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I'm giving the opening talk at Defrag tomorrow, and for some reason I insist on talking about the implicit. I keep coming back to this topic, and I still don't get it right. Here are the notes for my talk; they accompany a deck, which might explain their sketchiness. You may notice bits I've talked about before, but much of this is new...and at least this audience isn't going to have to watch my "Everything Is Miscellaneous" talk again.

Here goes:

At Defrag we’re talking about how we can put the pieces back together. The pieces aren’t broken because the original order is there. But now we can ALSO arrange them the way we want.

I want to talk about the role of the implicit, because as we put pieces together, the way we do it is more in service of what isn’t said -- it’s more mysterious than we sometimes think, and we should be humble about our ability to piece ourselves together.

I’ve decided to call it the unspoken because the implicit is about what we don’t see or don’t know, whereas the unspoken says that what isn’t there has to do with language and meaning.

This talk is divided into five moments of the unsaid

#1

[I'll read the following poem:]

Blue Hydrangea

Like the green that cakes in a pot of paint,
these leaves are dry, dull and rough
behind this billow of blooms whose blue
is not their own but reflected from far away
in a mirror dimmed by tears and vague,
as if it wished them to disappear again
the way, in old blue writing paper,
yellow shows, then violet and gray;

a washed-out color as in children's clothes
which, no longer worn, no more can happen to:
how much it makes you feel a small life's brevity.

But suddenly the blue shines quite renewed
within one cluster, and we can see
a touching blue rejoice before the green.

Rainer Maria Rilke
William H. Gass, trans.

Look at how much isn’t said in that line. We wash clothes, and they become more our own as they lose their color. That’s something we know implicitly. We know that clothes need washing.

The next line makes explicit that Rilke is thinking of clothing folded and put away for a child who has grown. Rilke is giving us increasing degrees of explicitness. Poet has to get this right.

But, computers are explicit. At the hex level, the poem is unambiguous and explicit

Even more explicit at the bit level. Anything left unsaid is simply undone when it comes to bits.

Computers began as engines of the explicit.

In the 1950s, they were the symbol of reducing life to data, and thus were symbols of conformity - we had to conform ourselves to their needs.

There was truth to the old Hollywood view. We all know that computers have reduced us. We look like this, but to the database we look like this,

We have allowed ourselves to be informationalized - thoroughly reconceived in terms of information

Information has even somehow been added to the basic mix of how we understand ourselves, as if we had a flesh and blood organ that processes information.

But, the Web is different from fifties computers. The Web links one page to another, but does so through language...the language of the anchor text as well as the words around it that contextualize it.

Hyperlinks are the opposite of information. They enrich, rather than reduce. Open-ended, decentralized, messy… all the things databases of info are not. Most of all, they are social...

...They are done for someone by someone. Linking is a type of writing. We link for some anticipated set of readers.

So, the Web works against the regime of informationalization.

Rashi said [I can't find the reference] about dogs that contact with humans ensouls them. That’s what we’re doing with computers, in a way.

Which is so different from where we thought computers were going in the Fifties. We thought in fact that computers as engines of informationalization when they became human, as with HAL in “2001,” they’d be demonic precisely because they grew up alone, in a world of mere information.

#2

I can’t tell you everything about my children. If I could, something would be wrong with our relationship.

If everything about a character can be expressed by saying she’s the dumb blond or the wisecracking sidekick, the character has failed. So, I can’t tell you everything about my children. But here’s what our relationship looks like to Facebook, when my son friended me. [The form with the categories of relationships]

This is a poor beginning. But it’s just the beginning.

We quickly ensoul Facebook by what’s said, and by what isn’t said, just as with all human relationships.

Judith Donath talks about this in terms of signaling...

...which we could also think of as gesturing. The value often isn’t in what’s said, but in what isn’t said ... the gesture, unintended or intended (Tommie Smith, 1968). It is hard to exhaust the meaning of such a gesture. It is hard to say what it gestures to.

#3

In an informationalized age, we think we are always giving off information. We used to see a street ...

… as a flow and eddies of publicness and privacy -- unfathomably rich with the implicit. That’s why we can sit at a sidewalk cafe and watch the river.

But now we think it’s all information, and all is information is alike. The surveillance cameras can’t tell the interesting bits from the uninteresting. It’s all explicit. That’s why we’re ok with 5000,000 surveillance cameras in London. The private has gone from what is kept off the record to, now that everything is on the record, what we’re allowed to pay attention to on the record. We may trust our government to see the right statistical correlations, but we can see beyond the statistics. We know there's more there. But why?

#4

We understand things through their potential. We simply don’t understand what an acorn is if we don’t see that it’s a potential oak tree, even though statistically, most acorns will rot in the ground.

Compare that to ["If you can dream it, you can be it," which claims all is possible. There’s got to be a better way to give our children hope than to lie to them.

Compare this to Rilke's lines about the child, in which we grieve the loss of potential, even when the potential is actualized, as when children grow up.

That’s not to say we’re good at understanding potential itself. For example, both sides in the abortion debate are prone to get this wrong. The pro-choice people have been known to refer to an embryo as a mere lump of flesh, as a growth. The anti-choice folks confuse the potential of the fetus with its actuality, thinking of abortion as the murder of a person. We’re not very good at understanding potential. Both are wrong. The fetus is a potential person, although that doesn’t help you resolve the debate, because we don’t know what rights are owed to lumps of flesh that can grow into into personhood.

We can informationalize potential and make statistical guesses, which may be quite accurate.

We can even teach a computer about potential. Doug Lenat’s CYC is trying to teach a computer all that we know without having to speak it -- that clothes have to be washed, and that washed clothes sometimes lose their color. It’s quite difficult to utter everything you know. CYC uses teams of philosophy PhD’s, for well over a decade. Yet even if CYC passes the Turing test about children’s clothing, we know something is missing. What?

Potential is lumpy. The world shows itself to us in those lumps. What turns the statistical homogeneity of possibility into the curds of potential?

#5

Rilke shows us something about old blue writing paper, and leaves most of it unsaid: That there is connection to hydrangea and to childhood. That the decomposition of time can reveal what was there but hidden. That the natural world and the world of art are not separate. But there is a world of possible connections Rilke could make. He chooses to make some of them apparent. He lets the world show in terms of what matters. Mattering makes possibility lumpy. The fact that we care about the world creates the lumps of potential. That’s the difference between us and CYC. It’s not simply that we care and CYC doesn’t. It’s that our caring creates a shared unspoken that is the source of meaning and value. We have divided the world into lumps because it matters, because we care.

It is ultimately language that is the unspoken between us. Language is driven by what matters to us. We have words, sentences, paragraphs, punctuation.... That’s the shared lumpiness of the the unsaid. And now we have links. Links that have presence and persistence.

Our brains discriminate edges, but we we also are fascinated by the transcendence of edges. The value is in the complex, the loose-edged, the potential, the unspoken, because that is what we share and how the world matter to us.

Defrag -- our generational project, not just this conference -- isn’t about reassembling pieces. It’s not about clarity and simplicity. It’s about how we are finding ways to let the world matter to us together. For that we need to enable, cherish, and protect the unspoken between us.