian realism, Jacques Ellul famously updated propaganda’s definition as the end product of what he previously lamented as ‘technique’. Instead of viewing propaganda as a highly organised systematic strategy for extending the ideologues of peaceful warfare, he understood it as a general social phenomenon in contemporary society.

Ellul outlined two types: political and sociological propaganda: Political propaganda involves government, administrative techniques which intend to directly change the political beliefs of an intended audience. By contrast, sociological propaganda is the implicit unification of involuntary public behaviour which creates images, aesthetics, problems, stereotypes, the purpose of which aren’t explicitly direct, nor overtly militaristic. Ellul argues that sociological propaganda exists; “in advertising, in the movies (commercial and non-political films), in technology in general, in education, in the Reader’s Digest; and in social service, case work, and settlement houses” (Ellul 64). It is linked to what Ellul called “pre” or “sub-propaganda”: that is, an imperceptible persuasion, silently operating within ones “style of life” or permissible attitude (63). Faintly echoing Louis Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses (Althusser 182) nearly ten years prior, Ellul defines it as “the penetration of an ideology by means of its sociological context.” (63) Sociological propaganda is inadequate for decisive action, paving the way for political propaganda – its strengthened explicit cousin – once the former’s implicitness needs to be transformed into the latter’s explicitness.

In a post-digital world, such implicitness no longer gathers wartime spirits, but instead propagates a neo-liberal way of life that is individualistic, wealth driven and opinionated. Ellul’s most powerful assertion is that ‘facts’ and ‘education’ are part and parcel of the sociological propagative effect: nearly everyone faces a compelling need to be opinionated and we are all capable of judging for ourselves what decisions should be made, without at first considering the implicit landscape from which these judgements take place. One can only think of the implicit digital landscape of Twitter: the archetype for self-promotion and snippets of opinions and arguments – all taking place within Ellul’s sub-propaganda of data collection and concealment. Such methods, he warns, will have “solved the problem of man” (xviii).

But information is of relevance here, and propaganda is only effective within a social community when it offers the means to solve problems using the communicative purview of information:

Thus, information not only provides the basis for propaganda but gives propaganda the means to operate; for information actually generates the problems that propaganda exploits and for which it pretends to offer solutions. In fact, no propaganda can work until the moment when a set of facts has become a problem in the eyes of those who constitute public opinion (114).

Visiting Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead’s survey exhibition, Never Odd Or Even, currently on show at Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, I found myself confronted with an enigma. How to assemble a single vision of a body of work, impelled only by the dislocated narratives it offers me? ‘Archaeology’ is derived from the Greek word, arche, meaning ‘beginning’ or ‘origin’. The principle that makes a thing possible, but which in itself may remain elusive, unquantifiable, or utterly impervious to analysis. And so it is we search art for an origin, for an arising revelation, knowing full well that meaning is not something we can pin down. Believing, that the arche of a great work is always just about to take place. In an essay written especially for the exhibition, David Auerbach foregrounds Thomson and Craighead’s work in the overlap between “the quotidian and the global” characteristic of our hyperconnected contemporary culture. Hinged on “the tantalising impossibility of seeing the entire world at once clearly and distinctly” [1] Never Odd Or Even is an exhibition whose origins are explicitly here and everywhere, both now and anywhen. The Time Machine in Alphabetical Order (2010), a video work projected at the heart of the show, offers a compelling example of this. Transposing the 1960 film (directed by George Pal) into the alphabetical order of each word spoken, narrative time is circumvented, allowing the viewer to revel instead in the logic of the database. The dramatic arcs of individual scenes are replaced by alphabetic frames. Short staccato repetitions of the word ‘a’ or ‘you’ drive the film onwards, and with each new word comes a chance for the database to rewind. Words with greater significance such as ‘laws’, ‘life’, ‘man’ or ‘Morlocks’ cause new clusters of meaning to blossom. Scenes taut with tension and activity under a ‘normal’ viewing feel quiet, slow and tedious next to the repetitive progressions of single words propelled through alphabetic time. In the alphabetic version of the film it is scenes with a heavier focus on dialogue that stand out as pure activity, recurring again and again as the 96 minute 55 second long algorithm has its way with the audience. Regular sites of meaning become backdrop structures, thrusting forward a logic inherent in language which has no apparent bearing on narrative content. The work is reminiscent of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, also produced in 2010. A 24 hour long collage of scenes from cinema in which ‘real time’ is represented or alluded to simultaneously on screen. But whereas The Clock’s emphasis on cinema as a formal history grounds the work in narrative sequence, Thomson and Craighead’s work insists that the ground is infinitely malleable and should be called into question.

