Modernism, Postmodernism, and Digitality
The Difference between Digitality and Postmodern
The first piece of the puzzle is to enumerate the differences between the new order – Digitality - and the old order – Postmodernism. The Postmodern era began with the challenges of World War II and before that of the great depression. In solving the present problems, they created a new set of problems which were far beyond the Modern’s scope. They created a global thermonuclear war and a generation far larger than could be sustained with the present infrastructure. They also created a new theory of math known as “Game Theory” which explained how players could move so as to limit the “minmax” of their losses. With the tools of production and the mathematics and engineering of game theory and of information theory they did not know it but they had produced a new kind of Cultural System for the second half of the 20th century.
The first thing to do is to explain why Postmodernism is both a sign of victory and an epitaph for defeat. This is because many of the Postmoderns do not like the term Postmodern. This is because there are many uses of the term Postmodern and one of those is to clear it a term of the left. But there are other uses for the term including corporate architecture that uses a sense of place to grapple with an oversized architecture. It was originally a reaction to the formalism of the 1950s. one of the seminal books is called Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour, and Denise Scott Brown. It opens with the first part: “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas” and then follows it up with the next part: “Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or The Decorative Shield.” Originally published in 1972, its theme is that rigid formalism combined with an austere lack of ornamentation is fundamentally not in touch with the commercial values that real estate, emphasizing the word real, must be in touch with. This is why they begin with the declaration that the necessity of studying the “commercial strip” as found in Las Vegas because the commercial value that buildings set upon must be taken into account. On the first page, they declare:
Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect. Not the obvious way, which is to tear down Paris and begin again, as Le Corbusier suggested in the 1920s, but another, more tolerant way; that is, to question how we look at things.i
In other words, where there is confusion, it is because multiple uses of the term are conglomerated into the same pottage. This confusion still occurs in criticisms of American academia, where Postmodernism is a critique of a particular version of continental philosophy and its descendants. While this may be important to many it is not the use of the term “Postmodern” which is used here. Instead, the entire spectrum of usage is implied from arcane philosophy to commercial products, because after all, traches are part of Postmodernity as much as Foucault in that they come from a theory that is put into practice having been communicated by books, software, and explanation. In this sense, Postmodern can be described as a conservative viewpoint in economics standing for low tax rates on the wealthy to allow them to buy capital. It was the Modern which raised rates on income tax and the Postmodern which reduced them with the leadership of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Not to put too fine a point on it but in this book, a cultural system has both reactionary, conservative, liberal, and radical aspects even though one or more may attempt to demonize the very way they do things. Thus when Fredric Jameson uses the phrase he is using it in a radical Marxist interpretation that does not mean that there are not others who are conservative or reactionary, this includes President Trump because he needs to use mechanisms that were not popular in the modern synthesis.
In other words, “Postmodern” includes all that was done in order to destroy the system that preceded it, and that means that in this book there are reactionary Postmoderns, conservative Postmoderns, liberal Postmoderns, and radical Postmoderns. The same will be true of Digitality: what is important is the establishment of a new order rather than what end the order comes from.
So, what can be pointed to as Digitality? The first, and most obvious, example is the use of digitization of information. While the Postmodern invented digitization its core it believed that the sum and total of knowledge were contained in “books”, “essays”, “reports”, and “papers” which could be collected so that an individual could them. It diverted from this in order to read secret documents such as the “Enigma” but the final end product was still in analog form which needed to be digested by humans. Contrast this with the information that digitization requires: the notes in terms of comments are a guide to the information but the information is instead in computer code or in database structures. Contrast this with the opening of Learning from Las Vegas which begins with the concept that literature and idioms are the access to knowledge.ii
This difference, between knowledge as transmitted from person to person or from leader to mass of people with code as the ultimate arbiter when run on a machine, is fundamentally part of digitization’s fundamental reality. This means that in Digitality’s framework, there is “no there there.” There is no person who can decipher what a git actually means.
This needs a framework and communicatory framework, which again it inherits from the Postmodern, and makes it central. This is of course the Internet, the always-on-always present reference to all that is, even if the Internet is wrong on any particular fact. This is because it has all of the facts, and that the current most popular fact may be wrong is not an issue for the Internet: eventually, it will be corrected in a leader revision. This too is more monumental than it at first appears there is no original source to be discovered. Instead, there are only additions, revisions, and stable releases. This means it is not the latest version but the most stable version which is canonical. There can be errors in individuals’ logic, but these are aberrations in terms of Digitality’s conception.
But when having a communicative array framework, it also needs a tool to translate the underlying pile of data. Which means that even footnotes need to be communicated. And that is coming into being.
