High on Technology ~~~ Low on Memory: Cultural Crisis in Dark City and The Matrix
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was arti- ficial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years' pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great,Exposition of 1900, with his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new. ~~~ Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown. ~~~ T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" Sluicing down our throats, washing through our minds (Eliot's chambers of the sea), the culture's dataflow surges into us momently, flushing out what we might have remembered, with the output from the socius' memory factory. The deciphering of history, a gratingly slow process of negotiation and disagreement, is replaced by a media blitz on events. All we want to know about massive cultural memory haemorrhages like the Shoah and D-Day can be squeezed into three-hour media bursts, convincing because of their technical brilliance, their ability to elicit emotions and to cre- ate in the viewer the conviction that the truth has been determined and can now be shelved~~~we are at last done with those crises. What with the dataflow are thoughts about who we've been and wanted to be, as a culture, as a society, as a people, in the face of problems of technology, faith, and memory. Anxious for optimal throughput, obeying the urgent pressure of the machine to upgrade to higher processor speeds with greater RAM, we have left ourselves little time to reflect, even less to reconsider, and instead leap from event to event, frantically memorializing (if not remembering) what the past means ~~~ a world war, the death of a celebrity, or the death of the child of a revered president all carry the same valence.l
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".