by Joshua Cohen
Instead, computationally, existence is founded in value, and value is founded in motion—transclusing principles that themselves transcluse the information and attention economies. If “it” is moving, “it” has worth; if “it” has worth, “it” exists—until, that is, the motion’s stilled, and the screenwork’s printed, leaving only a text, a page, whose meaning has been borrowed from the screen in a travesty of the way that folding cash and change borrow from governance and bullion. Increasingly, the meaning that’s borrowed is charity.
The computer “is a brain,” according to scientists; the computer “is not a brain,” according to scientists. I have read both claims on a computer. A program is “a rule”; a program is “a law.” Data, “a case.” A firewall: a barrier or screen designed to limit the spread of fire in a structure, and/or to mitigate a burning structure’s collapse. Firewall 2.0: a metonymic construct within each society, a conceptual barrier or screen separating security (institutional) from privacy (individual). Section 255 of the U.S. Telecommunications Act (1996) protects American citizens from technology and from themselves: Websites must be made operable for those with little or no color perception; those with little or no hearing; “touchscreen and touch-operated controls shall be operable without requiring body contact or close body proximity”—meaning: for users without hands.
Web advertising (“webvertising”) regards as prime placement the top-left banner, in L to R languages, and the top-right banner, in R to L languages—the starting points of end-user reading. Our vergence is tracked, our strokes, logged. The best passwords are produced stochastically, aleatorically—by flinging our digits at the keyboard uncapped, CAPPING the keyboard and flinging again, or, if numbers were chanced in the inaugural fling, shifting and flinging for symbols—as9f, &Q:Y.
The average TK (nationality) spent TK (metric, hours) per TK (metric, day) at the computer in TK (year), and TK (metric, $, £, €) per TK (metric, month) online in TK (year). TK (metric, number) sites have been accessed in the writing of this essay. TK (metric, number) facts have been assimilated. TK, a hold, a reserve—a journalistic abbreviation meaning material “to come,” and a purposeful mistake by compositors, who noted that no English words begin with those letters.
These letters too have been typed, not formed, my ductus a cursor (when unblinking), a caret (when blinking). They came into being—they began—as manifestations of light, beamed at a screen TK (60x) per TK (second). Since using the computer, since going online, it’s as if my mind itself has evanesced—with my mental ligatures, my tropes and types, now not leading my own words so much as following the sentences of others; now not linked to what I mean so much as to what others have meant, and so to what I could or should mean also; linking lucific. On the computer, with all its connectivity and access, “writing”—word processing, text generating—can only be a contendent app, yet another task among tasks, scheduled to a catenated beta, to be checked into, to be checked and responded to. “Distraction” has become too pervasive to require wording, to even be wordable. I would be better off describing to you your own face.
The “commodification” (approx. 2,430,000 Google.com hits as of 12/31/17) or “commoditization” (approx. 633,000 Google.com hits as of 12/31/17) of communication is as old as communication itself, and as young as its next product. An artifact or interaction offline has more utility when on—where it becomes transitive, transactional. The cultural artifact especially, in its reproduction, reproduces not just its producer—as it always has—but its consumer too, whose every interaction becomes an artifact, the new remains of civilization: the numeronymic remnants of a comment of chat. The first book I didn’t write on paper—the first book I wouldn’t have been able to write on paper—is now storaged, both on my computer and on multiple servers in multiple hemispheres (though the exact numbers and locations, my provider assures me, are better kept confidential), where it’s searchable by stratum, by shard.
What had been a dialogue with a page is now a polylogue with that least demanding, and so most diverting, of audiences—information. The opportunity, to be read, advantages the impulse, to write. Meanwhile, the second self who reads my writing has options of his own to consider. Farewell my tu, my du. My interests, purchasing habits, age, and geochronographical stats, most of which have strained most of the relationships I’ve had, constitute the totality of my relationships to advertisers. False models result, which, in turn, condition future relationships: “You might like this person,” but I don’t; “you might like this book,” but I don’t like myself. (This, parenthetically, was why I decided on “attention.” Once again I’d become reliant on a mind that didn’t seem to need or even want me, who seemed perfect despite me. Every thing I’d search, I’d find. Except “attention.” It wanted, needed, would be perfected by, mine. But: Wherever I searched, it wasn’t, and just when I was sure it was found, it was gone.)
