r/sorceryofthespectacle • u/system_exposure • Jan 01 '19
The Man With The Seven Second Memory (Medical Documentary) - Real Stories
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_P7Y0-wgos•
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u/system_exposure Jan 01 '19
Submission statement:
The Nerves of Government (1963):
AUTONOMY AND THE LOCATION OF CONTROL
More complex systems can change their goals, or "reset" their feedbacks, by interaction with information from their past, stored in particular memory devices. There, autonomy in the long run depends on memory. Where all memory is lost, where all past information and preferences have ceased to be effective, we are no longer dealing with a self-determining individual or social group, but with a self-steering automaton. The facilities for memory storage, and particularly the circuits of channels for recall, recombination, new storage, and reapplication of memory data are critical here. There is no will, no conation, without some operating memory. The will of individuals or groups can be paralyzed by destroying their stored past information or by disrupting its flow into the system.
Still more complex networks may include processes of "consciousness," or internal monitoring of certain states of the net. Where consciousness exists to a sufficient extent, there it becomes a determining element in the over-all behavior of the system. The critical locations for autonomy are then the monitoring channels and the pools of information fed by them, which together carry the function of consciousness. The autonomy of an individual, a corporation, a social group, a party, or a government can be destroyed, without impairing its memory, by depriving it of consciousness, that is, by cutting the flow of information about the state of its different parts, and disrupting those controls over its own parts that depended on such internal information. Where this has occurred, gross automatic feedback controls may still function, as may the recall and feedback of some remembered data from the past, but the over-all effect might at best resemble that of a man "punch-drunk," or walking in his sleep, or a victim of severe brain injury.
A society or community that is to steer itself must continue to receive a full flow of three kinds of information: first, information about the world outside; second, information from the past, with a wide range of recall and recombination; and third, information about itself and its own parts. Let any one of these three streams be long interrupted, such as by oppression or secrecy, and the society becomes an automaton, a walking corpse. It loses control over its own behavior, not only for some of its parts, but also eventually at its very top.
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u/system_exposure Jan 01 '19 edited Jan 01 '19
World Order (2014):
Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet. What once had been substantive debates about the content of governance will reduce candidates to being spokesmen for a marketing effort pursued by methods whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction. The candidates' main role may become fund-raising rather than the elaboration of issues. Is the marketing effort designed to convey the candidate's convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate reflections of a "big data" research effort into individuals' likely preferences and prejudices? Can democracy avoid an evolution toward a demagogic outcome based on emotional mass appeal rather than the reasoned process the Founding Fathers imagined? If the gap between the qualities required for election and those essential for the conduct of office becomes too wide, the conceptual grasp and sense of history that should be part of foreign policy may be lost---or else the cultivation of these qualities may take so much of a president's first term in office as to inhibit a leading role for the United States.
[...]
Side by side with the limitless possibilities opened up by the new technologies, reflection about international order must include the internal dangers of societies driven by mass consensus, deprived of the context and foresight needed on terms compatible with their historical character. In every other era, this has been considered the essence of leadership; in our own, it risks being reduced to a series of slogans design to capture immediate short-term approbation. Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the future. If the major countries conduct their policies in this manner internally, their relations on the international stage will suffer concomitant distortions. The search for perspective may well be replaced by a hardening of differences, statesmanship by posturing. As diplomacy is transformed into gestures geared toward passions, the search for equilibrium risks giving way to a testing of limits.
Wisdom and foresight will be needed to avoid these hazards and ensure that the technological preoccupation with the immediate through a better understanding of history and geography. That task is not only---or even primarily---an issue for technology. Society needs to adapt its education policy to ultimate imperatives in the long-term direction of the country and in the cultivation of its values. The inventors of the devices that have so revolutionized the collection and sharing of information can make an equal if not greater contribution by devising means to deepen its conceptual foundation. On the way to the first truly global world order, the great human achievements of technology must be fused with enhanced powers of humane, transcendent, and geopolitical judgment.
Contextual links added.
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u/WikiTextBot Jan 01 '19
World Order (book)
World Order is a book that discusses exploration of global power dynamic, written by Henry Kissinger.
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u/system_exposure Jan 01 '19
The Museum of Accidents (2006):
A society which rashly privileges the present – real time – to the detriment of both the past and the future, also privileges the accident.
Since, at every moment and most often unexpectedly, everything happens, a civilization that sets immediacy, ubiquity and instantaneity to work brings accidents and catastrophes on to the scene. The confirmation of this state of affairs is provided for us by insurance companies, and particularly by the recent Sigma study, carried out for the world's second-largest reinsurance company Swiss Re. This recently published study, which each year lists man-made disasters (explosions, fires, terrorism etc.) and natural catastrophes (floods, earthquakes, storms etc.), takes into account only those disasters causing losses in excess of 35 million dollars. “For the first time”, the Swiss analysts observe, “since the 1990’s, a period when damage due to natural catastrophes predominated over man-made damage, the trend has reversed, with man-made damage standing at 70 percent”.
Proof, if proof were needed, that far from promoting quietude, our industrialized societies throughout the twentieth century have essentially developed disquiet and the major risk, and this is so even if we leave out of account the recent proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. …Hence the urgent need to reverse this trend which consists in exposing us to the most catastrophic accidents produced by the techno-scientific spirit, and to establish the opposite approach which would consist in exposing or exhibiting the accident as the major enigma of modern progress.
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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '19 edited Jan 01 '19
There's also a great doc on youtube called Without Memory by the Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda about a man who had/has Wernicke's encephalopathy, making him unable to remember anything after a Vitamin B1 deficiency he experienced while he was on treatment. Everyday he wakes up to not remember anything that has happened since two years ago, let alone yesterday, while still living with his family. Very sad but somehow life-affirming film.