House of Eratosthenes

This fifty-ninth new word I’ve invented, is probably the most important of all of them. It refers to something that is dominating our lives. And probably in a bad way.

Teshmology (n.)

The Morgan K. Freeberg rule of technology is, and has always been, that it is the opposite of doing things the same way some other guy is already doing them (or viewed from a slightly different perspective, the opposite of doing the same things). It is the opposite of emulating others. The popular misconception is that “technology” is anything new; well, Teshmology would be whatever qualifies for the latter but relies on this emulation of others. It is new stuff that other people are already doing — but is still trendy. It is different from what we saw in years past but identical to what we’ve been seeing over & over again lately. It is, you might say, a new dance step.

As a personal possession, it is hard evidence that you have opened up your wallet sometime in the last year or two. It makes you cool. It shows you are capable of taking in new information…but imposes a very low bar for this…it shows you have taken in this new information about consumer products and services available to you, sometime within that last year or two. But while it proves there was some money spent, it doesn’t say anything about real creativity. It doesn’t have anything to it that is genuinely new. As in, original.

I thought of this reading Neo-Neocon‘s analysis of why the elections went the way they did. It is one of the very few analyses that make any sense, from what I can see. I’m not sure what to make of point #3 quite yet. Polling is an exercise in evolution within what amounts to a guessing game; by which I mean, they evolve well, then badly, then well again…while lessons are “learned.” This time, the stopped clock happened to be right about what time it is, so there’s not much learning to be done. But that isn’t really the question people are asking when the election is still in the future, what they’re asking is different. How are these battleground states going to shape up, insofar as one candidate will have >=270 electoral votes and one will not? My side got creamed here but it still looks like a guessing game to me.

But #1 and #2 are very well thought out and this deserves more emphasis. The Obama campaign did a better job of communicating and the Republicans need to realize it. Also, people who do not have reason to think they’ve got their “finger on the pulse” of anything — most especially, people who have learned they don’t — need to shut up when the subject has something to do with what other people are going to do. And I most certainly will. I will confine my comments to what I know about it, acknowledging that the vastly greater part of the information there, is stuff I have yet to learn.

What I have learned, thus far, is this: Anybody who sympathizes with the Republican side, especially if they have influence on how these lessons are going to be applied over there, needs to be very careful with this other word “communicate,” as in “Obama proved He is better at communicating with voters.” There is a temptation here to think of it as simply conveying information. That is not what Obama has been doing.

The line between this “sober” technology and the softer, drunk-talking teshmology that has to do with emulating what others are doing, is vanishing before our very eyes. Sometime in the last twenty years, it has emerged that even where technology is built and new things have to be invented, therefore it is proven that new things will have to be done, creativity doesn’t really help a whole lot. The possibility exists that perhaps we have outgrown it entirely. We still come up with new ideas now and then, but the ones that are brought to fruition seem to be hatched in a conference room somewhere, with very poor definition involved as to what individual came up with the idea, and not much of any hard requirement in place to arrange some proving ground, to demonstrate in scientific terms that this was the best idea to be chosen out of a line-up of other candidates. It is that process of selection from a line-up of possible new ideas, where the damage has been taking place. It seems we do it by “feel” now, grounded largely in a sense of what others are going to “feel” about it. There is an embarrassing lack of logical foundation for these selections in the wake. For example, with Obama’s re-election. This will fix what? Who can say? Anywhere?

I also notice, in the aftermath, that we seem pretty sure of ourselves that this was the “best” idea and our expectations aren’t terribly high in this assessment. If we’re still treading water, if meeting the larger objective was not a complete disaster, then that must have been the “best” idea. Sometimes, even if the whole thing is a flop. That one critical choice made, nah, that couldn’t have been it…must have been something else. Isn’t Mitt Romney’s nomination a good example of this? We’re doing it again, Republicans functioning as a meaningful emblem of what is going on across society. They’ll line up on two sides of the question, some saying “Romney jinxed this thing” and others saying “no he didn’t,” they’ll have a voice vote about it, and one side might “win.” It seems we have lost the ability to decide anything any other way.

I have personal reasons for being biased against teshmology. But, intellectually as well, struggle as I might, I can’t see anything good about it. There are benefits to our learning how to work together and communicate with each other on common ground, but that is not what this is. I would say this is like the rust, to the water that is that beneficial working-together thing (in which, by the way, I’ll take note that we don’t seem to be doing that terribly well either). This thing is rust because it is a solvent, it is an oxidization problem, one that eats away at the ferrous structure upon which we depend, the scaffolding that holds us up off the ground.

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I Made a New Word LIXSunday, November 11th, 2012

I Made a New Word LIX
Sunday, November 11th, 2012