Sunday, November 17, 2024

Cultagory Theory (School of Tomorrow)


In the minds of some fans, presuming fans, the above might seem a bold new direction, in terms of stepping onto the world stage. But for me it's more a tying off loose ends, as I've got these long running themes I've made some waves about, and now want to further contextualize, while I'm around to do so.

However, I'm not denying there's new content. The "USA OS" meme has burgeoned and I've been in meetings about it. My School of Tomorrow curriculum has come together more tightly.

On the matter of where and how to introduce cryptography, I want to keep Elizebeth Friedman one of the portals and her crusade against the rumrunners. Glenn Stockton educated me about these chapter. He'd been a cryptanalyst (a code breaker) himself and during his stint with the NSA, Elizebeth's husband William's works, which she'd help organize, were still classified.

The Roaring 20s, Prohibition, and Bucky Fuller's experiences with radio, including encryption, sets up a  prequel chapter to WW2, with Alan Turing and the Martians of Science (see Istvan Hargittai's book). The Vienna Circle features prominently as well, for its contributions to logic, music, and psychoanalysis. We pick up on Fuller's remarks about Freud and the importance of the invisible, relating to the metaphysical.

From Freud we jump to Bernays and those Adam Curtis documentaries about the powers of persuasion and their importance in manufacturing consent. Now that Natural Language Processing has shown us ways to model word embeddings by means of a vectorized Hilbert Space, we're better able to appreciate "tensegrity" as Fuller meant it.

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