“Some historians hold that history is just one damned thing after another”*…
… and in one sense, it is. From Matan Stauber, a remarkable demonstration…
“Histography” is interactive timeline that spans across 14 billion years of history, from the Big Bang to 2015.
The site draws historical events from Wikipedia and self-updates daily with new recorded events.
The interface allows for users to view between decades to millions of years.
The viewer can choose to watch a variety of events which have happened in a particular period or to target a specific event in time. For example you can look at the past century within the categories of war and inventions…
Explore “Historiography.”
* Arnold Toynbee
###
As we connect the dots, we might send well-preserved birthday greetings to Kevin Brownlow; he was born on this date in 1938. A filmmaker (documentarian and editor), he is best known as a film historian– the film historian of the Silent Era. His initiative in interviewing many largely forgotten, elderly film pioneers in the 1960s and 1970s preserved a legacy of early mass-entertainment cinema. He received an Academy Honorary Award at the 2nd Annual Governors Awards given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on 13 November 2010– the first time an Academy Honorary Award was given to a film preservationist.
“Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time”*…
Sara Walker and Lee Cronin suggest that time is not a backdrop, nor an illusion, nor an emergent phenomenon; rather, they suggest in an essay from The Santa Fe Institute, it has a physical size that can be measured in laboratories……
A timeless universe is hard to imagine, but not because time is a technically complex or philosophically elusive concept. There is a more structural reason: imagining timelessness requires time to pass. Even when you try to imagine its absence, you sense it moving as your thoughts shift, your heart pumps blood to your brain, and images, sounds and smells move around you. The thing that is time never seems to stop. You may even feel woven into its ever-moving fabric as you experience the Universe coming together and apart. But is that how time really works?
According to Albert Einstein, our experience of the past, present and future is nothing more than ‘a stubbornly persistent illusion’. According to Isaac Newton, time is nothing more than backdrop, outside of life. And according to the laws of thermodynamics, time is nothing more than entropy and heat. In the history of modern physics, there has never been a widely accepted theory in which a moving, directional sense of time is fundamental. Many of our most basic descriptions of nature – from the laws of movement to the properties of molecules and matter – seem to exist in a universe where time doesn’t really pass. However, recent research across a variety of fields suggests that the movement of time might be more important than most physicists had once assumed.
A new form of physics called assembly theory suggests that a moving, directional sense of time is real and fundamental. It suggests that the complex objects in our Universe that have been made by life, including microbes, computers and cities, do not exist outside of time: they are impossible without the movement of time. From this perspective, the passing of time is not only intrinsic to the evolution of life or our experience of the Universe. It is also the ever-moving material fabric of the Universe itself. Time is an object. It has a physical size, like space. And it can be measured at a molecular level in laboratories.
The unification of time and space radically changed the trajectory of physics in the 20th century. It opened new possibilities for how we think about reality. What could the unification of time and matter do in our century? What happens when time is an object?…
Find out at: “Time is an object,” by @Sara_Imari and @leecronin, from @sfiscience in @aeonmag.
Apposite: “The New Thermodynamic Understanding of Clocks.”
* Steven Wright
###
As we contemplate chronology, we might recall that it was on this date in 1947 that the Doomsday Clock appeared for the first time (as the fourth quadrant of a clock face with its hands at 7 minutes to midnight) as the background image on the cover of the June issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. From then to the present, the Doomsday Clock image has been on the cover of the Bulletin, though the hands over the years have been shown moving forward or back to convey how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction (midnight).
The clock currently stands at 90 seconds to midnight.
[HBD, GC(S)]
“Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part”*…
If only. All of us on this interconnected planet are deeply beholden to our oceans; but all too few of us, all too infrequently, pay them heed. Surabhi Ranganathan explores one too-seldom considered dimension in which we need to address that deficit: the “Law of the Sea.” As she explains, the growing international competition for reclamation, navigation, cabling, and undersea resource rights, against the backdrop of climate change, demand a radically-revised approach…
I write this essay in an office in Singapore, where I have just learned an arresting fact. The legal historians Antony Anghie and Kevin Tan have informed me that in the course of my arrival, via Terminal 3 of Singapore’s Changi Airport, I must have crossed – on foot – the probable spot where, more than 400 years ago, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) Captain Jacob van Heemskerk captured the Santa Catarina, a Portuguese ship. This makes sense: in Martine van Ittersum’s rich description of the incident, she notes that it took place at the entrance of the Singapore Straits. Heemskerk, the story goes, made a wild dash to Johor from Tioman Island upon receiving news that two Portuguese carracks laden with spices, silks, and porcelain, would be moving through the Straits. Having missed the first, he awoke on the morning of February 25, 1603, to find the second, the Catarina, right before his eyes. He swiftly captured the ship just off Singapore’s eastern shoals. In the time since that event, projects of reclamation have increased Singapore’s total land area by 25 percent, and Changi airport occupies one such reclaimed part, sitting where the shoals used to be.