Another work, Belief (2012), depicts the human race as a vast interlinked, self-reflexive system. Its out-stretched nodes ending at webcams pointing to religious mediators, spiritual soliloquists and adamant materialists, all of them searching to define what it means to be in existence. Projected on the floor of the gallery alongside the video a compass points to the location each monologue and interview was filmed, spiralling wildly each time the footage dissolves. Each clip zooms out of a specific house, a town, a city and a continent to a blue Google Earth marble haloed by an opaque interface. Far from suggesting a utopian collectivity spawned by the Google machine, Belief once again highlights the mutable structures each of us formalise ourselves through. As David Auerbach suggests, the work intimates the possibility of seeing all human kind at once; a world where all beliefs are represented by the increasingly clever patterns wrought through information technology. Instead, culture, language and information technology are exposed as negligible variables in the human algorithm: the thing we share is that we all believe in something.

Never Odd Or Even features a series of works that play more explicitly with the internet, including London Wall W1W (2013), a regularly updated wall of tweets sent from within a mile of the gallery. This vision of the “quotidian” out of the “global” suffers once you realise that twitter monikers have been replaced with each tweeter’s real name. Far from rooting the ethereal tweets to ‘real’ people and their geographic vicinity the work paradoxically distances Thomson and Craighead from the very thing twitter already has in abundance: personality. In a most appropriate coincidence I found myself confronted with my own tweet, sent some weeks earlier from a nearby library. My moment of procrastination was now a heavily stylised, neutralised interjection into Carroll / Fletcher gallery. Set against a sea of thoughts about the death of Margaret Thatcher, how brilliant cannabis is, or what someone deserved for lunch I felt the opposite of integration in a work. In past instances of London Wall, including one at Furtherfield gallery, tweeters have been contacted directly, allowing them to visit their tweet in its new context. A gesture which as well as bringing to light the personal reality of twitter and tweeters no doubt created a further flux of geotagged internet traffic. Another work, shown in tandem with London Wall W1W, is More Songs of Innocence and of Experience (2012). Here the kitsch backdrop of karaoke is offered as a way to poetically engage with SPAM emails. But rather than invite me in the work felt sculptural, cold and imposing. Blowing carefully on the attached microphone evoked no response. The perception and technical malleability of time is a central theme of the show. Both, Flipped Clock (2009), a digital wall clock reprogrammed to display alternate configurations of a liquid crystal display, and Trooper (1998), a single channel news report of a violent arrest, looped with increasing rapidity, uproot the viewer from a state of temporal nonchalance. A switch between time and synchronicity, between actual meaning and the human impetus for meaning, plays out in a multi-channel video work Several Interruptions (2009). A series of disparate videos, no doubt gleaned from YouTube, show people holding their breath underwater. Facial expressions blossom from calm to palpable terror as each series of underwater portraits are held in synchrony. As the divers all finally pull up for breath the sequence switches.

According to David Auerbach, and with echoes from Thomson and Craighead themselves, Never Odd Or Even offers a series of Oulipo inspired experiments, realised with constrained technical, rather than literary, techniques. For my own reading I was drawn to the figure of The Time Traveller, caused so splendidly to judder through time over and over again, whilst never having to repeat the self-same word twice. Mid-way through H.G.Wells’ original novel the protagonist stumbles into a crumbling museum. Sweeping the dust off abandoned relics he ponders his machine’s ability to hasten their decay. It is at this point that the Time Traveller has a revelation. The museum entombs the history of his own future: an ocean of artefacts whose potential to speak died with the civilisation that created them. [2] In Thomson and Craighead’s work the present moment we take for granted becomes malleable in the networks their artworks play with. That moment of arising, that archaeological instant is called into question, because like the Time Traveller, the narratives we tell ourselves are worth nothing if the past and the present arising from it are capable of swapping places. Thomson and Craighead’s work, like the digital present it converses with, begins now, and then again now, and then again now. The arche of our networked society erupting as the simulation of a present that has always already slipped into the past. Of course, as my meditation on The Time Traveller and archaeology suggests, this state of constant renewal is something that art as a form of communication has always been intimately intertwined with. What I was fascinated to read in the works of Never Odd Or Even was a suggestion that the kind of world we are invested in right now is one which, perhaps for the first time, begs us to simulate it anew.

