Stevenmitchell

— Wikipedian ♂ —
Name	Steven Mitchell
Current location	Long Island, NY
Education and employment
Occupation	student
Employer	Internetworking Systems & Technology, Inc. (former employer)
Education	Associates degree, currently Bachelors degree
High school	Bernards
University	Stony Brook University, Baruch College (CUNY), Raritan Valley Community College

This user is a member of WikiProject World Digital Library.

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. My name is Steven Mitchell and I am an older undergraduate at Stony Brook University as a triple Major in Psychology, History and Anthropology with Minors in Women's Studies and Archaeology. I am a former consulting network architect, Electrical Engineer and Telecommunications project manager for hire to financial service firms on Wall Street (companies involved in the manipulation of money for their personal gain) and the occasional pharmaceutical company. By that I mean that I designed global data delivery systems with their accompanying security requirements and developed corporate strategies (to accomodate policies) for Fortune 100 firms. I was at one time also a contributing member of the IETF, particularly in the area of routing and security protocols and was on the Board of the IEEE Comsoc in New York City, as well as other boards. However, the events of September 11th put myself and a significant number of people in the New York City metropolitan area out of work and ultimately discharged us from a career. (So please if you are in Boise, Des Moine or Pheonix and were dismayed by the WTC attack, keep in mind you were essentially unaffected and only marginally from a distance).

I like writing fiction, introspection and serious philosophical and theoretical work; great books; women; healthy & tasty foods; maybe some wine, maybe some smoke, great films; singing blues, classical and modern rock; listening to virtually any type of music (definitely including hip-hop) and nearly every intellectual discipline in the natural and social sciences. Doesn't it appear to you that all of knowledge is interrelated?

Quick Summary for the ultra lazy: Unfortunately, 1) we are a society that, because of technology, is quickly moving towards a one-size-fits-all featurability. If you want to live outside of the box, you will have to live in a cave (probably in Montana or North Dakota). To gain enough market share to be viable, all of technology has to dumb people down to appeal to the greatest common denominator, which is an intelligent gerbil. 2) Technology is now in control of "human progress", as a living being powered and fed by humans. Eventually, humans are merely instruments that will be totally unnecessary for technology to continue. Both of these circumstances are the result of human decisions that are probably too late to get under the control of human management, predominantly because most humans are simply not intelligent enough to be aware or cognizant of any developments outside of their own body. Associated with this, is that as the more intelligent humans evolve their cognition and filter it down to their less fortunate brethren, it will have already come to pass in its cultural gentrification and be ubiquitous...

Aside from the internet, which I believe offers great potential to open up human democracy (especially with Wikipedia-type formats), I think technology is as an entity, momentarily and maybe for the long-term, obsolete, as a supplement to human life. It has become a religion rather than a tool. I think eventually it may become humanity's worst enemy and an impediment to its use (if it isn't already)... Very specific anecdotes of this are: human capacity and capability on the computer keyboard, monitor and mouse is already underserved by nearly 3 or 4 times our common contemporary performance capacity. DSL currently can't be used for corporate home user's connectivity to the mother infrastructure. Telephones aren't integrated with the Rolodex of numbers we keep nor to the handheld devices we may use. Few device databases can talk to any other device databases - most especially between generations of devices (there is no common repository tool that is cross-platform, cross-generation and cross-tool). Other than the internet, computers do very little now that they didn't do, 20 years ago, just a lot more volume. There are actually considerably less applications now for home or office PC's than at that time, thanks to the decline of software competition in the U.S. Now we all use the same product - one size fits all. Other than some specialized applications primarily for unix users, little has been achieved. The only effective Search technology currently available of any significance is "Google". While it has developed a much larger post-search database than was available at the time of their inception 11 years ago, as a tool it inhibits/prevents specific algorithm combinations, in spite of their official advertisement. (If you haven't noticed in 2010 they have changed their Advanced Search menu options so that despite their offering of them on the template they no longer are enabled) So as useful as the internet may be in the overall scheme of things, until someone or a group of people roll out an algorithmic search product to compete with "Google", many specific intelligent search techniques and information will be unavailable and go unexploited by the human population. In the larger scheme of things, because technology is totally market-driven and has lost its overall planned schema, small brains will drive the selection of small, incongruent solutions. Future Internets and world-wide-webs, which were the products of government planning will be less and less. But then again, in a self-centric, fend-for-yourself world, it's not about where we go as a group, it's all about who got where first and can capitalize on that most intensely, regardless of how many people that may leave behind or at a disadvantage. In an Ayn Rand World, her advantage is your loss. And if it results in many people's loss, so be it - the more the merrier... It was never about you to begin with...

