Interesting connections

Christine, Joseph, and MySpace

I met two of my best friends on MySpace. This was back in 2004 when it was just taking off. Before people were inundated with social media it was far more acceptable to reach out and forge bonds with strangers. Nowadays people tend to add as a contact on LinkedIn or Facebook only those people they've met in real life. So, even though I lived in a different city than them at the time, Christine and Joseph, who were roommates, stumbled upon me and reached out on account of my professed interests in electronic music, body modification, and the Soviet Union. We grew close over the next few years and we're still friends. I visited each of them in their respective domiciles as recently as this summer.

Ford Seven and Girl Talk

Christine and Joseph eventually connected me to a place called Ford Seven. Just a sprawling apartment in an old building in Cleveland—sprawling enough to roller skate! The place was known for its antics and events. This is where the mashup artist Girl Talk played some of his first shows, and he took off from there. Another character who was a part of that scene was Antonio. He's a gifted hairstylist by all accounts, so gifted he was even Courtney Love's personal stylist. Well, at least for a few weeks. I never got the full story on what happened there.

The Fund and Street Fight Radio

The Fund (aka the Fund for Public Interest Research) recruits young idealistic (and/or desperate) people to fundraise for nonprofits, either door-to-door or by accosting people on the street. I worked there each summer in college, and Zack was my boss two of those summers. He went on to become the potato salad guy. He also ended up spending time working on the same farm in France as my friend Natasha, who used to live at Ford Seven.

In college I made good friends with a certain Lauren. And while I was at the Fund, I worked with Ljubica, who now hosts Cold Pizza Party. Ljubica has collaborated with Street Fight Radio, and one of the hosts of that was Lauren's first boyfriend.

Reality TV

Katie, who I met through Lauren, worked at a dry cleaner's in high school. She used to let her friend Akashia sleep on the couch in the shop. Akashia went on to compete in the first season of RuPaul's Drag Race, but not before stealing from the cash register. I coincidentally gave Akashia a Tarot card reading once when I was in high school. A kid I was on the cross country team and in art class with went on to compete in Project Runway, and Katie's friend Irina ended up in the same writing program at Bard College as Christine.

Battles over fate

Some of history's greatest battles have been over the definition of the world and how best to interact with it. When people are particularly concerned with their fate as defined by an afterlife, they concern themselves with how best to attain a desirable position in it. This historically manifested in the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Thirty Years' War, and played a part in the earlier Crusades. Of course, there were agents who used religious conflict to negotiate and attain material wealth, power, and other assets outside the purview of a Christian afterlife. Still, the fact that religion served as such a notable vehicle to those ends speaks to the orientation of societies at those times.

As society came to focus more on outcomes in people's lives—in contrast to their afterlives—we see greater focus on questions of how best to organize and run society, such as in the Renaissance, Enlightenment and later movements. I believe this change in orientation came about as a result of improvements to productivity, increases in quality of life, accumulation of wealth (including such simple things as surplus food), disposable time and other factors that facilitate education, related investments, reflection, and innovation. Once typical people were freed (or relative freer on average) from the time and mental demands of a subsistence lifestyle and this development went noted by aristocrats, society came to focus more on ends and means in this life.

The trend has continued as we've redefined our locus of control from faith to the political system and beyond. We've redefined what it is to be human—this tying into the history of race in the US and other countries. We've redefined what it means to be a citizen, a decent person, a successful person, etc. Many of these redefinitions have resulted in the enfranchisement of more people. Think of the waves of feminism: the first priority was equal legal rights and the later priority became equal social and professional opportunities. These developments have broadly coincided with great global productivity, wealth, and leisure time. Today a lot of rhetoric is focused on the level of individual interactions. Is it acceptable to employ aggression to dominate and control interactions and their outcome? What about prejudice and other heuristics that reinforce problematic historical patterns? How much should one benefit from being born into a well-connected family or other windfalls? Our lot, or at least how we perceive it, is no longer so much a function of how devout we are. Nor are we entirely concerned with the influence of legal and political protocols. We're identifying levers of the world and our lives in more granular, less formal interactions and patterns.

Conquering the conquerors

I've noticed a pattern in history of the conquered becoming the conqueror. I can think of several manifestations. The first is Rome and the Germanic tribes that harried its frontier. In time these tribes would take Rome's place but carry its torch. This is what happened with the Franks in France, retaining the language and many of the institutions of Rome, as well as what would happen in the general area of modern day Germany, in the form of the Holy Roman Empire.

The two other outstanding cases that occur to me carry us across Eurasia. During the Islamic conquests, it was Arab power structures that subsumed and converted Persians. In time, however, Persians came to dominate the power structure, in the administration of the Abbasid Caliphate. In turn, those ethnicities then on the periphery - nomadic Turks and Mongols - would go from populations encroached on or pushed back to the new rulers of extensive, urbanized domains. This brings us to China, where the Mongols established the Yuan dynasty, ruling over their former suzerain for a hundred years.

Could there be something fundamental to these three examples? It only makes sense that in time the wealth accumulated in a society would become the prize of a new contingent of people. It might not be a meaningful abstraction that I've presented at all. For instance, wealth and power were changing hands among groups within Rome. Is that really any different from it passing into the hands of, say, the Lombards? At the same time, there are many distinct groups that have never "conquered their conquerors."

Some thoughts and language on thought and language

I don't think in English. Sometimes I think in Russian. Sometimes I think in images or something like a scene from a movie where many non-verbal aspects of a situation develop and play out. My thoughts used to be more closely coupled to their representation in spoken English, particularly early on in college, where my main mode of digesting information and expressing myself had become the word. This was in contrast to how I'd spent much of my free time in high school -- drawing for hours. And later in college I would focus more heavily on a different symbolic system - mathematical notation - as I undertook more coursework in statistics and econometrics. The cumulative effect of these experiences has left me with thoughts that aren't dominated by any particular medium. Sometimes I'm rehearsing a conversation in my head. At other times, I'm thinking in a sort of raw mode of concepts themselves, without their being tied to their corresponding word in English or Russian, or I might be visualizing shapes interacting with each other in a kind of space, such as when working with a matrix of data for work.

Now I don't overestimate how unique this is. It's often a matter of degree. That said, I have encountered multiple instances where others describe their cognition in contrast to mine. A parallel can be drawn in the different ways people read. Many people subvocalize when they read, registering minute movements of the physical pronunciation of words as their eyes pass over them, perhaps hearing the words in their heads. An alternative mode of reading doesn't involve subvocalization, and can become a largely visual experience. This likely typifies the reading experience for those who've learned only the written form of a language. Think scholars who've learned enough of a language only to use written sources in their work, or who are working with a dead language, the spoken form of which is no longer known.

A number of these concepts are explored in The Arrival, a movie that left a strong impression on me: the mapping of spoken to visually-represented language, how the mode of thinking dictates what is even possible to think. We benefit from a long history of packaging up concepts into a shorthand representation. There was a time when we didn't have the means to represent or conceive of numbers. Imagine how greatly extended our ability to manipulate our worlds - internal and external - has become. If I'm recalling a documentary I once saw accurately, and if it was accurate itself, Einstein expressed that one of the greatest challenges in his work as a physicist was finding the means to capture what he'd already conceptualized. This leads me to believe that for all its expressive capacity, dealing solely with language as we've inherited it can keep us from expanding the realms of personal - or more generally, human - insight. I wonder what future developments in language will afford us.