On intuition and the limits of structured thinking

Signifying Nothing: Digital and physical space are not identical

Printers never cooperate. More often than not, at least one of the printers in Smith is flashing red, signaling its disobedience. I know a thing or two about printers. As the 2013-2014 Reed House Printer Coordinator, I was paid $43.75 per week to stock our house printer with paper and ignore the disgruntled emails from housemates trying to print late at night. Basically, it was a good gig.
As Printer Coordinator, I learned to be patient with machines. To work effectively with printers, you have to be calm and understanding, but firm—a printer whisperer. Because printers are in a precarious position. These machines bridge the gap between the physical and the digital. They are portals that translate data into images and text—things you can carry around that are disconnected from digital networks. The portals to the portable.
Printers shouldn’t really do what they do. They connect two disparate worlds, like a shaky wooden bridge in a B-level adventure film. And like those swinging bridges, they always fall apart, only for the hero (in this case, your valiant Printer Coordinator) to scramble up the bridge and preserve life and limb.
As the sphincter of digital space, printers make us uneasy. I’ve often gone to great lengths to avoid printing, to retain the data within the system. Think about Track Changes on Microsoft Word. The neat formalization of digital annotation allows us to avoid marking up our precious documents with our imperfect physical hands.
The frustration of printing reminds us that digital and physical space are not identical. There does not exist a function mapping every point in the physical world to a point in digital space. For now, the two worlds are only connected through us—the consumers—and excretory printers.
So far in this article, I’ve been riffing on a silly conceit. But while thinking about printers as the broken connection between two disparate worlds, I recalled an online experience that really affected me. On July 8, 2015, I (@sgnfyngnthng) tweeted a screenshot of a Facebook module, which said, “CREATE NEW GROUP/The easiest way to share photos and share things with your parents” and juxtaposed my profile picture with that of my two parents.
My parents have been split up for as long as I’ve used Facebook. Since my parents’ marital status has not always been the easiest part of my life, I wasn’t enthused with Facebook’s suggestion. But, as we know, Facebook has little room for unpleasantness. Facebook structures your news feed to reveal content that you don’t want to see, to keep you in a feedback loop of positivity that advertisers can exploit.
By suggesting that I start a group with my divorced parents, Facebook shows its own hand. This glitch in the matrix reveals that there is a matrix. Digital representations are not natural, but rather carefully constructed. While doing Spanish homework last week, I stumbled upon the word “matriz,” which means both matrix and womb. The English word “matrix” comes from the Latin “mater,” meaning mother. The digital matrix may be the mother, womb, outline of our online experience, but as users we are responsible for input.
Although there’s only so much we can do within a social network, recent history has shown how certain platforms lend themselves to “IRL” disruption. Twitter’s structure permits #blacklivesmatter and other activist movements to take hold. In contrast, Facebook’s system of groups can only permit the most self-referential aesthetic, producing communities that amuse themselves but fail to penetrate the mainstream. By imitating real-life interaction but minimizing user vulnerability, Tinder has shifted online dating away from its association with eHarmony tackiness, and made itself a fixture among young people looking to meet.
Form is intrinsically limited, defined by its boundaries. The structure of social media is no exception. Social networking often tries to model our lives. Though no models are perfect, some models are useful. In their imperfection, models are constantly susceptible to revision. Social media will duplicate life when the Smith Union printers work smoothly forever.

Signifying Nothing: Time as a personal and political relationship

How’s your relationship with time?
A few weeks ago, my friend mentioned over sushi that her recent struggles with sleep were connected to her relationship with time. That conversation got me thinking about my own interactions with time. I’ve often treated time as a high school lover, when every second together feels apocalyptic, fleeting moments never quite enough to fulfill my emotional and physical needs. In other situations, passing time feels excruciating, like being an eight-year-old waiting for my mom to finish shoe shopping during a buy-one-get-one sale, or swimming out of a pool of lime Jell-O. Time can also be the friend you don’t really want around, the one that keeps you in the Union for the fifteen minutes before your next class, or makes you lie in bed and listen to The National for an hour on Friday before you start drinking. This kind of relationship can drive you homicidal—often we want nothing more than to kill time, abuse it and cast it aside as if the present moment isn’t important.
Time does matter.
However, how can something so immaterial have such a profound impact on my life? Time is not an object, or an experience, but the function that connects objects and experiences as they take on different forms. From the individual perspective, this process feels continuous. Our sense is that time is constantly flowing, a universal condition of physical and emotional states. Time seems to be a great equalizer, the same train we’re all riding through the universe. But are all the seats on the train of time worth the same amount? What if there were a first class car in front, with lots of legroom and an open bar, but an “economy” car in back, with camped benches, crying babies and overpriced snacks?
In Marxist theory, material conditions determine social, political and ideological structures in society. But matter is determined by more than its form and position in space. Time engenders objects, and allow them to circulate and change. To fight oppression, we have to consider how people across socio-economic classes experience time. Do you have free time to leisure, reflect and unwind? Is time something that you can plan out and control? Time management is a privilege, reflecting one’s temporal wealth. Consider those who must wait in Emergency Rooms or free clinics for basic health care, or have to sit in bus stations instead of taking a cab. Unequal access to time perpetuates inequality by preventing oppressed people from improving their material status. As they say, time is money.
The power of time can manifest itself through state and corporate control. A few weeks ago, we all set our clocks back for daylight saving, an outdated and inconvenient tradition that we nevertheless obey. This weekend, I realized the psychological impact of time when my iPhone clock mysteriously malfunctioned. The clock would freeze periodically and then adjust itself, so the time was off enough to affect my schedule, but not so wrong that I could tell it was messed up. For several days, I felt like I was in some Twilight Zone, trying to navigate a space that was out of my control. When I brought this up to my friend, he said, “How could your phone be wrong? That’s supposed to be the right time!” Without a reliable iPhone, I couldn’t set my watch, or measure the inaccuracy of the clock in Moulton’s light room. By depending on my phone’s clock, I had allowed Apple to become my authority on time.
Recently, I’ve been aiming to understand and improve my relationship with time. Trying to find just a few minutes each day to meditate has shown me how structured my schedule can me, but mindfulness makes me consider my engagement with time. I’ve started planning meals at 12:55 or 5:55, which my friends refer to as “Jesse Time.” The five minute cushion often allows me to beat the meal-time rush. For a long time, I’ve obsessed about punctuality, and allowed other people’s lateness to put me in a bad mood. Now, I’m beginning to understand that we all experience time in different ways. By rethinking my urgency for timeliness, I can release my control over temporal means of production. In doing so, I can consider how my treatment of time affects my personal or political power.
It’s about time.