Other than a few consumer redesign features (such as the IPOD and IPHONE - both ideas created in the mid-1990's), and social networking which primarily integrates consumers, very little new has been created. (actually quite a bit was created (e.g. virtual switches, etc.), it just wasn't entrepreneurally successful - so those things have disappeared). In the last 10 years technological innovation has plateaued, even in the context of the imagination. If anything, it has been a period of stasis, as analog technologies are converted to digital formats. (Keep in mind, the Internet was created in the 1970's and developed in the 1980's. I might add nearly entirely through federal government financing of government and private sector personnel.) Computers were constructed at the speed of light, but with all the horrifically-designed software, now only operate at the speed of a limping dog. All of the "channel-based technologies" (including DSL) being currently implemented emanate from innovations of the 1980's. Most television, film, art and music are derived from formulas... I am horrified that most people think "technology" is cool. It has both contributed to the rate of creation (and hence demands for human consumption and absorption) and added significantly to the demands on our time - probably more so for the latter than for the former. (There are also other factors such as the "no free-lunch syndrome" as a result of corporate cost-cutting with its onus of reassigning what were once public responsibilities of corporations and the private sector to private, personal responsibilites and the ensuing assumption by governments {free-lunch at work; private insurance vs. mutual insurance; public utilities vs. privately-held utilities, etc.}) Hence, we are standing still with simply more ornamentation around us. I think the positives of technology are canceled by the negatives. We have less time because of the demands of technology, not more. It has not given us a freedom, but become a noose around our necks. I guess we will have to wait for the NEXT generation that grows up disappointed and frustrated "by the collective zombie adherence" and corrects the "period of stasis", that is in fashion now... I can hear the low murmuring but I can't see anything yet. We still are the "Stepford Society" and growing more accepting of being an automaton every day. The Stepford World appears to have clearly arrived, just maybe from an unexpected source. I believe that technology has become maladaptive primarily because it is an adhoc adoption based on short-term goals and consequences. Technology has emerged for its own sake, not to serve a purpose. There is no captain steering the ship as it travels in the ocean. And I think a society without foresight is similar to a man or woman with poor eyesight driving a car in the dark...

Likewise, I believe that the recent fad of libertarianism, with its very close kinship to anarchism is a threat to a stable world (loaded with nuclear weapons in unstable hands with very different agendas, I might add) and a converse to an orderly, successful, anthropogenic civilization. I believe it is the direct outgrowth of illiteracy and oversimplification of thought and understanding propagated by a handful of active, completely self-absorbed, intellectually-muted, far-right individuals who seek their own advantage at the expense of the many and the species, ironically without much foresight for even their own future progeny. It is the supplantation of an Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) with a Winner-Take-All strategy that possesses serious logical flaws. It is premised on a rollback philosophy of back-to-nature economics. And that would be fine, if we were starting out from scratch in a world that we hadn't already created... But realistically, what social entities such as corporations, families, charitable organizations or governments could actually function with everyone doing what they felt like, when they felt like it? We are all interconnected and somehow libertarians fail to grasp that comprehension or its necessity. It appears to be inconsequential to the rules of the game. But, in an affinity with Communists and others of similar religious persuasion, and maybe for the same reasons, they are locked in the dark dogma of someone on the trail of a prairie dog's tunnel... Maybe it is the analogous experience of maintaining an allegiance or devotion to a "concept" or a "supreme being" that permits the interchangeability between the two. In either case, it is a syndrome of attraction with great appeal to the intellectually lazy. Whatever the cause, libertarianism and whatever chemicals compel its adherents, will have changed and destabilized the World to an irreparable state, as we currently know it; by the start of 2017 - at the latest.

(I post this to the virtual space we call the Internet, in case it is the only remnant left of the West for future visitors to our planet - so they may know what happened and why - and that it was thoroughly intentional by a small group of malcontents).

I also have used the IP Addresses 68.117.37.121, or 24.186.198.189 when the "automated" technology (yea sure) fails to recognize my "cookies." I actually have several more but I am not sure what all of them are. On a separate note, according to my nephews and nieces, I have gotten the award for being the "Best Uncle in the World".

