situationism....,

So Harvard calls the study of something vaguely reminiscent of "dopamine hegemony", situationism, interesting.

The Situationist | Situationism is premised on the social scientific insight that the naïve psychology—that is, the highly simplified, affirming, and widely held model for understanding human thinking and behavior—on which our laws and institutions are based is largely wrong. Situationists (including critical realists, behavioral realists, and related neo-realists) seek first to establish a view of the human animal that is as realistic as possible before turning to legal theory or policy. To do so, situationists rely on the insights of scientific disciplines devoted to understanding how humans make sense of their world—including social psychology, social cognition, cognitive neuroscience, and related disciplines—and the practices of institutions devoted to understanding, predicting, and influencing people’s conduct—particularly market practices. Jon Hanson & David Yosifon, The Situation: An Introduction to the Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, and Deep Capture, 152 U. Pa. L. Rev. 129, 149–77 (2003).

Situationism has been applied to such topics as power economics, natural disasters, obesity, commerical speech and junk-food advertising, Supreme Court dynamics, racial injustice, affirmative action, race and rape, employment discrimination, employee adherence to workplace rules, legitimization of war, inside counsel, corporate law, and player autonomy in the National Basketball Association, among other topics.

Generational Causus Belli....,

My man Spence has been holding it down this week on the subject of youth rioting in Europe and some of what's motivating the current wave of unrest. David Green explored some of this same territory with an American focus at Counterpunch.

I cannot think of a single time in American history where one generation left their children such a stunningly large and complete a mess to clean up.

The fiscal part of it is astonishing, though only the most visible element. A wrecked economy that may sink below the depths of the Great Depression is just the latest contribution. But even before that, economists have been predicting that today’s young people will be the first generation in American history to be less well off than their parents. That doesn’t even account for the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, which has been almost completely neglected for thirty years, so that we could party now and pay later. It also doesn’t include bills encumbered as Baby Boomers begin to retire and demand their promised Social Security and Medicare. These would be almost impossible to meet by virtue of demographic and rising healthcare factors alone. But we might have had a chance at doing so had we set aside the revenues coming in all these last decades while Boomers were working, for use at the time when the payers would became the payees, en masse. But, of course, that would have meant raising taxes or spending less – and we can’t have that! – since we’ve been using that money instead to pay for general budget expenses.

Or, should I say, to not pay for general budget expenses? Could you imagine parents so reckless that they would party themselves into a drunken stupor by stealing the funds from their children? I’m not talking about burning through the inheritance, which, after all, is the parents’ money to do what they want with. No, I’m talking about spending the money the kids have saved themselves for their own college education, or for a down-payment on a house. Outrageous, eh? Well, guess what? That’s exactly what the Baby Boomers did. Because they wanted all the government services they got, plus the tax cuts that put a little extra jingle in their pockets, plus the luxury of being so stupid and ill-informed that they didn’t have to grapple with the questions of where that tax ‘cut’ money was really going, or how utterly bogus were the administration’s claims about its policies, especially concerning the hugely expensive Iraq war. Put it all together and it equates to living well beyond your means. And when you do that, there are only so many ways to deal with the difference in what you’re spending versus what you’re bringing in. Cue the kids here.

The math is astonishing. The current amount of the national debt is a staggering 10.667 trillion dollars, and climbing fast (indeed, it has already risen substantially since I typed that number). Let’s leave aside for the moment that it is rising every year with each annual deficit – which some people now think could be a dramatically record-breaking trillion dollars next year – added to the pile. And let’s also leave aside the fact that each of those dollars are borrowed, and are thus accruing additional liability every day in the form of interest. If we just take the current debt, and divide it by the number of payroll workers in America (about 150 million), that means each worker’s share of the existing debt is $71,113. Now, just for the sake of argument, let’s say a worker has a job pulling down fifteen bucks per hour in pay. At that rate, they would have to work 4,741 hours to do nothing but pay off the amount that has been borrowed in their names, without their assent, and just to cover only what has been loaned so far to date – not counting new additions to the pile each day, and not counting accruing interest. At forty hours a week, that’s 2.37 years of someone’s life. In fact, that’s 2.37 years of 150 million people’s lives. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine going to someone and saying “I’m going to force you to work over two years of your life in some job you probably don’t like, so that I don’t have to”? Because that’s exactly what this represents: Baby Boomers refusing to live within their means and desperately turning to their own children to facilitate the parents’ irresponsibility. Parents stealing more than two years of their children’s lives, to add two years of play time to their own. Unreal.