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ADHD. THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY might be the chief cause of this disorder so communicable I can’t even type it without suffering its effects, in quotes: “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,” a generic term for three comorbid (some say), noncomorbid (others say), syndromes—ADHD predominantly hyperactive-impulsive, ADHD predominantly inattentive, and ADHD combined (hyperactive-impulsive and inattentive)—none of which may exist “off-label.”
ADHD’s diagnosis is by exclusion; there are only symptoms, not consistent signs, and there are no tests not biased by conceptions of appropriate behavior—“appropriate” defined both developmentally and socially. The nominal neurological evidence: Patients diagnosed with ADHD have evinced not just subnormal functioning but also subnormal surface areas and/or thicknesses of frontostriatal structures, including dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (associated with organization, planning), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (response selection, error detection), caudate, putamen, globus pallidus (the basal ganglia: working memory, response inhibition). “Nominal”: a name for a thing that exists in name only.
Dyslexia, for example, has been claimed to express fairly locally, in a dysfunctional arrangement of smaller neurons (cells) and axons (fibers), in the thalamus and, developed ectopically, in the cerebral cortex. Autism too has been claimed as relatively locatable: in a supernormal number of neurons/axon bundles in the medial prefrontal cortex. But neither observations can be called cause or effect—for now, they’re merely aberrancies in common. The sheer range of structures found reduced in the brains of patients diagnosed with ADHD suggests: The reduction is the result of other factors (drugs or alcohol in utero), or ADHD is a “global perturbation.” Alternatively, homeopathically, the range of neurological evidence must stand for another range: a behavioral “dimensionality,” or “spectrum,” one extreme of which just won’t shut up, while the other extreme just—slumps.
ADHD’s descriptions—“won’t sit still,” “won’t sit down,” “antisocial-greedy,” “social-overgenerous”—are so divergent as to serve as etiology: Pharmaceuticals aside (profit motive), blame has been placed with genetics (anomalies in the dopamine genes); environment (organophosphate pesticides); diet (the preservative sodium benzoate, present in almost all packaged foods, and artificial food colorings including “sunset yellow,” “Red #40”); lack of exercise (exertion elevates dopamine); increased television consumption (5 percent of American children are diagnosed with ADHD); increased number of cuts in television programming, especially cartoons (30–60 percent of diagnosed American children report symptoms persisting into adulthood). Anthropologists have offered an evolutionary solution, associating hyperactivity with the “hunter-gatherer,” or “nomadic,” characteristics of pretelevisual—preagricultural—society. Meanwhile, psychoanalysis refuses to let neurology forget that juvenile attention-seeking is caused by overparenting and underparenting both. It’s the confusion of the craving of attention for the inability to pay attention that is the contemporary deficiency. T
he contemporary disease.
But there are treatments to treat ourselves to. There are ways to heal yourself. While researching this essay, to aid in researching this essay, I’ve had to acquaint myself with psychostimulants both legal (amphetamine salts, obtained from a shrink in Manhattan who asked me the most rudimentary of checklist questions pertaining to depression until, when the topic turned to sex, I interrupted and asked for a prescription, which he promptly scribbled, so ending the exam), and illegal (“speed,” obtained from a perky Turk in Berlin, who delivered throughout Kreuzberg/Neukölln reliably and punctually).
At the time I lived in Berlin, Freud’s favorite substance, cocaine, was expensive, but speed was cheap and easy to obtain—it was even cheaper and easier to obtain than aspirin. Speed was peddled in parks and on corners and out of the backs of Spätis (delis), whereas aspirin was exclusively available at Apotheken (pharmacies).
