The past is right here with us; it's an idea that I think is particularly well-expressed in "the infinite image" by zainab bahrani

imagine: you see a sculpture from 5000 or even 25000 years ago today. You think, "that looks so nice." Someone from the time that the artifact was made says the same thing. Other people at both times think not.

ancient objects holding aesthetic value today indicates some enduring sense of aesthetics/beauty. endures --> duration

not making the claim that there *is* a standard or universal aesthetics, but that at least some of the base processes of thinking, evaluating, etc. are the same. There is a connection across time and we relate to these figures of the would-be past simultaneously

the line of time is not straight, but jumbled in a knot; in this metaphor, "A" and "B" can end up right next to, if not directly on top of one another

this is the kind of against-trajectionist, relational foundation that I come to when i read about spheres of exhange (Appadurai, Bohannn)

spheres of exchange: boundaries determined by prestige, moral, use cases, not anything-to-anything value abstraction (some things can't be traded for each other outside exceptions). spheres emerge when it doesn't "make sense" for two things to be traded for each other. spheres not only determine associations between goods, but can be used to create boundaries around who is allowed to trade/have what

in the whole-world, though, people don't stay in the closed system of their sphere-of-exchange architecture; they venture out and interact with people who have other sphere architectures and other systems

two people interact, standing in front of each other; behind them each is a cloud of mystery; and behind each of their opacities is a unique sphere architecture

money is the sphere breaker (it establishes anything-to-anything value abstraction), but it can have fucked up societal consequences... it's been called a "shatteringly simplifying idea" which is why it creates its own revolution

every commodity refers to a mound of different relations and agents

is it possible that spheres help prevent the monopolization of sustenance goods? Instead of being able to use the equalizer to hoard resources, the hoarder is forever obligated to exchange some of theirs for something else. One simply cannot have all the corn if corn is a currency needed to acquire meat

ideas and culturfacts are not commodities

globalization will refer to the final cry of the european modernity project, with liberalism and the european modernity project being interchangeable. This thing would like to commodify ideas and culturfacts, which are not the physical byproducts of events and time

what is not commodity is still a byproduct of conditions, but without being produced concretely (like thought). It comes about spontaneously

trajectionism is a weapon to justify liberalism's expansion

As the failures of the european modernity project elucidate, it is pushed harder and stretched thinner; in the face of these failures (the failure to eradicate poverty, the failure to literacize the world, the failure to end war and hunger) the cry becomes more frantic and violent, like a big baby. To the rest, these were not really failures, but examples of generational capping 🧢 (your heart was never in it)

the broken dream of top-down globalization is collapsing under its own weight thanks internet

the term "scapic" intends to capture the expansive, fluid and unpredictable nature of global/culture in "the information age," primarily referring to appadurai's five dimensions of culture flow: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, ideascapes

knot theory helps give poetry/science/mapping to the idea of folded up time (the present is always with us, relational thinking) and this manifold model of scapism

this got me thinking that persistent homology or braid theory could be useful in figuring out how ideas and symbols propagate semantically in social networks

if the scapes of hypermodern flow twist up into strange manifolds, their subscapes could be seen as reduced-dimensional projections of these highly complex processes

knotting/unknotting numbers could then be seen as a measure of complexity or potential opacity within a community or set of relating agents. threads (of interest, communicating, interaction) can maintain distinct topologies while linking productively with others

There's also the introduction of bollinger bands (thanks @antidwell): resonant interest zones that expand and contract with respect to heat, volatility, excitement. Something emerges under the umbrella of "bands of interest" that feels intuitively useful for understanding pluralistic, anti-algorithmic ways of connecting + being

Romanticizing the work that I’m leaning on is what I’m most concerned with avoiding - like Sokal wrote: can’t be using math language to give false authority to philosophical claims 

Big questions: 

How are bands maintained?

How have they been identified/talked about before? 

If ideas, culturfacts, and other things exist that are protected from being reduced to money-value with spheres of exchange, how does the scapic flow of high modernity complicate those things? How can they be protected?