The Catarina’s capture occupies an important place in the history of international law. The incident was part of an imperial struggle between European states over access to trade with the East Indies. Such trade promised fabulous wealth: the goods recovered from this event alone sold for over three million guilders in the markets of Amsterdam, an amount that was roughly double the capital of the English East India Company. Portugal was outraged by the loss, while the VOC was keen to defend its actions. On retainer from the company, the jurist Hugo Grotius—then just in his early twenties!—wrote a brief that is now regarded as a foundational text, Mare Liberum, or The Free Sea.
Grotius argued that the sea was entirely unlike land. Land, being fixed, cultivable and, most importantly, exhausted by its use, could be regarded as divisible, subject to public and private ownership, and demarcated by national boundaries. The sea was fluid and constantly in movement; it was indivisible, unoccupiable, inexhaustible, indeed unalterable for better or worse via human activity. As such, it was irreducible to private ownership or state sovereignty. That being the case, it was Portugal that had acted wrongfully in claiming exclusive rights of maritime navigation and commerce with the Indies.
The Grotian imaginary of the sea persisted for centuries. The principle of the freedom of the seas came to define oceanic activities from navigation to fishing. Indeed, modern international law continues to express a principle of maritime freedom, though it is a far narrower form of freedom than Grotius initially claimed.
Today, international treaties, states, institutions, corporations, and courts all recognize that the ocean is divisible and, in parts even appropriable, in the same way as land. Oceanic resources are exhaustible and can also be enhanced by human endeavor: cultivation through new methods like aquaculture is increasingly seen as essential to assure the global supply of fish. In the decades since the Second World War, a dense network of legal rules on access, use-rights, and responsibilities have developed to regulate the crowding conglomerations of interests and territorial claims upon the oceans.
Moreover, international law has been increasingly called upon not only to articulate the ways land and sea resemble each other, but also to address the mutability of those very categories. Thanks to legal and technological innovations, what was once sea might become land: the reclamation projects that have accounted for the site of Changi Airport are but one example. In the other direction, rising sea levels and intensifying critical weather events can quickly turn what was once land into sea. Down in the deep, the binary between land and sea is confounded by formations which appear as neither fully one nor quite the other.
The shifting relation between land and sea reflects the scale of human impact on the environment. This unstable relation forces us to confront the consequences of climate change, as the fixed certainties — soil, resources, infrastructure – that have for so long governed our imagination of land begin to fall apart. As a result, we must contend with new expectations of, and investments in, the sea…
Down in the deep, the legal distinction between land and sea no longer holds– and that’s a problem: “The Law of the Sea,” from @SurabhiRanganat in @thedialmag.
* Hermann Broch
###
As we go deep, we might recall that it was on this date in 1911 that RMS Titanic was launched from the boatyard in Belfast in which it was built, the largest passenger ship of its day. A state-of-the-art steamship, it set sail from Southampton on its maiden voyage on march 10th of the following year, bound for New York City. Four days later, after calls at Cherbourg in France and Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland, the “unsinkable” Titanic collided with the iceberg that sent it under in the North Atlantic, 375 miles south of Newfoundland.
When the location of the wreck of Titanic was discovered in 1985, there was fear that extant Admiralty law would allow for the “looting” of what its discoverer believed should be “a monument.” In an example that the Law of the Sea can in fact be revised, the RMS Titanic Maritime Memorial Act was passed in 1986. (After the Act’s passing, the Department of State proposed an agreement with the United Kingdom, Canada and France (as well as other interested countries) to enact the policies from the 1986 Act on an international scale… the U.K. ratified it briskly, but the U.S. didn’t get around to it until 2019. France and Canada are pending. In the meantime, the wreck of Titanic has been revisited on numerous occasions by explorers, scientists, filmmakers, tourists and salvagers, who have recovered thousands of items from the debris field for conservation, public display… and sale.