[1] David Auerbach, “Archimedes’ Mindscrew,” in Never Odd Or Even (Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, London: Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, London, 2013), 4, https://www.carrollfletcher.com/usr/library/documents/thomson-and-craighead-essays/essay-from-tc-final-low-res.pdf.

[2] Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso, 2005), 100. 

Visiting Jon Thompson and Alison Craighead’s survey exhibition, Never Odd Or Even, currently on show at Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, I found myself confronted with an enigma. How to assemble a single vision of a body of work, impelled only by the dislocated narratives it offers me? ‘Archaeology’ is derived from the Greek word, arche, meaning ‘beginning’ or ‘origin’. The principle that makes a thing possible, but which in itself may remain elusive, unquantifiable, or utterly impervious to analysis. And so it is we search art for an origin, for an arising revelation, knowing full well that meaning is not something we can pin down. Believing, that the arche of a great work is always just about to take place. In an essay written especially for the exhibition, David Auerbach foregrounds Thompson and Craighead’s work in the overlap between “the quotidian and the global” characteristic of our hyperconnected contemporary culture. Hinged on “the tantalising impossibility of seeing the entire world at once clearly and distinctly” [1] Never Odd Or Even is an exhibition whose origins are explicitly here and everywhere, both now and anywhen. The Time Machine in Alphabetical Order (2010), a video work projected at the heart of the show, offers a compelling example of this. Transposing the 1960 film (directed by George Pal) into the alphabetical order of each word spoken, narrative time is circumvented, allowing the viewer to revel instead in the logic of the database. The dramatic arcs of individual scenes are replaced by alphabetic frames. Short staccato repetitions of the word ‘a’ or ‘you’ drive the film onwards, and with each new word comes a chance for the database to rewind. Words with greater significance such as ‘laws’, ‘life’, ‘man’ or ‘Morlocks’ cause new clusters of meaning to blossom. Scenes taut with tension and activity under a ‘normal’ viewing feel quiet, slow and tedious next to the repetitive progressions of single words propelled through alphabetic time. In the alphabetic version of the film it is scenes with a heavier focus on dialogue that stand out as pure activity, recurring again and again as the 96 minute 55 second long algorithm has its way with the audience. Regular sites of meaning become backdrop structures, thrusting forward a logic inherent in language which has no apparent bearing on narrative content. The work is reminiscent of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, also produced in 2010. A 24 hour long collage of scenes from cinema in which ‘real time’ is represented or alluded to simultaneously on screen. But whereas The Clock’s emphasis on cinema as a formal history grounds the work in narrative sequence, Thomson and Craighead’s work insists that the ground is infinitely malleable and should be called into question.

Another work, Belief (2012), depicts the human race as a vast interlinked, self-reflexive system. Its out-stretched nodes ending at webcams pointing to religious mediators, spiritual soliloquists and adamant materialists, all of them searching to define what it means to be in existence. Projected on the floor of the gallery alongside the video a compass points to the location each monologue and interview was filmed, spiralling wildly each time the footage dissolves. Each clip zooms out of a specific house, a town, a city and a continent to a blue Google Earth™ marble haloed by an opaque interface. Far from suggesting a utopian collectivity spawned by the Google machine, Belief once again highlights the mutable structures each of us formalise ourselves through. As David Auerbach suggests, the work intimates the possibility of seeing all human kind at once; a world where all beliefs are represented by the increasingly clever patterns wrought through information technology. Instead, culture, language and information technology are exposed as negligible variables in the human algorithm: the thing we share is that we all believe in something.