Interestingly, there is as yet no current mobilization along generational lines in the U.S. such as we're witnessing in Europe. I suspect we can easily understand why this is the case. I suspect that as we descend further into the devastating economic crisis of the Greatest Depression that Barack Obama cannot halt, there will be tens of millions of Americans who will be ruthlessly thrust aside. As their houses are foreclosed, as their jobs are lost, as they are forced to declare bankruptcy and watch their communities collapse, they will retreat even further into irrational fantasy. It will be very interesting to see what glittering and self-destructive illusions the dopamine hegemony - our corporate advertisers, our charlatan preachers, our television news celebrities, our self-help gurus, our entertainment industry and our political demagogues—have in store for American youth who have yet to face their own rude awakening. We ain't seen nothing yet.....,

Decision Neuroscience

This will not be the first time you've heard this from me, I've variously addressed it hereabouts under the rubrics neuroeconomics or dopamine hegemony - but this morning my very good friend Arnach hit me up back channel with a morsel supportive of the theory that global human governance boils down to the science of stimulating and controlling dopaminergy in the individual brain.

From the Stanford Storybank we have This is Your Brain on Bargains.

Scientific inspiration can derive from the most mundane experience. Archimedes was said to have figured out how to compute volume in his bathtub. When Uzma Khan had her eureka moment, she was sprawled on her couch, just back from a shopping mall where she had gone to avoid working on her dissertation.

Khan—then at Yale, now an assistant professor of marketing at the Graduate School of Business—knew all about the supposed levers of consumer behavior: supply, demand, advertising, discounting. Traditionally, business theorists described consumer behavior as being based on rational decisions about value and price. But as Khan looked at the shopping bags strewn around her apartment she realized that the conventional wisdom was, well, bankrupt. She was sure that her buying decisions had much less to do with price than they did her frayed nerves. She had gone shopping to feel better. Once home, the thrill was gone. “I looked at all that stuff, all those bags, and I thought, 'I don't need this stuff. I'm going to take most of it back. What was I thinking?'”

Khan's professional focus today is answering that question—what are we thinking when we go shopping? She is one of a growing number of researchers at Stanford and elsewhere working on consumer mysteries: Why are our needs and wants so disconnected? Why do people dig themselves into debt from foolish spending? Why do our brains perceive expensive products as superior? And what are the biological bases for the pleasures that shopping or even the anticipation of shopping can unleash?

So simple, elegant, and obvious. Selective governance via the natural tendency of the brain's neuronal circuits to Do What They Do..., what could be easier, more powerful, and more durable than that? The basic fact is that humans are routinely exploited by those with the wherewithal to "engineer" values in the outside world and a little knowledge of the workings of the "inside" world.

Hegemony for Health!!!

In the NYTimes - Warning: Habits May Be Good for You in which the methods of dopamine hegemony are shown both to have turned you into an automatized consumer and revolutionized your health and well-being in the process. (not to mention selling bazillions in products, as well.)

If you look hard enough, you’ll find that many of the products we use every day — chewing gums, skin moisturizers, disinfecting wipes, air fresheners, water purifiers, health snacks, antiperspirants, colognes, teeth whiteners, fabric softeners, vitamins — are results of manufactured habits. A century ago, few people regularly brushed their teeth multiple times a day. Today, because of canny advertising and public health campaigns, many Americans habitually give their pearly whites a cavity-preventing scrub twice a day, often with Colgate, Crest or one of the other brands advertising that no morning is complete without a minty-fresh mouth.

A few decades ago, many people didn’t drink water outside of a meal. Then beverage companies started bottling the production of far-off springs, and now office workers unthinkingly sip bottled water all day long. Chewing gum, once bought primarily by adolescent boys, is now featured in commercials as a breath freshener and teeth cleanser for use after a meal. Skin moisturizers — which are effective even if applied at high noon — are advertised as part of morning beauty rituals, slipped in between hair brushing and putting on makeup.