“Charisma is not so much getting people to like you as getting people to like themselves when you’re around”*…
Charisma: hard to define, but clear when one encounters it. Joe Zadeh looks at charisma’s history– both as a phenomenon and as a concept– and contemplates its future (spoiler alert– AI figures).
After recounting the story of Stephan George, a German poet and thought leader who was hugely consequential in Germany in the first half of the 20th century, he turns to pioneering sociologist Max Weber, who met George in 1910…
At the time, charisma was an obscure religious concept used mostly in the depths of Christian theology. It had featured almost 2,000 years earlier in the New Testament writings of Paul to describe figures like Jesus and Moses who’d been imbued with God’s power or grace. Paul had borrowed it from the Ancient Greek word “charis,” which more generally denoted someone blessed with the gift of grace. Weber thought charisma shouldn’t be restricted to the early days of Christianity, but rather was a concept that explained a far wider social phenomenon, and he would use it more than a thousand times in his writings. He saw charisma echoing throughout culture and politics, past and present, and especially loudly in the life of Stefan George…
Weber had died in 1920, before George truly reached the height of his powers (and before the wave of totalitarian dictatorships that would define much of the century), but he’d already seen enough to fatten his theory of charisma. At times of crisis, confusion and complexity, Weber thought, our faith in traditional and rational institutions collapses and we look for salvation and redemption in the irrational allure of certain individuals. These individuals break from the ordinary and challenge existing norms and values. Followers of charismatic figures come to view them as “extraordinary,” “superhuman” or even “supernatural” and thrust them to positions of power on a passionate wave of emotion.
In Weber’s mind, this kind of charismatic power wasn’t just evidenced by accounts of history — of religions and societies formed around prophets, saints, shamans, war heroes, revolutionaries and radicals. It was also echoed in the very stories we tell ourselves — in the tales of mythical heroes like Achilles and Cú Chulainn.
These charismatic explosions were usually short-lived and unstable — “every hour of its existence brings it nearer to this end,” wrote Weber — but the most potent ones could build worlds and leave behind a legacy of new traditions and values that then became enshrined in more traditional structures of power. In essence, Weber believed, all forms of power started and ended with charisma; it drove the volcanic eruptions of social upheaval. In this theory, he felt he’d uncovered “the creative revolutionary force” of history.
Weber was not the first to think like this. Similar ideas had been floating around at least as far back as the mid-1700s, when the Scottish philosopher David Hume had written that in the battle between reason and passion, the latter would always win. And it murmured in the 1800s in Thomas Carlyle’s “Great Man Theory” and in Nietzsche’s idea of the “Übermensch.” But none would have quite the global impact of Weber, whose work on charisma would set it on a trajectory to leap the fence of religious studies and become one of the most overused yet least understood words in the English language.
…
A scientifically sound or generally agreed-upon definition of charisma remains elusive even after all these years of investigation. Across sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, history and theater studies, academics have wrestled with how exactly to explain, refine and apply it, as well as identify where it is located: in the powerful traits of a leader or in the susceptible minds of a follower or perhaps somewhere between the two, like a magnetic field…
…Weber himself would disagree with the individualized modern understanding of charisma. “He was actually using it in a far more sophisticated way,” he said. “It wasn’t about the power of the individual — it was about the reflection of that power by the audience, about whether they receive it. He saw it as a process of interaction. And he was as fascinated by crowds as he was by individuals.” In Weber’s words: “What is alone important is how the [charismatic] individual is actually regarded by those subject to charismatic authority, by his ‘followers’ or ‘disciples.’ … It is recognition on the part of those subject to authority which is decisive for the validity of charisma.”
…
The Eurocentric version of how Weber conceptualized charisma is that he took it from Christianity and transformed it into a theory for understanding Western culture and politics. In truth, it was also founded on numerous non-Western spiritual concepts that he’d discovered via the anthropological works of his day. In one of the less-quoted paragraphs of his 1920 book “The Sociology of Religion,” Weber wrote that his nascent formulation of charisma was inspired by mana (Polynesian), maga (Zoroastrian, and from which we get our word magic) and orenda (Native American). “In this moment,” Wright wrote in a research paper exploring this particular passage, “we see our modern political vocabulary taking shape before our eyes.”