Never Odd Or Even features a series of works that play more explicitly with the internet, including London Wall W1W (2013), a regularly updated wall of tweets sent from within a mile of the gallery. This vision of the “quotidian” out of the “global” suffers once you realise that twitter monikers have been replaced with each tweeter’s real name. Far from rooting the ethereal tweets to ‘real’ people and their geographic vicinity the work paradoxically distances Thomson and Craighead from the very thing twitter already has in abundance: personality. In a most appropriate coincidence I found myself confronted with my own tweet, sent some weeks earlier from a nearby library. My moment of procrastination was now a heavily stylised, neutralised interjection into Carroll / Fletcher gallery. Set against a sea of thoughts about the death of Margaret Thatcher, how brilliant cannabis is, or what someone deserved for lunch I felt the opposite of integration in a work. In past instances of London Wall, including one at Furtherfield gallery, tweeters have been contacted directly, allowing them to visit their tweet in its new context. A gesture which as well as bringing to light the personal reality of twitter and tweeters no doubt created a further flux of geotagged internet traffic. Another work, shown in tandem with London Wall W1W, is More Songs of Innocence and of Experience (2012). Here the kitsch backdrop of karaoke is offered as a way to poetically engage with SPAM emails. But rather than invite me in the work felt sculptural, cold and imposing. Blowing carefully on the attached microphone evoked no response. The perception and technical malleability of time is a central theme of the show. Both, Flipped Clock (2009), a digital wall clock reprogrammed to display alternate configurations of a liquid crystal display, and Trooper (1998), a single channel news report of a violent arrest, looped with increasing rapidity, uproot the viewer from a state of temporal nonchalance. A switch between time and synchronicity, between actual meaning and the human impetus for meaning, plays out in a multi-channel video work Several Interruptions (2009). A series of disparate videos, no doubt gleaned from YouTube, show people holding their breath underwater. Facial expressions blossom from calm to palpable terror as each series of underwater portraits are held in synchrony. As the divers all finally pull up for breath the sequence switches.

According to David Auerbach, and with echoes from Thomson and Craighead themselves, Never Odd Or Even offers a series of Oulipo inspired experiments, realised with constrained technical, rather than literary, techniques. For my own reading I was drawn to the figure of The Time Traveller, caused so splendidly to judder through time over and over again, whilst never having to repeat the self-same word twice. Mid-way through H.G.Wells’ original novel the protagonist stumbles into a crumbling museum. Sweeping the dust off abandoned relics he ponders his machine’s ability to hasten their decay. It is at this point that the Time Traveller has a revelation. The museum entombs the history of his own future: an ocean of artefacts whose potential to speak died with the civilisation that created them. [2] In Thomson and Craighead’s work the present moment we take for granted becomes malleable in the networks their artworks play with. That moment of arising, that archaeological instant is called into question, because like the Time Traveller, the narratives we tell ourselves are worth nothing if the past and the present arising from it are capable of swapping places. Thomson and Craighead’s work, like the digital present it converses with, begins now, and then again now, and then again now. The arche of our networked society erupting as the simulation of a present that has always already slipped into the past. Of course, as my meditation on The Time Traveller and archaeology suggests, this state of constant renewal is something that art as a form of communication has always been intimately intertwined with. What I was fascinated to read in the works of Never Odd Or Even was a suggestion that the kind of world we are invested in right now is one which, perhaps for the first time, begs us to simulate it anew.

[1] David Auerbach, “Archimedes’ Mindscrew,” in Never Odd Or Even (Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, London: Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, London, 2013), 4, http://www.carrollfletcher.com/usr/library/documents/thomson-and-craighead-essays/essay-from-tc-final-low-res.pdf.

[2] Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso, 2005), 100. 

Otherkin are a community of people who see themselves as partially or entirely non-human. They contend that they are, in spirit if not in body,[2] not human. This is explained by some members of the otherkin community as possible through reincarnation, having a nonhuman soul, ancestry, or symbolic metaphor.[1] Scholarship has framed this claim as religious because it is frequently supported by a framework of metaphysical beliefs.[3] Not all otherkin necessarily share these beliefs; some may simply prefer to identify as non-human.

