by Misha Lepetic

"The edge of the unnavigable,
the region of no information."
~ Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

Last month I ended with a question: If art is partly about eliciting a diversity of reactions that come from a shared experience of a single object, gesture or construct, then how do the potential meanings of art change when reproduction is made deliberately impossible? As we'll see, recent advances in software allow for custom (or 'procedural') generation of worlds and narratives that are not only unique to a single individual, but will also never be repeated, even for that person. Nevertheless, this approach is not entirely without precedent: precursors can be found, as always, in the work of artists going back at least as far as the 1950s.

For me, the example that immediately comes to mind is John Cage's 'Imaginary Landscape No. 4'. An early experiment in removing the author from the piece, Cage's score is for 12 radios. Each radio is operated by two performers, one charged with turning the frequency dial and the other attending to volume and timbre. The score provides instructions for duration and frequency, and the overall effect intends to liberate listeners from the tyranny of the composer's intention. The Guardian's Robert Worby gives a sense of what the 1951 premier of the piece might have sounded like:

What the audience heard was the gentle crackle and hiss of radio static as the players glided between stations. Occasionally there was a burst of speech, a snatch of music, the reassuring flurry of violins playing a sweet, late-night melody. The audience giggled, coughed, and applauded wildly when a recognisable fragment of Mozart blasted out.

This last bit is interesting: on the one hand, giggling may imply delight when a surprising moment or juxtaposition occurs. But on the other, a sense of congratulation (or perhaps relief) when the performers stumble across 'real music'. But there is no one to congratulate – neither the composer nor the performers could follow the score and game the system to create this moment. It's also clear that the reactions of the audience constitute a further part of the piece itself. Cage created the space where chance drove the performance, and this opened the possibility for more sound events to further accentuate the uniqeness of that particular event. In effect, the audience itself takes up the role of performer.

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by Jalees Rehman

Do you still remember the first day of school when you started first grade? If you were fortunate enough (or in some cases, unfortunate enough) to run into your classmates from way back when, you might sit down and exchange stories about that first day in school. There is a good chance that you and your former classmates may differ in the narratives especially regarding some details but you are bound to also find many common memories. This phenomenon is an example of "collective memory", a term used to describe the shared memories of a group which can be as small as a family or a class of students and as large as a nation. The collective memory of your first day in school refers to a time that you personally experienced but the collective memory of a group can also include vicarious memories consisting of narratives that present-day group members may not have lived through. For example, the collective memory of a family could contain harrowing details of suffering experienced by ancestors who were persecuted and had to abandon their homes. These stories are then passed down from generation to generation and become part of a family's defining shared narrative. This especially holds true for larger groups such as nations. In Germany, the collective memory of the horrors of the holocaust and the Third Reich have a profound impact on how Germans perceive themselves and their identity even if they were born after 1945.

The German scholar Aleida Assmann is an expert on how collective and cultural memory influences society and recently wrote about the importance of collective memory in her essay "Transformation of the Modern Time Regime" (PDF):

All cultures depend upon an ability to bring their past into the present through acts of remembering and remembrancing in order to recover not only acquired experience and valuable knowledge, exemplary models and unsurpassable achievements, but also negative events and a sense of accountability. Without the past there can be no identity, no responsibility, no orientation. In its multiple applications cultural memory greatly enlarges the stock of the creative imagination of a society.

Assmann uses the German word Erinnerungskultur (culture of remembrance) to describe how the collective memory of a society is kept alive and what impact the act of remembrance has on our lives. The Erinnerungskultur widely differs among nations and even in a given nation or society, it may vary over time. It is quite possible that the memories of the British Empire may evoke nostalgia and romanticized images of a benevolent empire in older British citizens whereas younger Brits may be more likely to focus on the atrocities committed by British troops against colonial subjects or the devastating famines in India under British rule.

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by Thomas Manuel

In Dishonoured by History: ‘Criminal Tribes’ and British Colonial Policy, Meena Radhakrishna presents rare scholarship on some of the worst excesses of the British Empire. The Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 was passed with intention of demarcating certain tribes in India as being “hereditary criminals”. This wasn’t necessarily genetic but rather occupational. The colonial interventions of the 19^th century had invalidated a lot of hereditary occupations and the British were extremely aware of the dangers of the resulting mass unemployment. In their eyes, there was no other choice for these poor, wandering nomads but to take up a life of crime. What else could they do?

Radhakrishna’s scholarship focuses on the erstwhile Madras Presidency where the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 did not apply at first. It was resisted by the Madras administration who argued (using statistics!) that there was no crime problem in general and crime was actually lower in districts where these tribes operated. There were other objections voiced including questions of implementation and practicality but the real reason seemed to be because the wandering tribes were useful.