Native American beliefs were of particular interest to Weber. On his only visit to America in 1904, he turned down an invitation from Theodore Roosevelt to visit the White House and headed to the Oklahoma plains in search of what remained of Indigenous communities there. Orenda is an Iroquois term for a spiritual energy that flows through everything in varying degrees of potency. Like charisma, possessors of orenda are said to be able to channel it to exert their will. “A shaman,” wrote the Native American scholar J.N.B. Hewitt, “is one whose orenda is great.” But unlike the Western use of charisma, orenda was said to be accessible to everything, animate and inanimate, from humans to animals and trees to stones. Even the weather could be said to have orenda. “A brewing storm,” wrote Hewitt, is said to be “preparing its orenda.”
This diffuse element of orenda — the idea that it could be imbued in anything at all — has prefigured a more recent evolution in the Western conceptualization of charisma: that it is more than human. Archaeologists have begun to apply it to the powerful and active social role that certain objects have played throughout history. In environmentalism, Jamie Lorimer of Oxford University has written that charismatic species like lions and elephants “dominate the mediascapes that frame popular sensibilities toward wildlife” and feature “disproportionately in the databases and designations that perform conservation.”
Compelling explorations of nonhuman charisma have also come from research on modern technology. Human relationships with technology have always been implicitly spiritual. In the 18th century, clockmakers became a metaphor for God and clockwork for the universe. Airplanes were described as “winged gospels.” The original iPhone was heralded, both seriously and mockingly, as “the Jesus phone.” As each new popular technology paints its own vision of a better world, we seek in these objects a sort of redemption, salvation or transcendence. Some deliver miracles, some just appear to, and others fail catastrophically.
Today, something we view as exciting, terrifying and revolutionary, and have endowed with the ability to know our deepest beliefs, prejudices and desires, is not a populist politician, an internet influencer or a religious leader. It’s an algorithm.
These technologies now have the power to act in the world, to know things and to make things happen. In many instances, their impact is mundane: They arrange news feeds, suggest clothes to buy and calculate credit scores. But as we interact more and more with them on an increasingly intimate level, in the way we would ordinarily with other humans, we develop the capacity to form charismatic bonds.
It’s now fairly colloquial for someone to remark that they “feel seen” by algorithms and chatbots. In a 2022 study of people who had formed deep and long-term friendships with the AI-powered program Replika, participants reported that they viewed it as “a part of themselves or as a mirror.” On apps like TikTok, more than any other social media platform, the user experience is almost entirely driven by an intimate relationship with the algorithm. Users are fed a stream of videos not from friends or chosen creators, but mostly from accounts they don’t follow and haven’t interacted with. The algorithm wants users to spend more time on the platform, and so through a series of computational procedures, it draws them down a rabbit hole built from mathematical inferences of their passions and desires.
…
The inability to understand quite how sophisticated algorithms exert their will on us (largely because such information is intentionally clouded), while nonetheless perceiving their power enables them to become an authority in our lives. As the psychologist Donald McIntosh explained almost half a century ago, “The outstanding quality of charisma is its enormous power, resting on the intensity and strength of the forces which lie unconscious in every human psyche. … The ability to tap these forces lies behind everything that is creative and constructive in human action, but also behind the terrible destructiveness of which humans are capable. … In the social and political realm, there is no power to match that of the leader who is able to evoke and harness the unconscious resources of his followers.”
In an increasingly complex and divided society, in which partisanship has hindered the prospect of cooperation on everything from human rights to the climate crisis, the thirst for a charismatic leader or artificial intelligence that can move the masses in one direction is as seductive as it has ever been. But whether such a charismatic phenomenon would lead to good or bad, liberation or violence, salvation or destruction, is a conundrum that remains at the core of this two-faced phenomenon. “The false Messiah is as old as the hope for the true Messiah,” wrote Franz Rosenzweig. “He is the changing form of this changeless hope.”…
How our culture, politics, and technology became infused with a mysterious social phenomenon that everyone can feel but nobody can explain: “The Secret History And Strange Future Of Charisma,” from @joe_zadeh in @NoemaMag. Eminently worth reading in full.
###
As we muse on magnetism, we might recall that it was on this date in 1723 that Johann Sebastian Bach assumed the office of Thomaskantor (Musical Director of the Thomanerchor, now an internationally-known boys’ choir founded in Leipzig in 1212), presenting his new cantata, Die Elenden sollen essen, BWV 75— a complex work in two parts, of seven movements each, marks the beginning of his first annual cycle of cantatas— in the St. Nicholas Church.
