Val Plumwood, author of Being Prey, was found dead on March 1st, 2008. I read the story of her being (almost) prey due to a crocodile attack in The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2001, edited by E. O. Wilson (the crocodile incident, where she nearly fell prey, happened in 1985). The 2001 booklet has several other fascinating stories as well (not least, Wilson's introduction). Being prey is of course not normally how we think of ourselves... but it happens. Val calls the report on her near death experience (while being in a crocodile's death roll) a ...

"... humbling and cautionary tale about our relationship with the earth, about the need to acknowledge our own animality and ecological vulnerability"

It is of course another example of an inversion (albeit a "traditional" one) ...

Stiff People’s League

I learned about Stiff People's League via a LabCast from MIT that I recently saw. For me this is another example of a strange inversion: This virtual soccer game is primarily played in Second Life but also real people at a foosball table can join the action. But they are really secondary. So when you're inside of Second Life you see these clumsy proxies of real-world people inside of the machine. Tron: "Are there users?". In the Stiff People's League you can see proxy actions of real users. The borders keep melting, possibly faster than the polar ice caps. Let the Ka be with us...

Great Minds Like a Think! Or Like Thinks a Great Mind??

So I'm fond of this idea of an inversion. A bit like Pollan's corn domesticating us, instead of the other way round.
Or the inversion in 'office automation': we used to be in charge. Now we've become gmail transducers.
The idea is not new... but can still be intriguing. Biologists can tell you all about it: Check out co-evolution! Who is the parasite and who the host?

Anyways, here's another one: When you get up at 3am in the morning, and half-asleep stumble to find a pencil and paper to write down an idea. Why then are we saying that

I had an idea! And I had to write it down!

Are we really having an idea? Or is the idea having us?
Well, well -- It sure feels like a forced move. Gotta think about this: is there a way to distinguish whose in charge and who is simply reacting?
It seems things are often a bit more symmetric than we would wish ...

Are you a Gmail Transducer?

In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan asks whether we have domesticated Corn, or whether Corn has domesticated us. Strange inversion of reasoning you might think. Isn't it evident that we are in charge, controlling where corn is grown, how much of it, etc? Sort of... and after all, we have free will, right?

So how is your free will coming along recently, as you are consuming a constant stream of incoming messages, reacting to it by producing a stream of outgoing message, slavishly following a Getting-Things-Done scheme?

Wikipedia says:

A transducer is said to transduce (i.e., translate) the contents of its input tape to its output tape, by accepting a string on its input tape and generating another string on its output tape. It may do so nondeterministically and it may produce more than one output for each input string. A transducer may also produce no output for a given input string, in which case it is said to reject the input.

Sounds familiar? Doesn't this idea of being a Gmail Transducer give the notion of Office Automation a totally new meaning? It used to mean that we tell the machine what to do. The tedious, repetitive stuff. But things change and life co-evolves with those changes. We have now perfectly adapted to our new, self-inflicted work environment. A toast to plasticity and adaptation! We have turned ourselves into the cogs of the meme replication networked mega-machine!

Welcome then to the Wonderful Life of gmail transduction -- and enjoy your stay!
And please don't forget to output a comment after you've input this message...