In 1959, Dr Milton Rokeach, a social psychologist, received a research grant to bring together three psychotic, institutionalised patients at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan, in order to make a two and a half year study of them. Rokeach specialised in belief systems: how it is that people develop and keep (or change) their beliefs according to their needs and the requirements of the social world they inhabit. A matter of the inside coming to terms with the outside in order to rub along well enough to get through a life. As a rule people look for positive authority or referents to back up their essential beliefs about themselves in relation to the world: the priest, imam, Delia Smith, the politburo, gang leader, Milton Friedman, your mother, my favourite novelist. It works well enough, and when it does, we call ourselves and others like us sane. When it goes awry, when people lose and/or reject all positive referents in the real world for the self inside, we call them delusional, psychotic, mad. In order to count as sane, you don’t necessarily have to conform to the norms of the world, but you do have to be nonconformist in a generally acceptable way. One of the basic beliefs we all have, according to Rokeach, is that we are who we are because we know that by definition there can be only one of us. I’m Jenny Diski. You therefore aren’t. The converse is also true: you are the sole example of whoever you say you are. Therefore I can’t be you. It keeps things simple and sane for both you and me, and it’s easy to check the basic facts with each other, as well as with such socially sanctioned authorities as the passport office or the registrar of births and deaths. According to Rokeach that is a fundamental requirement of living coherently in the world of other people, the only world he believed we can effectively live in. He tested it one evening on his two young daughters by calling each of them by the other’s name over the dinner table. At first it was a good game, but within minutes it became so distressing to the girls (‘Daddy, this is a game, isn’t it?’ ‘No, it’s for real’) that they were starting to cry. If you’re thinking Rokeach is a bit of a sadistic daddy, I got the same impression reading The Three Christs of Ypsilanti when it was first published in 1964.[*] But what researcher doesn’t use the materials to hand – usually family – to begin to investigate a theory? Darwin observed and wrote about his children, as did Freud. And so did that particularly unpleasant behaviourist father in the movie Peeping Tom, made around the same time as Rokeach’s dinner table experiment. Rokeach did at least stop once the girls became tearful. But what would happen, he wondered, if he made three men meet and live closely side by side over a period of time, each of whom believed himself to be the one and only Jesus Christ?

In this view belonging to a religion involves accepting a set of beliefs, which are held before the mind and assessed in terms of the evidence that exists for and against them. Religion is then not fundamentally different from science, both seem like attempts to frame true beliefs about the world. That way of thinking tends to see science and religion as rivals, and it then becomes tempting to conclude that there's no longer any need for religion.

This was the view presented by the Victorian anthropologist JG Frazer in his book The Golden Bough, a study of the myths of primitive peoples that is still in print. According to Frazer, human thought advances through a series of stages that culminate in science. Starting with magic and religion, which view the world simply as an extension of the human mind, we eventually reach the age of science in which we view the world as being ruled by universal laws.

By now, nearly everyone with a passing interest in science or religion is familiar with Stephen Jay Gould’s description of the two disciplines as “non-overlapping magisteria” with separate domains — science in the physical universe and religion in the moral realm. On this website, the philosopher Roger Scruton recently made the sweeping declaration that “genuine science and true religion cannot conflict.” A 2004 editorial in Nature magazine insists that science and religion clash only when the two “stray onto each other’s territories and stir up trouble.”

One might as well say that conflict arises between men and women only when they stray onto each other’s territories and stir up trouble. Science produces discoveries that challenge long-held beliefs (not only religious ones) based on revelation rather than evidence, and the religious must decide whether to battle or accommodate secular knowledge if it contradicts their teachings.

I know both scientists and religious believers f

Among the theorists who jumped into the market for models of the future, three stood out: Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, and John Mearsheimer. Each made a splash with a controversial article, then refined the argument in a book -- Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man, Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, and Mearsheimer in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Each presented a bold and sweeping vision that struck a chord with certain readers, and each was dismissed by others whose beliefs were offended or who jumped to conclusions about what they thought the arguments implied. (Reactions were extreme because most debate swirled around the bare-bones arguments in the initial articles rather than the full, refined versions in the later books. This essay aims to give the full versions of all three arguments their due.)

None of the three visions won out as the new conventional wisdom, although Fukuyama's rang truest when the Berlin Wall

In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for two years in Ypsilanti State Hospital to see if their beliefs would change. The early meetings were stormy. "You oughta worship me, I'll tell you that!" one of the Christs yelled. "I will not worship you! You're a creature! You better live your own life and wake up to the facts!" another snapped back. "No two men are Jesus Christs. … I am the Good Lord!" the third interjected, barely concealing his anger.

Frustrated by psychology's focus on what he considered to be peripheral beliefs, like political opinions and social attitudes, Rokeach wanted to probe the limits of identity. He had been intrigued by stories of Secret Service agents who felt they had lost contact with their original identities, and wondered if a man's sense of self might be challenged in a controlled setting.

Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens confront the faithful head-on, but there may be another way to dispel religious beliefs.

I am not so sure about this. In my experience, waverers and Sunday-only observers can find forthright challenges to religious pretensions a relief and a liberation. They give them the reason, sometimes the courage, to abandon those shreds of early-acquired religious habit that cling around their ankles and trip them up.

Still, Darwin and David Lewis-Williams have a point in thinking, as the former put it, that "direct arguments against [religion] produce hardly any effect on the public, and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science". In the preface to this book, Lewis-Williams says that he intends to follow Darwin's strategy, seeking to achieve by flanking manoeuvres what Dawkins and Hitchens attempt by cavalry charge.

In God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens writes of Buddhism as the sleep of reason, and of Buddhists as discarding their minds as well as their sandals. His passionate diatribe appeared in 2007. So what's he doing now, just three years later, endorsing a book on Buddhism written by a Buddhist?

The new publication is Confession of a Buddhist Atheist. Its author, Stephen Batchelor, is at the vanguard of attempts to forge an authentically western Buddhism. He is probably best known for Buddhism Without Beliefs, in which he describes himself as an agnostic. Now he has decided on atheism, the significance of which is not just that he doesn't believe in transcendent deities, but is also found in his stripping down of Buddhism to the basics.

Reincarnation and karma are rejected as Indian accretions: his study of the historical Siddhartha Gautama – one element in the new book – suggests the Buddha himself was probably indifferent to these doctrines. What Batchelor believes the Buddha did pr

People talk about science fiction as the literature of humanism. But actually, science fiction's explorations put it into conflict with humanism's tenets. The best science fiction questions the nature of humanity, and whether the universe will let us stay human.

It's easy to think of science fiction and humanism as going hand in hand: Science fiction is about, or else informed by, science, which is empirical and rejects "a priori" beliefs and superstitions. Both Isaac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut served as honorary presidents of the American Humanist Association.

According to Wikipedia, other famous secular humanists include Arthur C. Clarke, Terry Pratchett, Joss Whedon, Carl Sagan, and not surprisingly Philip Pullman. (A side note: I love the fact that the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU)'s symbol is the Happy Human. Which sounds like a fast-food chain for cannibals.)

Star Trek has long been described as a cult phenomenon…but is it an actual cult? Some anthropologists think so. Following the example of anthropologist Margaret Mead, they lived among the natives and studied their rituals-that is, they went to Star Trek conventions and fan clubs. Here's what they found.

Their conclusions? Writes cultural anthropologist Michael Jindra in the journal Sociology of Religion:

When I undertook this research, my first intention was to focus on how ST [Star Trek] draws a picture of the future that is attractive to many Americans. But early on I realized I was dealing with something much bigger and more complex than I had anticipated...it had features that paralleled a religious-type movement: an origin myth, a set of beliefs, an organization, and some of the most active and creative members to be found anywhere…Religion often points us to another world; ST does the same.

“We know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers.” Barack Hussein Obama, 20th of January, 2009

