I've been writing a series of essays that may eventually be book-length on Property and Free Speech, called How Free Is Speech in America, Today? Or “Is Free Speech ________?” One chapter was edited for publication in the November issue of the Brooklyn Rail. You can read it HERE. Other subjects include Banksy's "artists residency" in October 2013, with a general discussion of street art versus property regime over time; optics and 4d perception; cultural cannibalism; the New Society alternatives we've been working on since 2011 (through collective productions and projects OAS, GFS, OwA, the Spatial Occupation of Hyperallergic, Novads, etc). I hope to review case studies from pre-Occupy AFH, such as AFH Gallery Chinatown, Eureka!, DDDD/01, etc. The method I'm using in the text is 4D analysis. I may publish some portion of the text here, but for now am reserving How Free Is Speech in America... for outside publication. For now, here's a snippet, minus footnotes and citations, from Chapter 3, "Optics and 4 Dimensional Perception":

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The problem is “Seeing is believing.” The human optical system is optimized for 3D vision. In a 4D world, that’s one dimension shy of what’s needed. Mathematics, which does not rely on the visible, beyond the math equation (2D) and its supporting texts, is capable of operating in the 4D realm, especially after Grigori Perelman’s breakthroughs. Fields other than those, like art, can function operationally without object-oriented representation. Representation can be accomplished through spatial, relational, symbolic mapping systems, predicated on accepted-as-real terms. Practicality, the concrete, is essential to working in 4D, which is why datamining with 4D tools, triangulating using associative concentricity in search models, and response programs emanating from a point of origination, all work effectively to rationalize massive amounts of information, and even provide predictive intelligence for the user. When utilized for analysis, data diagnosis can happen in real time, subject to the actualities of multi- or all-directional movement, which provides the quantum of potential applications, such as locating signal origins. Sub-field or contextual determinism is possible, when the analyst undertakes to discern agency in the components of systems. Thanks to power computing and advances in algorithmic programming, models of astounding complexity can be created on the presumption of intent or desire. Obviously, this potency is the one that fuels the mad rush to “total information awareness” [TIA], an idea that is the wet dream of all despots, all megalomaniacs, all those consumed by fear of risk or lust for maximum control and command-over. On the other hand, the same matrix can be a buoyant tool for total democracy. The same apparatus that establishes the surveillance state can be, for instance, an apparatus that establishes full voter participation in elective, legislative and judicial processes. Even access to the executive offices, in essence affording the leader(s) clear understanding of “the will of the people,” is available as an alternate use of the available technology and communications web. Facebook and Twitter can be nationalized and directed at public office, so that the mandate of the demos is never in question.

But where can a citizen look to see that potential actualized? At this point, governmental policy in the United States over a span of decades has prioritized TIA for multinational corporations (the majority of whose productive consumers live in America) over any possible usage of the internet that might solve some of our country’s most important civic, economic and social problems. Global profits have been prioritized over the progress of the nation. Instead of approaching the web as a national and international free speech zone, a utility for responsive governance and concourse and a domain for the invention of new modes of democratic exchange, the international power elites (the majority of whom live in America) have built an abortive net that is above all a management tool. The potential value of the internet has been transducted into the stupid, mediocre and destructive economies of plutocracy. The web has been made a slave of the old and neo-robber barons and is now little more than a content-push and data-gathering device vital to the cause of enforcing a regime of “openness” masking social engineering leading to a partial eugenic endgame, not just a retarded society denuded of privacy rights. The NSA in its catchall surveillance net is only achieving more comprehensively what the private corporate syndicates had already achieved by 2005. Microsoft, Apple, News Corp, AT&T and others made deals and got in on the fix. Clearly, this fact has not been widely discussed in corporate-controlled monopoly media, which has instead turned its lens on Edward Snowden (and his journalist intermediaries), and used the big global messaging platforms to smear him and downplay or spin the story wherever possible. At the same time, the next-gen industries that have become dependent on “Clouds” of “Big Data” are scrambling to avert any backlash that might ensue. The info-moguls are correctly afraid. A mass citizens’ movement to reclaim personal data and resituate “communications” and “media” solidly in free speech frameworks would almost certainly destroy much of the for-profit management systems that use private, personal information as the fuel driving their businesses. What’s barely under the surface here is an enormous privately owned consortium benefiting a tiny fraction of the people that feeds on the fundamental components of free speech. These social leeches feed on the very substance of life. Profiles of individuals are harvested, details of their social exchanges are cataloged and archived in huge databases. This data is packaged in derivatives that are bought and sold completely outside the will and knowledge of the citizen from whom – from whose life - they were extracted. This is what 4D assault on civil liberties over time “looks” like, well into the arc of its realization.

At this point, many citizens are convinced that, if they can’t “see” the interventions by the private-public co-conspirators engaged in Fourth- and First Amendment abnegations, they are not being harmed, either individually or collectively. Hence the stunning results of polls querying people on their attitudes toward the NSA practices. Perceptual response can be manufactured incrementally over time. Whole disciplinary fields are devoted to this penetrative process, operating under labels that situate their operations in the several sectors of social organization. Without question, the individual is the smallest and most susceptible unit in the social organism. With enough power and force pushing it, enabled by layered technology, almost any message can be foisted on almost any person and successfully imbedded as soft- or hard-indoctrination. A person can learn to “see” the world not necessarily as it is, but rather, how management wants one to “see” it. The perceptual is filtered by an interpretive image-plasm, apparent in the original domain of language, like a Microsoft LOGO.SYS. The base description is resolved in conviction. What does it take to convince someone of anything? Does truth require one’s being convinced? Does truth require sight? Is image the on/off switch that makes the human perceptual activate and/or power-down? Or is this actually the sign that brackets free thought and enslaves it?
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