“You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don’t already believe it”*…
As Greg Miller explains, conspiracy theories seem to meet psychological needs and can be almost impossible to eradicate. But there does appear to be a remedy: keep them from taking root in the first place…
If conspiracy theories are as old as politics, they’re also — in the era of Donald Trump and QAnon — as current as the latest headlines. Earlier this month, the American democracy born of an eighteenth century conspiracy theory faced its most severe threat yet — from another conspiracy theory, that (all evidence to the contrary) the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Are conspiracy theories truly more prevalent and influential today, or does it just seem that way?
The research isn’t clear. Rosenblum and others see evidence that belief in conspiracy theories is increasing and taking dangerous new forms. Others disagree. But scholars generally do agree that conspiracy theories have always existed and always will. They tap into basic aspects of human cognition and psychology, which may help explain why they take hold so easily — and why they’re seemingly impossible to kill.
Once someone has fully bought into a conspiracy theory, “there’s very little research that actually shows you can come back from that,” says Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge whose research focuses on ways to combat misinformation. “When it comes to conspiracy theories, prevention is better than cure.”
…
Talking a true believer out of their belief in a conspiracy can be nearly impossible. (The believer will assume you’re hopelessly naïve or, worse, that you’re part of the cover-up). Even when conspiracy theories have bold predictions that don’t come true, such as QAnon’s claim that Trump would win reelection, followers twist themselves in logical knots to cling to their core beliefs. “These beliefs are important to people, and letting them go means letting go of something important that has determined the way they see the world for some time,” says [Karen Douglas, a psychologist who studies conspiracy thinking at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom].
As a result, some researchers think that preventing conspiracy theories from taking hold in the first place is a better strategy than fact-checking and debunking them after they do — and they have been hard at work developing and testing such strategies. Van der Linden sees inoculation as a useful metaphor here. “I think one of the best solutions we have is to actually inject people with a weakened dose of the conspiracy…to help people build up mental or cognitive antibodies,” he says.
One way he and his colleagues have been trying to do that (no needles required) is by developing online games and apps. In a game called Bad News, for example, players assume the role of a fake news creator trying to attract followers and evolve from a social media nobody into the head of a fake-news empire…
The critical question — pushing the vaccine metaphor to its limits — is how to achieve herd immunity, the point at which enough of the population is immune so that conspiracy theories can’t go viral. It might be difficult to do that with games because they require people to take the time to engage, says Gordon Pennycook, a behavioral scientist at the University of Regina in Canada. So Pennycook has been working on interventions that he believes will be easier to scale up.
…
Even as researchers push to develop such measures, they acknowledge that eradicating bogus conspiracy theories may not be possible. Conspiracy theories flourished as far back as the Roman Empire, and they inspired an angry mob to storm the U.S. Capitol just last week. Specific theories may come and go, but the allure of conspiracy theories for people trying to make sense of events beyond their control seems more enduring. For better — and of late, very much for worse — they appear to be a permanent part of the human condition…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The enduring allure of conspiracies, ” from @dosmonos in @NiemanLab.
* Robert Anton Wilson
###
As we fumble with the fantastic, we might send prodigious birthday greeting to G.K. Chesterton; he was born on this date in 1874. The author of 80 books, several hundred poems, over 200 short stories, 4000 essays, and several plays, he was a literary and social critic, historian, playwright, novelist, Catholic theologian and apologist, debater, and mystery writer. Chesterton was a columnist for the Daily News, the Illustrated London News, and his own paper, G. K.’s Weekly, and wrote articles for the Encyclopædia Britannica. Chesterton created the priest-detective Father Brown, who appeared in a series of short stories, and had a huge influence on the development of the mystery genre; his best-known novel is probably The Man Who Was Thursday.
Chesterton’s faith, which he defended in print and speeches, brought him into conflict with the most famous atheist of the time, George Bernard Shaw, who said (on the death of his “friendly enemy”), “he was a man of colossal genius.”
The lunatic is the man who lives in a small world but thinks it is a large one; he is the man who lives in a tenth of the truth, and thinks it is the whole. The madman cannot conceive any cosmos outside a certain tale or conspiracy or vision.
G. K. Chesterton
You must be logged in to post a comment.