Signifying Nothing

On intuition and the limits of structured thinking

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Jesse Ortiz

Columnist

October 27, 2015

There are three main arguments in favor of veganism. The first, and (to my mind) most logical, concerns the environment. Seeing the film “Cowspiracy” on campus this weekend reminded me of the devastating effects of animal agriculture, and reignited my enthusiasm and personal commitment to resisting environmentally destructive habits. Without going into too much detail, producing one pound of beef requires 2,500 gallons of water, compared to 304 gallons for a pound of almonds (which are often demonized for their water consumption), and 34 gallons for a pound of broccoli.

“Cowspiracy” convincingly argued that raising cattle for beef is clearing rainforests, wasting water and producing reckless amounts of methane. However, the movie didn’t limit itself to beef production, but aimed to criticize all animal agriculture. To do this, the film had to appeal to vegan argument number two: the appeal to animal sentience. Philosopher Peter Singer has famously argued that we should not eat animals because, as far as we can reasonably tell, animals can feel pain, and we should not cause unnecessary pain. This argument has stuck with me ever since we debated animal consumption in “Moral Problems” my first year at Bowdoin. With the language of “speciesism” (privileging the pleasure of humans over the life of animals) I could finally justify something I’d felt for a long time—that eating animals made me feel mean, icky and kind of uncomfortable. As a kid, I would refuse to eat any meat that had bones in it, choosing chicken nuggets and hot dogs over drumsticks and fish. Eating around bones reminded me that my food had once been a living, feeling animal.

“Cowspiracy” really tries to make its viewers feel icky. In a pivotal moment in the film, the documentarian visits a backyard duck farm and closely watches a man kill a duck. It was gross. However, this scene didn’t really have anything to do with large-scale agribusiness and environmental degradation, the main topics of the film.

“Cowspiracy” also features a scene that appeals strongly to the third argument: health veganism. The filmmaker in “Cowspiracy” interviews a tan, leathery and lean older doctor who talks about how he and his patients have enjoyed exceptional health by following a vegan diet. The funniest part of the film is when this doctor is joking about the cognitive dissonance required for people to consume dairy, which he terms “baby calf fluid.” For this doctor, eating animal products just didn’t make sense for living a healthy lifestyle. There are many arguments for and against health veganism. The China Study is a good place to start, and the internet has no shortage of opinions.

But this article isn’t really about veganism as much as it is about arguments. After spending an hour accusing large-scale cattle farms of destroying the environment, why does “Cowspiracy” show a man beheading a duck? For a while, I’ve been caught up with the various debates over veganism. For some, abstaining from animal products is about helping themselves. For others, it’s about helping animals. Others care most about the environmental degradation of the planet.

Why do we decide to do what we do? How do we make the decisions that shape our identities? Liberal academia supposes that we can rationalize the world by breaking it down, pulling it apart and dividing knowledge into disciplines. Secularism provides no language to earnestly engage with generalities. The world speaks to us, all the time, but the death of God makes it just about impossible to think about things in their entirety.

Academic disciplines impose borders on knowledge. Borders, being functions of power, keep some people comfortable at the expense of others. In his inaugural address, Clayton Rose warned of “the threat to free and robust intellectual discourse” of those who privilege comfort over academic engagement. It seemed to me that President Rose was implicitly attacking the “trigger warnings” without using that phrase directly. While I don’t intend to put words in President Rose’s mouth, he didn’t specify where this threat came from, or how it manifests itself. However, by speaking vaguely, President Rose set limits on his discussion which allowed his listeners to remain comfortable, while positioning himself as the authoritative voice on academic discourse.

I have never heard of a conversation truly being shut down by trigger warnings. Rather, students use these warnings to explore their own boundaries, understand how a conversation makes them feel and convey their discomfort to others. It’s ironic that, after they were criticized for preventing conversations, trigger warnings became a hot-button, widely discussed issue.

The discourse on discourse also reveals an implicit boundary between academic conversations and material action. President Rose’s speech suggests that it’s fine to be “unsafe” and take risks in the classroom. However, a common argument against divesting Bowdoin’s endowment from fossil fuel companies is that we’d be risking our endowment for a symbolic action that we can’t be sure will work. The dualistic approach to material and symbolism is deeply ingrained in secular thinking. Yet, we don’t make decisions in pure rationality. Intuition exists, and beliefs guide even our most mundane actions. What is lost when we break down beliefs into separate parts? As the recent Intersections Teach-In showed us, people can understand and respond to a real and urgent problem by transcending disciplinary boundaries.

And yet we can and should not rely merely on intuition. Many of our instincts are racist, sexist, homophobic or simply selfish. But perhaps, within the limitations of academic disciplines and modes of thinking, we don’t give enough credit to instinct. We already synthesize information with intuition all the time. Sometimes it helps to follow your gut.

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