Historically, the Koravas of the Madras Presidency were salt and grain traders. They travelled from the coast with salt, taking it along regular trade routes to villages that were deep inland. Many of these remote villages were not connected by road and had no other access to salt. The Koravas, who carried these goods on the backs of their herds of cattle, would be able to sell salt in these areas at prices lower than any ordinary merchant. The Madras administration knew this and acknowledged it. This was the case with a number of tribes, each of them seen as beneficial as they ensured the movement of particular goods across the presidency.

But in the year 1911, the new Criminal Tribes Act was passed and this one applied to the entire territory of India. In the four decades since the first Act, new economic policies had played havoc with the traditional trading system. The salt trade was centralized with the government acting as clearing house. Coupled with the introduction of the railways, the entire face of the salt supply chain changed.

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by Shiban Ganju

An update and gratitude is overdue to the readers and editors of 3QD who supported the NGO, ‘Save a Mother’ in its infancy. Years have passed. So, what’s new?

Nothing seems to have changed in ten years since I visited this village – a dusty swathe of land, home to over eleven hundred people, who connect with the world via a newly built, one car wide, winding road. Cracks, loose stones and chunks of matted mud straddle its tarred surface. A sign at its junction with the main road, two kilometers away, reads: “Prime Minister’s Rural Road Plan”; an adjacent sign announces the name of the local muscle man who claims the credit for the new road. It reminds: we are in Uttar Pradesh, a northern state of India, where muscle power grabs political power. The road ends near the village community hall – a newly built large concrete cube with dirty white walls showing new cracks. Our SUV stops. We have reached. The ride, after ten years, was a road show of frustrating pace of progress; change is imperceptible here – until we meet the women.

Over a hundred women, young and old, most draped in bright colorful Sarees, a few in black burqas without head cover, have walked from surrounding villages to participate in the review meeting. They look different: gone are the veils and bashfulness; they are vocal and animated. A twenty years old articulate college student, who is a trained health activist, conducts the meeting. She introduces herself and other health activists, who take turns to recount their experiences and of their neighbors. The embellish their stories with songs about preventive health – all written and created by them. And then they hang big paper charts on the wall displaying hand written numbers to buttress their claims: maternal deaths are rare, girls do not marry before the age of eighteen, contraceptive use has increased and they campaign for equal treatment for girls. This is new – not what I had seen ten years ago.

Then, I was not sure how we would convince the women to adopt a few simple steps to curb rampant maternal deaths. (Detox Body or Mind?) (Save A Mother). We were novices. We borrowed wisdom from a few rural doctors and took inspiration from social workers who had been pioneers in the field of maternal health. Their integrity, sacrifice and charisma had propelled their success. But these leadership qualities were not replicable. We wanted to develop a frugal model of maternal mortality reduction by working with the community, especially women but had no established theoretical scaffold to hold us steady.

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by Paul Braterman

Bullshit is sticky, and by trying to stamp on it you spread it. Because its appeal is directly to the emotions, rational critique is beside the point, while virtuous outrage is as effective as support in sending it viral.

The term bullshit was introduced in its current sense by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt in 2005, and has been the subject of a rash of books since Trump's emergence as a force to be reckoned with. I have chosen this particular volume as my jumping off point, because I am familiar with the author's UK perspective, and because the author himself, as a contributor to Buzzfeed, is part of the revolution in electronic publishing that has made bullshit so much easier to propagate.

Lying is lying; bullshit is different

Lying is misrepresentation of reality. Bullshit is something far more serious. Bullshit invites us to follow the leader into a world of subjectivity, where reality comes second to what we choose to believe. Bullshit is the delegitimisation of reality, designed to make rational discussion impossible. It is the triumph of assertion over reality.

This book names names. Boris Johnson (for more on Johnson's chronic mendacity, see here) the Daily Mail (which is world's largest news website, because of focus on celebrities), the Canary,¹ Brexit, the Daily Express, and, of course, Trump. He also mentions others who have helped spread bullshit, including his own readership. I had planned to write a piece simply based on the book, when the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica story broke. I cannot claim to do that story justice, with new material surfacing daily, but will try to show how the separate themes involved relate to each other. Bullshit, fake news, targeted messages, and the manipulation of opinions, including yours and mine, are now inseparable, as recent disclosures show.

In which connection, let me urge all readers who have not yet done so to check and adjust their Facebook settings; you will find my own detailed instructions here, and CREDO's here. When I did this, I was horrified at how much information I was allowing to be harvested, and by whom, not only about my own preferences but about those of my friends.

I, too, have spread bullshit. As in the false claim, which I passed on unexamined,² that a close family member of a senior Conservative politician had shareholdings in a scandal-ridden company that has been strangely successful in securing government contracts. Here we have the distinguishing features of bullshit. Highly emotive, tailored to appeal to a certain audience, effective clickbait, difficult to ignore, a plausible and indeed in this case well-warranted central concern, and an allegation so sticky that the very act of refuting helps spread it (which is why I have not named names here, although I am sure that many readers could supply them).

