Thesis General

I believe, and hope to elucidate, that there exist many powerful parallels between technological advances in today's society with those leading into the Ancient Greek Dark Ages. I'm not yet ready to broaden this discussion to other civilizations or explore the implications of these parallels. The intent here is simply to identify and explain the similarities as an intellectual vehicle. I also need to start by acknowledging the significant contributions to this thesis made by Derek Walls and Steven Diamant.

Here's the basic idea. Classical Greek culture was flourishing until the fall of Mycenaean Civilization around 1100BC. During the Dark Age that followed, most of the elements associated with the organized, prosperous, and intellectual society vanished. The historic catastrophic collapse was probably motivated by an environmental, foreign political, or domestic social disaster. If our own civilization has already suffered its own catastrophic tipping point, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what that might have been. Suffice to say that extremely severe events of all three types have occurred and the societal consequences are already being suffered in ways I will seek to identify.

Upon significant reflection, I've decided to look no further back in history for evidence supporting this thesis than my own personal experience. Let's start with the typewriter. I came into the world in 1986 when computers existed, but typewriters were commonplace. They were the standard for business communication, formal correspondence, and official documentation. Presumably anything that was typewritten when I was born was previously handwritten. The reasons for the switch seem obvious: increased speed and accuracy while at the same time providing a more polished 'professional' appearance. For the purposes of this thesis, the significance is that the typewritten word is a perfect example of conceptual art. Both of my parents submitted typewritten college applications. The typewritten requirement is a bold statement to shelve your own expressive handwriting at the door. These institutes of higher learning to which my parents both applied were saying that the only 'A' they could interpret was the singular, Platonic-form, identically-reproduceable, type-written 'A'.

Sure there were no content constraints, but the simple, mechanical task of typing a full page of text modularly inserting pre-formed characters has a lot in common with the geometric patterns of lines and triangles of the late Greek Dark Age. We are asking the creative mind to conform to a short list of acceptable and predictable responses. And this is just the beginning, the typewriter will contribute to this thesis in other important ways.


One of the most striking characteristics of the Greek Dark Age was the change in Art. It would be a stretch to call Mycenaean artwork naturalistic in the sense of the Classical Period that would follow, but as compared with earlier Minoan work it was certainly more expressive, elaborate, and opulent. After the fall of Mycenae, there was almost no archaeological record of painting, pottery, weaponry, or even architecture. When these art forms resurfaced, they were simpler, rougher, smaller, and in many ways lacking the experience of their predecessors.

It's easy to suggest the Renaissance as our modern-era Mycenaean peak of expressive artwork. The level of lifelike naturalism and emotional expression achieved by painters during that era, along with the phenomenal scale of architecture provide clear parallels. My question is where has society gone since that? The impressionist, cubist, and modern conceptual art periods all look rather geometric as compared with those from Florence. There is a subtle argument here that applies to much of this thesis on modern achievements. Modern art is not lacking in expressiveness. In the departure from the classical formats the artist has lost versatility. Artists working with mixed media can shock and awe the audience into saying "I can't believe he made art with that [wire/steel/blood/poop/etc...]" but the modern viewer cannot get past this excitement to begin to interpret the message. Also, lacking any formal construct for comparison, it is hard to get any message besides "this artwork is different from anything else I've seen." And that leaves us in a pretty drab position with respect to our art. Going to a modern art museum and marveling at everything is roughly equivalent to our Dark Age friends enchantment with simple pots: "Oh my God, a pot...that holds water...I've never seen one of those before..." and the like.


I'll confess some ignorance as to the state of music tumbling into the Greek Dark Age, but I can say a lot about the conceptual state of ours today: mainstream music is horrendously formulaic in almost every genre. If you heard the song on a commercial radio station, it has been carefully filtered in recording studios financed by MTV, in production by an elite group of producers, and in boardrooms of corporate alliances. You are being sold music big companies want you to listen to that sounds the way they think you want it to sound. If you have been listening to music for a while you probably think that all 90s music sounds the same--that's because it does, and it's getting worse.

House music from across the pond is so carefully patterned that there are DJs who only play songs with a specific BPM. There's only so much freedom of expression you can have as a recording artist at 138 BPM. The idea here is that the more art is compartmentalized, controlled, and stylized, the less free the minds of its creators.


Movie stars have always been subject to extreme pressure towards certain barbie-like body types. However, the idealized 'type' for a female actor has gotten a lot worse in recent years and is about to become more impossibly slim, exceptionally busty, and in general more sterile and less representative, let alone humanistic. People love to mock the triangle-shaped bodies on Geometric vases, but I would argue that the figures you see today on the big screen are more degrading and less realistic to human sensibility than even those stick figures.

I don't think that I need to bring up the eating disorders, drug addictions, or even the mundane injuries sustained in routine daily life of these actors to make the point that we as a society buy into an unrealistic but coveted concept of a female movie actress. Instead I want to focus on the next and even more dangerous phase of our idolatry of shapes: animated films. Let me start by saying that I saw Disney/Pixar's WALL-E last night and I was entertained. Now let's tear realistic computer-animated films apart.