“OUR products succeed when they become part of daily or weekly patterns,” said Carol Berning, a consumer psychologist who recently retired from Procter & Gamble, the company that sold $76 billion of Tide, Crest and other products last year. “Creating positive habits is a huge part of improving our consumers’ lives, and it’s essential to making new products commercially viable.”

Through experiments and observation, social scientists like Dr. Berning have learned that there is power in tying certain behaviors to habitual cues through relentless advertising.

The Peacock/Peahen Spectacle

"I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceases only in death." -- Thomas Hobbes

Six billion or so of you humans are imprisoned in a status-driven social paradigm. You are bound and determined to increase your social status -- i.e., increase the size of your peacock tail. The only way for you to increase the size of your peacock tail is to deplete natural resources. I call this process the Peacock/Peahen Spectacle.

All of the organizations comprising your society -- be they branches of government, universities, corporations, politicians, churches, and philanthropies -- work to support the genetic drive for increased status. The leading members of those social organizations (i.e. highest status individuals) work to increase the status of the organizations and in the process, increase their own personal status. Throughout this process, opinions expressed by dissenting individuals are suppressed. Dissent within the overarching paradigm is not conducive to the achievement of high status.

In addition to being among the most powerful genetic drives, the genetic drive for status is utterly insatiable, in other words, if your neighbor appears to increase his status beyond yours, then you must work harder to increase your status and get ahead of him (buy more-expensive car, bigger house, better job, etc.). This tendency is commonly referred to as "keeping up with the Joneses".

All high status individuals within your social paradigm deliberately lie (many subconsciously though none the less obviously) to further their drive to increased status. Moreover, no high status individual is willing to lose social status by admitting lies, errors, or omissions in the decisions that they've taken pursuant to their status-seeking aims. So, not only do all of the organizations within your society work in concert to promote this paradigm, but, all the current high-status individuals leading these social organizations are genetically-biased against telling the truth because it threatens to cost them their hard-won social status.

When people are frustrated in their endless drive to increase status, they often resort to violence. The only alternative to public violence is the endless conversion of finite natural resources into ever-more-marvelous peacock tails - thus it is that the Peacock/Peahen Spectacle operates within a system of governance via dopamine hegemony.

With fewer natural resources available for conversion into ever-more-fabulous and more widely sought-after peacock tails - the insatiable and infinite genetic drive for increased status must inevitably lead to a new world war over finite natural resources.

Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied

Charles Kettering: General Director of Research Laboratories at General Motors.
[From Nation's Business, 17, no. 1 (January 1929), 30-31, 79.]

A few weeks back I was sitting with a group of executives. All were admiring a new model.

"It is absolutely the best automobile that can be made," enthused one. I objected to that statement.

"Let's take this automobile which, you say, is the 'best that can be made' and put it into a glass showcase," I said. "Let's put it in there-seal it so no person can possibly touch it. Just before we seal it in the case, let us mark the price in big letters inside the case."

"Let us do that and come back here a year from today. After looking at it and appraising it, we will mark a price on the outside of the glass. It will be a price something less than what we think the car is worth today. Probably $200 less. Then, let's come back once every year for ten years, look through the glass, and mark a new price. At the end of ten years we won't be able to put down enough ciphers to indicate what we think of the car. That is, of course, eliminating its value as junk.

"In those ten years, no one could possibly have touched the car. There could be no lessened value through handling. The paint would be just as good as new; the crank case just as good; the real axle just as good; and the motor just as good as ever.

What then, has happened to the car?

"People's minds will have been changed; improvements will come in other cars; new styles will have come. What you have here today, a car that you call 'the best that can be made,' will then be useless. So it isn't the best that can be made. It may be the best you can have made and, if that is what you meant, I have no quarrel with what you said. . . ."

Change, to a research engineer, is improvement. People, though don't seem to think of it in that manner. When a change is suggested they hold back and say, "What we have is all right--it does the work." Doing the work is important but doing it better is more important. The human family in industry is always looking for a park bench where it can sit down and rest. But the only park benches I know of are right in front of an undertaker's establishment.