As a safeguard against such behaviour I have now taken the Pro-Truth pledge, which includes a commitment to fact-checking information before passing it on.

Indignantly calling out bullshit plays into the hands of its producers, but it is difficult to resist the temptation. We all enjoy drawing attention to the wickedness of our opponents. The added attention that bullshit brings makes it lucrative to give it coverage, and thereby help it spread. Hence the enormous amount of coverage given to the Trump campaign in 2016, when media deeply opposed to him gave him billions of dollars worth of free advertising.

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by Ashutosh Jogalekar

In 1968, James Watson published “The Double Helix”, a personal account of the history of the race to discover the structure of DNA. The book was controversial and bracingly honest, a glimpse into the working style and personalities of great scientists like Francis Crick, Lawrence Bragg, Rosalind Franklin and Linus Pauling, warts and all. The vividness of Watson’s recollections and the sometimes almost minute-by-minute account make his memoirs a unique chronicle in the history of scientific autobiography.

After Watson’s book had been published, the physicist Freeman Dyson once asked him how he could possibly remember so many details about events that had transpired more than a decade ago. Easy, said Watson: he used to write to his family in America from Cambridge and had kept all those letters. Dyson who had been writing letters to his parents from the opposite direction, from America to Cambridge, asked his mother to keep all his letters from 1941 onwards.

The result is “Maker of Patterns”, a roadside view of the remarkable odyssey of one of the finest scientific and literary minds of the twentieth century. Letters are a unique form of communication, preserving the urgency and freshness of the moment without the benefit and bias of hindsight. They recall history as present rather than past. One wonders if the incessant barrage of email will preserve the selective highlights of life that letters once preserved. Dyson’s letter collection was initially titled “The Old One”. The allusion was to a famous letter from Einstein to Max Born in which Einstein noted his dissatisfaction with quantum theory: “Quantum mechanics demands serious attention. But an inner voice tells me that this is not the true Jacob. The theory accomplishes a lot, but it does not bring us closer to the secrets of the Old One. In any case, I am convinced that He does not play dice”.

Publishers sometimes change titles to suit their whim. Perhaps the publisher changed the title here because they thought it was presumptuous to compare Freeman Dyson to God. I would concede that Dyson is not God, but it’s the metaphor that counts; as these letters indicate, he is certainly full of observations and secrets of the universe. The letters contain relatively little science but lots of astute observations on people and places. Where the science does get explained one senses a keen mind taking everything in and reveling in the beauty of ideas.

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by Max Sirak

(Audio version for your earballs!)

TV gets a bum rap.

Like any tool or technology – it's neutral. Television is neither good nor bad, healthy nor un-. We, the users of such tools and technologies are the lucky pronouncers of such designations and definitions, based upon their use.

Binge-watching, albeit easy, certainly isn't evil. Excessive? Sure. Bad for the retention and recall? Probably. All I can say for certain is, after watching 12 seasons of the CW's Supernatural over the span of a couple months, the details of all the Winchester's exploits are a bit foggy.

My guess is the fuzziness has to do with the way memory functions. Sleep plays a big part in the consolidation memory. So, the more episodes you watch in a row between sleeps, the blurrier the particulars become.

Anyway – back to the point.

TV is what you make it. And, while it certainly seem like the air waves have never been fuller of monster-hunting melodrama, ridiculous "reality", negative news, and polarity politics, there are beacons of lucid light.

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by Holly A. Case

Szeged is a Hungarian university town near the border with Serbia where I spent my third year of college abroad in 1995-1996. When I arrived for the first time with a year's worth of luggage, the traffic in and out of the train station included a rail-bus that carried people in and smuggled goods out. A college friend from Belgrade knew Szeged as a grocery stop for cheese, catsup, juice, and gasoline, and wondered why on earth I wanted to spend a year abroad there. The wondrous strangeness of provincial towns near troubled borders is impossible to explain to people from the fast-talking capitals, yet these are the weighty time-space benders that have always attracted me: Klagenfurt, Szeged, Mardin…

There was money to be made selling gas to the embargoed Serbs in 1995, but since it entered illicitly inside the tanks of private cars to be siphoned out just across the border, none of it passed through the train station. I saw its effects later, where I rented a room in an apartment just down the street from the station for seventy dollars a month. The house, with greenhouse and rabbit farm (off-site), was connected to another whose owners had their fingers in countless post-communist pies, of which smuggling gas into Serbia was only one. My rent was deliberately lower than it might have been so long as I gave English lessons to the son of the family, who in his mid-teens was already doing so well that he didn't feel English was necessary.

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Sughra Raza. Self-portrait at Schiphol, April 7, 2018.

Digital photograph.