However, there is much more to Digitality. This is because it is not Visionary but Revolutionary in its concept. One of the steps is to trace the road from analog to digital in the same manner as tracing the road from B/W to color television sets for the same reasons: it is a new way to understand transmission.
What this means from a scientific point of view is as follows, while the Postmodern is interested in the kurtosis which is motivated by the very small number of people who can order a nuclear war and their subordinates the Digitality is interested in the φ because everyone is linked to global warming even though the most powerful have the most say.
Postmodern:
Digitality:
This means that the Postmodern ones minimize the long tail which is the Laplace transform while the Digitality ones minimize a Fourier transform based on Dirac delta conception. Think about this for a moment: the Postmodern wants to minimize the number of GTW actors that still have a chance to maximize the threat while the digitalis wants to maximize the number of people who depend on energy while minimizing the total population pyramid. This means that the Postmodern is in the logarithmic phase while the Digitality is in the sigmoidal phase.
This also means that be Postmodern once to minimize the competition for not only global thermonuclear war but also anything that has value. That means that we can save for later whether this is a general signal in that a Cultural System wants to have a straight line even if in the long term it is a sigmoidal curve. Because any given point can look as a straight line until it hits the late stage.
This means that the “late stage” Postmodern needs to prop up the straight line by consuming more and more of the added value even if it consumes all of the surplus. Now we need to look at whether or not those things labeled as profit really are profit or are borrowing from the future a surplus that is not really available. Because at the late stage, the gap between a straight line and the sigmoidal curve grows ever upwards.
But when does the curve hit the late stage rather than evolutionary? In the Postmodern case, it is rather simple to see that there was a 2007- 2009 financial crisis where the response was to hold up the banking system including by allowing the banks to own private homes. This did extremely well for the banking system but created the problem that more and more of the private homes are bank-owned rather than privately owned. That means that we can draw a curve so that the Postmodern is passed peaking and the Digitality is not quite capable of assuming control. The challenge from the Postmodern perspective was to prop up the banking system because this is the most important economic activity that the dominant country, the US, controls. President Barack Obama, being a Postmodern president, did exactly what the consensus demanded even though it was a long process.
The following graph was done by many, including myself, which started with each recession and plotted how long it took to recover the lost employment:iii
The trick is that by taking Linear algebra and setting the first month as the beginning of the recession one can then take the eigenvector of the lost employment as a “V” until the eigenvector crosses the 0% line, we can then take the eigenvalue as the depth in percentage terms.iv Note that the postmodern recoveries from 1990 onwards are different then the recoveries from 1948 to 1981: they have fewer people unemployed but have them for longer. This is even true of the Great Recession because while it only dropped by 1.25% it continued for three times longer than the 1981 recession. This means that various indicators will be changed from one system to another rather than all indicators moving together.
At the time there was a call for a different type of economy, but there was no way to run such an economy nor any way to staff that economy. The required consensus was not available for the change from fossil fuels to electrical based on solar, wind, and nuclear. There is a consensus now for such an economy to be placed instead of the fossil fuel economy, but the consensus from scientists is not sufficient.
The problem at present is that while it is not possible to profitize the fossil fuel economy when one takes into account the losses from fossil fuels, these losses are not yet accounted for in terms of economics or legality. This does not mean that they are not there, and in fact the current economy once said that it is changing from fossil fuels but is not actually doing so in any form that is nearly sufficient. One can see this in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its reports. For example:
Climate change is projected to alter land conditions with feedback on regional climate. In those boreal regions where the treeline migrates northward and/or the growing season lengthens, winter warming will be enhanced due to decreased snow cover and albedo while warming will be reduced during the growing season because of increased evapotranspiration (high confidence). In those tropical areas where increased rainfall is projected, increased vegetation growth will reduce regional warming (medium confidence). Drier soil conditions resulting from climate change can increase the severity of heat waves, while wetter soil conditions have the opposite effect (high confidence). {2.5.2, 2.5.3}v
There is simply too much false profit to engage in such realism. But this is exactly what the Cultural System would tell us: before the law says that the paper conforms to the reality there must be damage to the countries who stand to make profit. And as we shall see in “inequality” if the countries can make other people pay, even if it is their own people who are too young to object, then the Cultural System will do that until it is far too late. This is a theme which will be revisited with every logical system.
The inequality is not just for profit, but the right to say what profit is.
i Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. 1977. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press called Las Vegas. 3.
ii Las Vegas. 3.
iii This is from Researchgate from FED data.
iv It should be noted that there is a distinct difference between Modern recessions and Postmodern recessions, in that the Modern recessions were numerous but short whereas the Postmodern recessions (1990, 2001, 2007) are longer but less numerous.
v IPCC, 2023: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Called IPCC 2023, 14.