First Thought - When data goes mystic or, Data Myth

Thinking a bit about the past. And how we got here. Ruminating on the passing of Paul Kantner, and contemplating his dogged clutch to a futuristic transcended science fiction vision. And where a lot of my impressions of technology emanate initially from .. Shannon the telegraph messenger, Wiener the cyberneticist, the Alchemists, neural nets.

Have taken time too to track back and visit Lewis Mumford, who I probably have only read before but once or twice removed. His Myth of the Machine –while rich but scatter plotted – sets a backdrop for the present moment of machine learning and the rebirth of AI – much as Kantner’s Wooden Ships does.

Maybe by riffing on Mumford I can characterize my moody interpretation of technology better. I have been a mystical spin on technology for a very long time. And therefore I go back to another point in time to start over again via Lewis Mumford

Who's book is purply impenetrable – as much about science as Benedictine monks’ fermenting cheese or Micky Mouse’s sorcerer’s apprentice’s broom.

Mumford can see the days of yore that now escape us. He sees  the envy of the birds in the desire to conquer the air in the myth of Icarus, the flying carpet in the Arabian Nights, or the Peruvian  flying figure of Ayar Katsi. [The index to They Myth of Machine is like the debris of a cruise ship in the Sea of Saragossa.]

Mumford notes that literate monks like Bacon and Magnus (the ones on the cusp of alchemy and modern science- when clockwork elements began to show the path of automation) like da Vinci did visualize elements that are still fodder for the Astonishing Tale tokens of our day -  incredible flying machines, instantaneous communication, transmuting of the elements. He notes too how magically influential still the dynamo and the talking machine were as he wrote (late 1960s).

Mumford mentions Thomas More, and Utopia, Bacon and The New Atlantis, in depicting the machine itself as an alternative way of reaching heaven. Language for him is a disease with symptoms we see as dream symbols that become imposing metaphors that like myth rule. You can only filter what you see using the commanding metaphors of your age, he suggests. And the machine is that which bugs Mum.

What is the myth or master metaphor of today? The belly I labor bacteria like in is made of the myth of data. Data bears resemblance to penury as described [p.274] by the Mummer man [who by the way had not too kind comments for contemporary Marshall Mcluhan.] Ask the people who sued Netflix for using their data in an A/B machine learning contest.  What do they think of mystic data? Or, the myth of the machine? –J.V.