The younger generation--and by that I mean the generation that is always coming--knows what it wants and it will get what it wants. This is what makes for change. It brings about improvements in old things and developments in new things.

We, as manufacturers, must offer those improvements after they have been found to be capable improvements. The public buys and disposes of what it has. The fact that it is able to dispose of what it has enables us, as producers, to put a lower price tag on the new model. The law of economy in mass production enters here. We are permitted to turn out cars in volume because there is a market for them...

If everyone were satisfied, no one would buy the new thing because no one would want it. The ore wouldn't be mined; timber wouldn't be cut. Almost immediately hard times would be upon us.

You must accept this reasonable dissatisfaction with what you have and buy the new thing, or accept hard times. You can have your choice.

Of course, it wasn't always this way. Coupled with the corporate aim of production and sales without end, psychology and the tools of mass media combined to give rise to the collective id monster threatening to devour us all - dopamine hegemony.

The Face of a Prophet

In today's NYTimes;

“I consider this the biggest financial crisis of my lifetime,” Mr. Soros said during an interview Monday in his office overlooking Central Park. A “superbubble” that has been swelling for a quarter of a century is finally bursting, he said[...]The market theory he has promoted for two decades and espoused most of his life — something he calls “reflexivity” — is still dismissed by many economists. The idea is that people’s biases and actions can affect the direction of the underlying economy, undermining the conventional theory that markets tend toward some sort of equilibrium.

Mr. Soros said all aspects of his life — finance, philanthropy, even politics — are driven by reflexivity, which has to do with the feedback loop between people’s understanding of reality and their own actions. Society as a whole could learn from his theory, he said. “To make a contribution to our understanding of reality would be my greatest accomplishment,” he said.

Soros is correct. "Reality" mirrors the contents of the collective unconscious. To change the former requires autonomous access to and some degree of control over the latter. Human beings have engendered a number of such cultures of psychological competence. The currently dominant dopamine hegemony is not such a culture. Instead, it is a culture in which the tendency toward unconscious behaviour is maximized and ruthlessly and habitually exploited. That's why it works. That's why it's universal, and that's why it will be our undoing.

Duck and Cover: It's the New Survivalism

Moral blindness and the governance system of dopamine hegemony will prove more devastating than a thousand atom bombs.

The traditional face of survivalism is that of a shaggy loner in camouflage, holed up in a cabin in the wilderness and surrounded by cases of canned goods and ammunition.

It is not that of Barton M. Biggs, the former chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley. Yet in Mr. Biggs’s new book, “Wealth, War and Wisdom,” he says people should “assume the possibility of a breakdown of the civilized infrastructure.”

“Your safe haven must be self-sufficient and capable of growing some kind of food,” Mr. Biggs writes. “It should be well-stocked with seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc. Think Swiss Family Robinson. Even in America and Europe there could be moments of riot and rebellion when law and order temporarily completely breaks down.”

Survivalism, it seems, is not just for survivalists anymore. Faced with a confluence of diverse threats — a tanking economy, a housing crisis, looming environmental disasters, and a sharp spike in oil prices — people who do not consider themselves extremists are starting to discuss doomsday measures once associated with the social fringes.

Duck and Cover: It's the New Survivalism in today's NYTimes..,

Obamamandius

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

As the ultimate rorschachian figuration, Obama has been claimed and disclaimed by elements from all across the spectrum desperate to be seen as relevant or percipient. Few, however, comprehend his actual signification. Last year at Cobb, I spelled out precisely what would be required of the presidential heir apparent.

Last night, I happened to catch some of Real Time on my way to shuteye and saw Andrew Sullivan venture about as close as anyone has here-to-date in grasping the signification of an Obama presidency. Baraka is an idealized construct of elite governance. This is why he has garnered the support of U.S. elites and elements from throughout the establishment. quoth Sullivan;

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can......Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly—and uncomfortably—at you.

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

Remember, when everything is said and done, and all the rorschachian self-affirmations are complete, all that will remain, and all that has ever mattered from the outset with this perfectly honed candidacy - has been the imperative to maintain the global rule of dopamine hegemony.