(Originally published at 3quarksdaily) As a British citizen I watched the inauguration speech of America’s 44th President with a warm but distanced interest. But as someone who was brought up in a non-religious family, and has thrived without a belief in a deity, I listened to Barack Obama’s words with fascination, concern and hope. Obama’s message to his nation and the greater world was one of inclusion. A broad ranging speech during which America’s new leader threw his arms wide around those who believe in America, and even wider around those who perhaps do not. The matter of ‘belief’ resonated throughout Obama’s address: the belief in God, the belief in America and the belief in Obama himself. Yet in regard of that single word a debate among ‘non-believers’ has sprung up. A debate as to whether Obama’s nod to the millions of Americans who call themselves non-theists, atheists or agnostics should have been wrapped up in such a semantically negative phrase. To pick apart the significance of the phrase ‘non-believers’ it pays to look at the word ‘atheist’: a label which is often analysed by theistic and nontheistic communities alike. A common etymological error connects “a”, from the ancient Greek for “without”, and “theism”, denoting a belief in God. Thus, an a-theist is considered to be someone without a belief in God. The true etymology of the word though is better derived from the Greek root “atheos” meaning merely “godless”. Thus athe(os)ism is closer in kind to a “godless belief system”, rather than “without a belief in god/gods”. This analysis, although tiresome, is worth attending to in regards Obama’s inclusive rhetoric, because as a minority non-theists are some of the most pilloried in American society. In an infamous 2004 study, conducted by the University of Minnesota’s department of sociology, 39.5 percent of those interviewed stated that atheists “did not share their vision of American society”: Asked the same question about Muslims and homosexuals, the figures dropped to a slightly less depressing 26.3 percent and 22.6 percent, respectively. For Hispanics, Jews, Asian-Americans and African-Americans, they fell further to 7.6 percent, 7.4 percent, 7.0 percent and 4.6 percent, respectively. The study contains other results, but these are sufficient to underline its gist: Atheists are seen by many Americans (especially conservative Christians) as alien and are, in the words of sociologist Penny Edgell, the study’s lead researcher, “a glaring exception to the rule of increasing tolerance over the last 30 years.” - link The suggestion that an atheist’s concern for their country is of a different quality to that of a believer is enormously telling. Has the common misunderstanding of atheism as a lack of belief come to be associated in America not just with God, but with morality, patriotism and an empathy for others? A 1987 interview conducted by Rob Sherman with George Bush senior seems to attest to this. Whilst in the office of Vice President, Mr. Bush stated: “I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God.” A comment that has rung in the ears of nontheists ever since. It is this apparent mis-conception about non-belief that makes Obama’s comment seem all the more thoughtless. Surely, in a speech of such fine rhetoric, so minutely crafted to chime with the thoughts and feelings of an entire nation - and of a world beyond - a phrase weighted as strongly as ‘non-believers’ should have been handled more carefully? It is doubtful that it was included as an afterthought; doubtful indeed that Barack Obama and his team of talented speech writers did not deliberate over its usage and inclusion in the most important piece of oratory they had ever crafted. How many Presidents of the last century have talked of ’non-believers’ in such patriotic tones? How much recent American policy has cited atheists and agnostics as integral to the character of the nation; as a minority worth even calling attention to? A closer look at the phrase is necessary, I believe, to truly grasp its significance as one of the most subtle shifts in political rhetoric the Obama team has yet delivered. Another extract from the inaugural address begins to clarify our semantic quarrel: “On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.” Here Obama asks for the narrative of American life, of American policy, to be redrafted. A call to a young nation to “pick [itself] up, dust [itself] off, and begin again” the work of building its identity. Obama’s call for America to unite under its founding principles is a definitively secular call; a call to the American State to be once again separated from any religion, just as its founding fathers had intended. For too long the identity of America has been infused with a kind of Christian grand-narrative, a sense that if God had placed mankind on the Earth to achieve greatness, and if America was the world’s greatest nation, then God must have always intended for the Christian story to also be the American story. This dangerous ethos, often echoed in the rhetoric of the Bush administration, is arguably responsible for the current tension between America, the Islamic world and beyond. This dangerous ethos, once reassessed through the eyes of a secular nation, bears more relationship to a fundamentalist doctrine than it does to a moral bedrock for American policy. By placing ‘non-believers’ at the end of a list of religious denominations Obama and his team were speaking not to the religious beliefs that unite Americans, but the moral and social bonds that tie them together as communities. When we look at the Christian community, at the Jewish community, at the Muslim and Hindu communities, the sharing of ‘beliefs’, becomes much more irrelevant. Two distinct people may call themselves Christian, but as a Protestant and a Catholic their core religious beliefs will be very different. By citing the non-believer community in his “patchwork” identity Obama was talking of the irrelevance of any particular view of God in the constitution of the American nation. His message to the Muslim world to ”seek [together] a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect” was a message to all to put particular beliefs in Gods aside and get on with the common goal of restitching our patchwork world. A message to: “Tie up your camel first, then put your trust in Allah.” - link As a non-American, I can believe in similar ideals. As a proud atheist I can attest to the fact that not believing in a God does not mean I don’t have beliefs. After all, every one of us - Atheist or Agnostic, Christian or Muslim, Jewish or Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Baha’i, Shinto or Rastafarian - are non-believers in something.

Dealing with a friend that has different beliefs than you can be frustrating for both yourself and the non-believer. Learning how to deal with it can be extremely difficult and you might want to convert them.