===A Note on the Potential Value of Wikipedia:=== Aside from being an electronic repository of "encyclopedic" information, Wiki formats also permit the organization and reorganization of data to exist in categorical and associative arrangements that cannot be emulated as readily in any other format. Unfortunately, because traditional learning has stymied the minds and imagination of some younger adherents and practitioners of Wikipedia, "they" are unyieldingly reluctant and obdurate in taking advantage of the organizational capability afforded by Wikipedia's potential. To take advantage of the associative arrays of database congruences offered by this format, is to realign information in a way that our predecessors could not. It is a way that humanity can take a further step forward into the 4 dimensions we have locked ourselves into.

Unfortunately, because of the lack of academic-caliber contributors on Wikipedia and the blog-orientation of its format, few universities for good reason, and especially those of any significance, will permit citations of information from Wikipedia itself, so Wikipedia as it stands is simply, and at its best, an informational tool on the level of a New York Post, Daily News or National Review. The fact that many Americans (even with a collegiate background) are so poorly educated and bereft of logical skills, and so many children (with less than rudimentary knowledge) make editorial contributions on Wikipedia further degrades the quality and potential of a community repository of "knowledge" such as Wikipedia, and probably relegates it to a "participatory" substandard online reference. If an eleven year old has the same authority to contribute as a seventy-one year old, than the sagacity gained from wisdom and life experience have been canceled. As such, Wikipedia is and will be, as other editors have noted, primarily a resource for popular culture.

Further, the overzealousness of certain administrators to delete articles is particularly frustrating. Some articles of note that I have originated to have deleted and some of which were then restarted by other contributors are Eddie Durham (an old friend and colleague), Paul Zimansky (an important archaeologist), a linguist that I can't remember offhand the name of, the Locrians, articles on the Eastern Locrians and Western Locrians and several articles on Medieval women of whom I no longer can either remember nor have the university library books that I used as sources. There are others as well I am sure. There are others still that I did restart and through my own efforts I was able to retain. (I mean Kaity Tong is more important than William Shakespeare, isn't she?) My particular frustration with overzealous administrators is that in any of these instances, they did not even notify me of the page's impending deletion nomination. This tendency toward anti-democracy I find particularly disturbing but so be it.

That being said, I believe that all of us as continuing participants in Wikipedia, hold out hope for improvement and improved methods of contributing to Wikipedia's content.

Again, my name is known as the notorious Stevie Mitchy. I often stomp in the early mornings. I like to be particular with my grains whilst making my delightful beer inside my roommates' kitchen. Every now and then I will fart small, and I mean ridiculously small farts on the stair case after a quick game of super mario 64 (On DS only) in my bedroom, coughing like I have mesothelioma. A final note on history. History is essentially the story of human evolution as told by humans both inside and outside of the experience itself. That being said, the natural sciences are an integral part of the explanation of human behavior, its consequences and its unfolding in the chronicle of what we can observe and readily admit to ourselves. It is the basis of neuroscience itself, extrapolated from fundamental physics up through the tree of scientific explanation until we reach human action. In the West as such, most human beings attribute human behavior to human decisions and choice - despite and in direct conflict with all of what we know about "science" (i.e. the human technology to discern the Laws of Nature). And that contradiction is simply a cultural legacy of earlier traditions and Christian dogma (St. Augustine would be the foundation and its biggest advocate), in contrast to what we are familiar with on a biological and physical cognizance. To apply rules derived from the Natural Sciences infers that humans may be subject to mechanistic responses and determinism. It also may imply that our ongoing battle against Nature may be futile and an inherent part of Nature itself. (It may even mean that some people have personal "defects" because of psychologically-defined illnesses, many of whom become through sheer force or through various strategies of "selection" become our leaders). That contrary to the notion of "free will", our options for choice are delimited by the possibilities Nature presents within the realm of our potential cognizance that has been allocated to us through the laws of physics.

History is not the accretion of human experience over time, but the storytelling of how humans formed larger and larger aggregates - the population dynamics of human formation as told through our own recognizable or accepted elements of a story - a history of our own adaptation and adaptations whether they are apparent to us or not. History is that record of our self or semi-self-cognizance. It is our mirror onto ourselves through our own published memoirs. History is the cognitive realm of our organism's own maturation. And it may simply be, that as humankind evolves, our evolution and our self-recognition of our achievements that currently suggests that humans are so unique, were merely byproducts of our role as a species in the larger folds of the Universe and its offspring... Maybe everything we have achieved, is in fact, simply a part of Nature... and free-will, as we traditionally ascribe behind the accomplishments of humans, is simply the figment of St. Augustine's and later biblical champions attributive imagination. Is it possible that humans do not understand their role in the evolutionary scheme of things or even how things may work in what we call, the Universe?

(to be continued...)

Steve

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

This user is a member of WikiProject World Digital Library.

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