Amerika

Based on Brett Stevens’ piece on future functionalism and Peter Slezkine’s piece on a Multipolar World future, the following thoughts may be applicable.

The deduction is that the future regardless of the option chosen, must be functional, or, regardless of the option desired, that functionality will decide over what the people desire.

The lessons learnt from past cycles, are that people/leaders never follow up on mistakes made or try to fix the sequence of failures characterising every cycle. The next cycle always starts anew.  This time however, it is different.

This time the current declining cycle is not destined to reach its end. The West may be bankrupt, but money still flows. And more importantly, western languages are still favored and respected.

This brings forth the following table:

Language	Pidgin	Digital Orality	AI Orality
Individual meaning	Opposite meaning	Group meaning	AI design

The table should be read from left to right. The top line depicts the nature of human communications over time. Human groups usually use their bodies to communicate, then vocalise their communications ending with literature where thoughts are written down (in stone) as they used to say. This is called language. What is interesting is that male individuals mostly wrote things down. The second line therefore indicate that literature itself presented individualism (to some extent)

Over time and over many generations, people tend to ignore the written part and use vocalization to invert word meanings by speaking pidgin language, now perpetuated through BBC pidgin channels. Whereas individualism was serious because of literature, pidgin was seen as humorous where elites and commoners vocally use the same word but with opposite meanings with wry, cynical smiles all around.

The age of computers arrived, bringing with it digital orality. This is texting of typical vocal expressions in written form transmitted digitally. Whereas pidgin vocals are not recorded, digital messages are because it is “literature.” Some people say it is just social media, but lawyers say it is serious, carrying liability which have ruined people already.

Even body language can be included in this type of communication. One can almost imagine a student taking an oral examination being allowed to flash smiley faces to punctuate his verbal argument.  But because this communication is between everybody i.e., society, the messages represent group meaning and many observers use statistics obtained from these messages, because it is viewed as “the truth,” whether it is in fact, is not the issue. This type of society or group have been described as the Precariat, or in other words, the new common class to replace the Western middle-class.

The future is rushing toward us in the form of artificial intelligence. If you are a student, you can ask AI to write an essay for you with references. If you are a manager, you can ask AI whether you should hire or fire somebody. AI will answer your questions in written format, but you can’t hold it accountable. This does not promote functionalism, which is a problem.

However, if the programmers of AI can change the basis of the AI generator to a functional abstract design base (requirements analysis, system analysis etc) instead of a liberal university literal database, then language will become functionally serious and with it, human life. The idea is to think in abstract models which will result in real literature that can be functionally applied.

In the old days they used to use the expression “from first principles” — well, we need an AI like that.

Afterthought: The reference below from the book “The Internet is not the answer” by Andrew Keen in 2015 describes the pidgin language used in America very well. In today’s political language “Peace through Strength” actually means “Peace through Ignorance” for which there are many references motivating separate discussion. There are many parts applicable, and the book is a must read, but the following is copied as an example:

On the list of all-time greatest lies, the idea that FAILURE IS SUCCESS doesn’t quite match the Orwellian trinity of WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, or IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, but it’s still an astonishing perfidy, worthy of the best Ministry of Truth propagandist. And yet, in Silicon Valley the “failure is success” lie has become such an accepted truth that there is now even an event called FailCon, dedicated to its semination.

Along with several hundred other aspiring disruptors. I’d gone to FailCon to learn why, in the Valley at least, failure is considered to be desirable. Held at San Francisco’s luxury Kabuki hotel a couple of miles west of the Battery, FailCon was part of countercultural remix of the old Protestant work ethic, part classic Californian self-help therapy; and – like most technology events in Silicon Valley – wholly divorced from reality. It’s as if the Orwell’s Ministry of Truth had, to borrow another fashionable Valley word, “pivoted” into the conference business. “Stop being afraid of failure and start embracing it,” the event instructed its audience. And to help us overcome the fear, to make it feel good to fail, FailCon invited some of Big Tech’s greatest innovators to outfail each other with tales of their losses.

Postmodernists might add that pidgin language comes about through political correctness. Certain viewpoints, topics, or notions are banned through language, meaning that words referencing those cannot be used, leaving us only the approved terms that remain.

In order to use these to communicate, we have to cobble together salads of buzzwords to frame the context of the expression of the same old stuff, so that people can see that our take on the status quo is both socially acceptable and entirely different.

This means that we gesture at meaning with language, using the terms we are still allowed, and come up with an imprecise contexture of political language and emotive hyperbole, leading to more confusion than if we had not spoken at all.

Tags: pidgin, precariat