Jevon's Paradox and the Tata Nano

India’s Tata Motors on Thursday unveiled the world’s cheapest car, a $2,500 four-door subcompact the company promises will revolutionize the auto industry by bringing car ownership within reach for tens of millions of people. The potential effect of Tata’s Nano has given environmentalists nightmares, with visions of the tiny cars clogging India’s already choked roads and spewing millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air.

Industry analysts, however, say the car may do for India and the developing world what Ford’s Model T did for America nearly a century ago — deliver unprecedented mobility to the masses.

In economics, the Jevons Paradox is an observation made by William Stanley Jevons, that as technological improvements increase the efficiency with which a resource is used, total consumption of that resource may increase, rather than decrease. It is historically called the Jevons Paradox as it ran counter to Jevons's intuition. However, the situation is well understood in modern economics. In addition to reducing the amount needed for a given output, improved efficiency lowers the cost of using a resource – which increases demand. Overall resource use increases or decreases depending on which effect predominates.

Dopamine hegemony ruthlessly drives the herd over the cliff and into the olduvai gorge....,

UPDATE:
Ed Dunn caught in the act of simultaneously peeping the same phenomenon and coming correct with its implications;This Car Should Make You Lose Sleep Tonight

Systemüberwindung

Hegemony is usually understood to mean the one-sided ability to influence others. In contrast to an empire, which actually has formal political control over the affected territory, the hegemonic power merely has the power to influence events. Since the decline of conventional imperialism, hegemony has been revived as the organizing principle of international relations.

“People are pretty much the same everywhere; they all want the same things.”

In the fin d'siecle dopamine hegemony, this is a common suggestion. Seldom if ever do you hear the countervailing point that this is due in largest measure to “want creation” by the global media, due to a “revolution of rising expectations”, and so on.

“America couldn't be all bad, otherwise everyone wouldn't want to live here”, is still another common suggestion. It is far more accurate to state of immigrants to America that a certain kind of person from every other type of culture wants and has wanted to immigrate to America, the kind of person with a certain framework of values, a certain constellation of wants - a certain definite neurotype. Wants unquestionably imply things -- and pretty much only things.

Non-economic migrants have always been a very, very small subset of those who have made their way to America - and non-economic motivations have always been a very, very small component of any mixed bag of immigrant motivations.

The neurotype that wants things, that wants the same things - is the neurotype unfailingly drawn to aggregate with the dopamine hegemon.

Given the distinctly psychological nature of this hegemonic phenomenon, we are faced with an urgent demand-side problem. The demand-side is the controlling variable in the short and mid-term.

Given that the gathering planetary energy crisis is exponential in nature, the neurotype that is expressing the hegemon's values, its media-driven constellation of wants - is THE major component of the failing energy foundations of the prevailing global civilization (dopamine hegemony).

Solar energy and natural resource supplies are fairly well fixed; whereas, the effects of increments of growth in demand have exponential and not proportional consequences.

What will survive the inevitable collapse of dopamine hegemony?

The Creative Stream

1 John 2:15 Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi - The World - To be tightly attached to the world signifies immaturity; as long as you're an embryo, blood-drinking is your business. III, 1293-7]

There are two distinct streams of human life on the earth. One is the visible external stream of life - a system of organization in which we are governed by a combination of suggestion, coercion and the skillful manipulation of desire and cognitive error. Sadly, because it is the dominant scheme of human affairs, most of us are obliged to participate in this system of organization.

One can say that this stream is causal. Factors that existed in the past are producing results experienced in the present and which promise to be carried forward into the future. With the advent of mass communication technologies in the 20th century, cultural hegemons have been empowered to further distribute, amplify, and enforce important features of their system of organization. Theirs has rapidly become a global standard operating system influencing if not outright governing the affairs of all of humanity.

The great majority of humanity is content to live in the visible external stream of hegemonic life. Only a few people are even searching for another stream - driven by a feeling that we are only half alive and perhaps not even that. Despite the manifold communication tools at our ready disposal - many of us are stuck in dreadful isolation and have begun to despair of genuine and meaningful interpersonal communion. Even the way most folks come together in person under present circumstances, there is a tendency to front and to confine oneself to trivial and external exchanges - or formal and ritual exchanges. Oftentimes, we depart one another's company even lonelier and less fulfilled than before we'd come together.