“Aspirin” was once proprietary, registered to the German drugmaker Bayer Pharmaceuticals, which lost its international trademarks in the Treaty of Versailles (Part X, Chapter V, Section IV, “property, rights, and interests”). The year of that treaty, 1919, also marked the synthesis of crystallized methamphetamine—a compression of methyl-alpha-methylphenethylamine—though the drug wasn’t commercialized until the verge of the next war, 1938, when Temmler Werke, in Berlin, packaged it as Pervitin. In Berlin the streetname for speed is “Perv,” and the majority of foreigners in the city assume that it’s related to “perversion,” though a true speedfreak would know that any sex requiring an erection is unthinkable while binging: Amphetamines are vasoconstrictors, which cause blood-vessel walls to contract. The Nazis subsidized Pervitin, and issued three-milligram daily doses to the Wehrmacht (approx. one-third the daily dose administered to the average ADHD child), while the Americans and British supplied their troops with their own nationally sensitive uppers—the Americans, like the Germans, preferring theirs in pill form, the British preferring theirs in the form of tinctures and inhalants.
Meth’s parent substance, amphetamine—alpha-methylphenethylamine—was developed in Berlin too, in 1887, by chemist Lazăr Edeleanu of Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (now Humboldt-Universität), who also invented the process of refining crude oil. Amphetamine was and still is a more responsible, if more costly, business/pleasure choice than meth, whose double methylation was an attempt to enhance the drug’s delivery system—in essence, to boost its potency. The progenitor of all phenethylamine-class psychostimulants is the organic compound ephedrine, which was first isolated in 1885 from plants of the Ephedra genus, though according to the notes I took on a rainy weekend night at the library of Humboldt-Universität, extracts of Ephedra sinica—joint-pine or joint-fir?—have been used in traditional Japanese and Chinese medicines to treat asthma and bronchitis—since when? The Zoroastrians made entheogenic use of the Ephedraceae too? Neanderthals buried themselves in it, in Kurdistan? My notes are spotty, contradictory. The library is closed on weekend nights. Is memory loss from amphetamine abuse recoverable? Have I searched that up before?
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EACH BOOK IS MYRIAD, is books—what was conveyed to you, what I hoped to convey, your life as you were reading, my life as I was writing—and all the links between them, unlike links online, have to be so embedded and tightly tucked away that they’re unnoticeable; whatever rumples the covers has to be tautened, smoothed.
Back at my apartment—my “flat”—K was on the edge.
He was in the midst of a binge and pacing around his bed, which was just a mattress: no blankets, no sheets, sleepless.
K (that is seriously his initial) was my roommate in Berlin. He used to work for Google. He was hired young and cashed out young, at +/- $600/share. His room was trashed with computers, programming manuals (bindered paper, as if to prove his cred), American snacks ordered online (he missed California). Full ashtrays, empty bottles.
He took another of my pills and broke off half of it for me.
We swallowed dry.
A legal pill, an illegal pill—a pill legal (in America) illegally obtained (in Germany), a pill illegal (in Germany) legally obtained (in America)—whichever: They have the same effect. With other sources, however, you have to equalize the doses. One thirty-milligram pharmaceutical-grade pill is not always equal to one thirty-milligram street-grade pill, due to the street’s tendency to cut: with flour, baking soda, baking powder, rodenticide (if you invest in scales and purity testing kits, you’re done for).
I’m alert; the mind gets fast, fastens. I’m attached to a thought, but then I forget it, but then I remember it, but it’s not the thought I’d had. I don’t think it is, at least. A day passes and if the dosage isn’t upped, the brain scatters like grains across the trackpad. If another day passes and the dosage isn’t upped—until, after sleeplessness, a crash.
K was pacing, babbling about clocks. About clock rates. Upclocking, overclocking. Increasing operating speed through dynascaling, therming.
Computers had gotten too slow.
He’d had this idea, he said. Rather, he said he had a concept.