Pixar animation is the logical extreme of formulaic art in movies simply because it is perfect. There is no human talent on the screen or grips on the set to mess anything up. The script (itself a manifestation of formulaic authorship) is the guiding formula and it is executed to a perfect type-writer 't'. This conforms perfectly with the Geometric conventions born of the Dark Age to represent humans with stamped patterned emotions.

Because this particular example is so clear, I will digress for a moment to discuss two ways in which these films are damaging to society (and why we can argue that the Dark Ages were not a desirable time to live). Firstly, these types of movies tend to emphasize gender roles in a powerful and negative way. For young girls watching animated girls, their unnaturally smooth skin, unnaturally sculpted hair, and biologically impossible barbie figures present very real challenges to individual image and self-esteem. For young boys watching animated boys invincibly confront danger, characteristically assume responsibility, and win or lose based on physical strength reinforces cycles of violence and pigeonholes their psychological development. Their expectation to find the girls they see rendered in such movies in real life is certainly not the least damaging impact either.

Besides the developmental consequences for children with fake role models, the popularity of animated films emphasizes the Dark Age theme of inferiority. There is a certain sterility of unattainable perfection in animated characters. That we need this in place of real actors and actresses with flaws accompanying their talents tells me that as a society we are slipping from realistic optimism about human possibility to passive acceptance of defeat. As bad as it was to have young girls aspire to be sickly thin movie actresses it is worse to have a society not aspire at all (or, equivalently, aspire without hope to impossible ideals). And don't tell me that animation isn't replacing live actors. Just look at how ubiquitous airbrushing and digital retouching is in fashion. This is the next logical step.



In an interesting way, the digital revolution itself is a commodification of individual artistic expression. Every digital document, photo, sound, or video is recorded as a sequence of the ultimately simplified symbols--0 and 1. If you don't think this cheats our brains, you're not looking hard enough. JPEG photos have strong visible artifacts of compression: even at high quality, the format tends to block color regions and highlight boundaries much like a child coloring with crayons would do. MP3 audio is cleverly designed to filter out harmonics to which humans are less sensitive, but the compression is clearly audible below 192kHz and subtle but distinguishable sonic coloration is always evident. By storing our artwork digitally we are forcing it to look, feel, and sound a certain way that limits our creativity.

If you don't buy the argument that MP3s sound weird, then let's talk about cell-phones. As an artifact of the modern era this device typifies and exemplifies the acoustic artifacts of bad digital audio. The wired telephone was fully-duplexed and wired to provide the best synchronized sending and receiving of audio possible given the electrical limitations of the wire. Cell phones are filtered to sound barely as good as conventional wired telephones, gated to stop transmitting audio when one side is listening instead of talking, and connected asynchronously because it's cheaper and people barely notice the tiny delay. Subconsciously, however, our minds are training the body to speak and listen in ways that are compatible with cellular communication (which is why young people are more able to understand each-other using cell phones than those exposed to the technology later in life.) Conforming the way we think to the technology available rather than making the technology work to fulfill human needs reeks of the Dark Age.


In addition to the decline of expression in art, the collapse of trading networks and relative scarcity in the archaeological record are trademarks of the Dark Age. In our own world, we continue to generate enough trash to have no fear of scarcity in our record, but the nature of the physical remains may belie the level of interactions currently taking place. Our international commerce may be advancing to the point where it leaves no physical trace.

One of the best indicators of trade with foreign lands historically has been discovery of foreign currency (in addition, of course, to foreign goods). Yet the largest international transactions today occur with no exchange of hard currency. Visa transactions leave no physical trace, and can be effected at a distance with ease. For large multinationals with outsourced components of production or services, there isn't even any foreign good exchanged. Moreover, the telephone lines that stand testament to interconnectivity in the US and EU may never get built in certain parts of the world already proliferated with wireless coverage sans grid. To the uninformed historian conducting a post-apocalyptic survey, it would be hard to infer the penetration of cellular phone coverage deep into Africa or the worldwide data connectivity provided by satellite.

Indeed, the miniaturization of technology presents a number of challenges to the hypothetical post-apocalyptic historian. Millions of bank statements may soon exist only encrypted in a server hard disk smaller than the average paperback. Without knowledge of the larger system it would be hard to infer the level of financial sophistication from such limited evidence.


Government during the Greek Dark Age also suffered a significant collapse in organization. Palaces that had once employed sophisticated inventory systems and codified laws pronouncing their authority and economic redistribution policies were replaced with a largely illiterate tribal-based structure. I'll skip the unstable state of the social security system in the US for the time being, and return instead and as promised to typewriters.

Government forms (social security, passport application, taxes) used to all be type-written. In the absence of the type-writer today, these forms submitted electronically at best and handwritten at worst. Imagine the same archaeologist looking at the record of official paperwork. The machine used to process the paperwork neatly disappears, the number of forms decreases dramatically, and the remaining forms left in the archaeological record are all sloppily hand-written. He or she might wonder what catastrophic environmental, foreign political, or domestic social disaster transpired in our society.