Last week I wrote at Spence's joint about an experience I had the friday before Christmas. This experience confirmed for me the ready existence and availability of a second stream of human life present and available in the lives of everyday people, if only you are motivated to seek and choose this alternative for yourself.

It was my privilege to meet an elder who founded just such a creative stream in Kansas City.

anyway, in the afternoon, they had a christmas party where I met the brother who originally founded the consultancy. we talked for a while and he described to me the apprenticeship model he implemented beginning in the late 1950’s to make 4-6 young Black engineers. (this brother was the first Black engineering graduate from the University of Nebraska - if I remember correctly)

In the room were three generations of civil and mechanical engineers who were all brought up and brought together by this one old cat - simply because he could. The continuity of working for the work had produced this large thriving extended “family” as it were of folks who in turn, “work for the work”.

The alternative picture of reality given by the activity of these people comprises a potential second stream of human life on the earth. I believe that communities of such people have formed over the years for mutual support and collaboration. Exactly such a formation occurred decades earlier during the 20th century. Many other people have seen this picture at different times and places. Since they couldn't directly communicate the picture to the majority of others, they all contributed to creating a situation where it could be communicated and transmitted across generations within the community.

These people used their understanding of the situation to make adjustments and create work oriented cultures that study and practice the arts. While humanity became increasingly enmeshed in the causal stream which thanks to technology and applied psychology has grown to planetary hurricane strength during the 20th century, such small communities and cultures of competency provided sanctuary in the encompassing storm. Each time the stream has broken out previously, it has centered its activities around the arts. Each time, it has been co-opted and assimilated by the hegemon. I have concluded that by themselves, the arts are insufficient to the cause of nucleating a persistent, autonomous, and self-sustaining alternative to dopamine hegemony.

Exploration of the hegemonic governance space has been primary to me for as long as I've been online. As I see it, traditional governance is about the establishment and maintenance of control and distribution barriers. Riffing on McKenna, race in America is a social construct with a definite history and governance application. I find numerous striking parallels between that history and application, the challenge of computational governance, and, the emerging challenge of genomic governance;

One of the perennial hallmarks of Black cultural genius in America is our knack for surmounting control and distribution barriers. Personally, I've never encountered a control or distribution barrier that couldn't be hacked...., it's precisely because of this fact that I place primary emphasis on science and technology as the object of any creative collaborations with which I'm involved.

Five Minute Primer on Dopamine Hegemony

Video - Century of the Self Pt One

Business responded to people's innermost desires in a way that politicians never could do.

It was a form of democracy that depended on treating people not as active citizens, as Roosevelt did, but as passive consumers,

because this, as Bernays believed, was the key to control in a mass democracy.

It's not that the people are in charge, but that the people's desires are in charge.

The people are not in charge, the people exercise no decision making power in this environment.

So democracy is reduced from active citizenry to the idea of the public as passive consumers driven primarily by unconscious desires.

If you can in fact trigger those desires, you can get what you want from them.

Neuroeconomics - Dopamine Hegemony

Physiological utility theory and the neuroeconomics of choice;

For decades it has been known that these neurons and the dopamine they release play a critical role in brain mechanisms of reinforcement. Many of the drugs currently abused in our society mimic the actions of dopamine in the brain. This led many researchers to believe that dopamine neurons directly encoded the rewarding value of events in the outside world.

That last one is a gem. Even though the discipline is barely aborning, it's already become value-laden and placed in the service of a political agenda.

Neuroeconomics has been described as:

• "an emerging transdisciplinary field that uses neuroscientific measurement techniques to identify the neural substrates associated with economic decisions” (Zak, 2004, p. 1737)
• “Economics, psychology and neuroscience are converging today in to a single unified discipline with the ultimate aim of providing a single, general theory of human behavior. (…) The goal of this discipline is thus to understand the processes that connect sensation and action by revealing the neurobiological mechanisms by which decisions are made". (Glimcher & Rustichini, 2004, p. 447)
• “the program for understanding the neural basis of the behavioral response to scarcity” (Ross, 2005, p. 330)