He wanted to give a computer drugs. He wanted to program a computer not to process the neurological effect of amphetamine, rather to experience the effect itself.
He was already tossing the room, assembling our experiment.
We would compare the effects of amphetamine on a computer with the effects of amphetamine on ourselves—to determine how our processing differed and whether there might be a way of improving computer function without purging memory or performing system upgrades. But as the human brain and the computer were mere analogies for each other, we had to synthesize an amphetamine especially for the computer.
This led to a discussion of methodology.
From the start, the idea of analyzing amphetamine effect on humans—on ourselves—and using that data to create a program to affect our computer in a similar way was rejected, for the reasons that: 1.) human drug experience is never reliable, because humans on drugs are never reliable, and the two of us were now especially untrustworthy, and 2.) computers aren’t capable of consciousness. Rather, even if a computer could be programmed to be aware that it was on drugs, it could never be programmed with that uniquely human admixture of acceptance/denial that both acknowledges the altered state, yet repeatedly proclaims, “I’m OK,” or “I’m perfectly fine to drive.” At the time of our experiment, at least, programming neurosis was beyond K’s—beyond anyone’s—ability.
So we discussed and peer-reviewed, and finally a single approach was decided upon: The first step was to analogize the brain, the second to analogize the substance.
Firstly we’d analyze the way in which amphetamine affected the different areas of our brains, as a means to identifying analogous areas within the computer’s central processing unit (CPU).
Secondly we’d analyze the human amphetamine, or humphetamine, as we called it, in order to find a way to directly translate it to computer amphetamine, or comphetamine, as we called it, by coding their chemico-constituents—the isomers levo and dextro, the hydrogen, NH2, and CH3—into their computational equivalents.
So we went ahead, began analogizing brain structure: Memories short-term and long-term became issues of storage (humphetamine having slight impact on long-term main memory or disk, the comphetamine equivalent would have to focus on affecting the short-term or random access/cache); primary visual and auditory cortices became the computer’s instruction pointer, which receives and keeps track of the order of programmed instruction; the mesolimbic and mesocortical “reinforcement pathways,” which control responses of satisfaction or pleasure at the completion of each task, became the write-back connection located between the instruction pointer and the register file (which stores the memory of each executed instruction: operands/results); the dopamine, serotonin, and glutamate neurotransmitters, and their respective transporte
r proteins, were found in the internal clock, the crystal oscillator, and their connections (all of which determine and conduit rate of processing).
As for the drug, the comphetamine itself: It was coded with supplemental l-and-d enantiomers, which, in context, were instructions to the processor to: 1.) buffer or ignore—levo—any auxiliary program we attempted to run during the running of the initial program, if that auxiliary program was larger or took longer to load, and 2.) reinforce that buffering or ignorance by preventing—dextro—the pointer from sending the execution for write-back—essentially telling the computer not to store any record of its activity in the cache. Lastly, the hydrogen, the binding essence of the molecule, was the primary instruction to the computer’s internal clock—to continually and steadily increase its speed for the duration of the experiment.
Then we had to choose the initial program. We chose something medium-sized. Nothing with video or audio. Word processing.
We loaded our word processer, ran the comphetamine master. We dosed the computer, full strength.
The computer began processing, radiating heat; the cooling fan whirred (K had decided that the computer would not be allowed any supplementary cooling elements).
Throughout the processing, as I typed—or rather flung my digits at the keys: jrfivytngggggghh10pz,.—K floated over me, interrupting my flinging with attempts to run the auxiliary programs: regular checking of processor speed, irregular searches of cache for memory of executions the computer had been instructed to buffer or ignore, a file (huge) of Scarface, these bit.torrents (huge) of a complete season of a German reality show I didn’t recognize—Frauentausch—the translation would be Wife Exchange? Wife Swap?
The intention was that the intervals between K’s running of these programs would decrease in direct proportion to the increase in clock rate—but we weren’t so organized, or unimpaired.