On The Fringes of Amman (I)

Life is getting pretty much hectic and fun is becoming an elusive quarry. That would be a sufficient description of how I have been feeling lately. It is, almost, my first year working from 9 am to 5 pm, and the first without a lengthy reinvigorating university summer vacation.

With the monotony about to cross my tolerance threshold, and I almost exhausting all the recreational options offered by Amman that cater to my taste, I sat down with two of my friends in a car somewhere around the 8th circle. "What shall we do?", the most vexing of the questions seemed like the only thing they could utter that night, and, oddly enough, "Fuheis" was the only word echoing back an forth within the confines of my skull.

I frequent that town on regular basis to dine at a restaurant somewhere at the bottom of a hill on its outskirts, but I never thought about going there aimlessly, even though I walked through it once with the fast walking group last December. But that night "Fuheis" was, without prior notice, phenomenal in its persistence, yet meaningful. I swear that the word repeated 6 times meant "All the relaxation you need tonight", twice "screw Amman", and thrice "reclaim your sanity".

Trying to break what felt like an unholy spell, I turned to my friends as I was starting the engine and said "Fuheis, we are going to Fuheis". Silence fall all over the car until one of them sarcastically asked "do you know how to get there?" alluding to an almost disastrous venture into Na'ur the Friday before. This trip to Na'ur was, in retrospect, the first subtle manifestation of an urge that intensified in that mental "Fuheis" flurry. What kind of a maddening urge was that, I can't conclusively tell yet, but I can confidently link it to the uncomfortably parched Ammani nature which begets the stressful lack of greenery, besides the lack of widespread empty spaces.

Less than 15 minutes later, we were getting out of the car as I parked it at the central circle of Fuheis, though replacing "circle" with "eclipse" in the preceding statement would make for a more accurate description. There, the two main streets constituting the town meet. The city in any other day of mine, could have been an epitome of boredom, for it has nothing to offer other than restaurants and wine shops. Yet, in what seemed like an ordinary Fuheis weekend evening, a host of separate mundane backdrops to our aimless trip there fused into a mural, a benchmark, against which I found myself involuntarily comparing my life at Amman.

The cool breeze was reviving and freshening, a thing we are largely deprived of in Amman thanks to the wind shielding, air trapping, and heat storing concrete blocks that it is crammed with. The ladies walking around with bare shoulders and revealing clothes was a stunning view. Don't get me wrong, not the ladies themselves, but the fact that they were at ease and paying full attention to nothing other than their conversation while walking at a slow pace at the main and only, busy square in town is a clear sign that they are rarely stalked there. In contrast to Amman, where the widespread acts of stalking women with prying eyes and impudent tongues are being progressively joined by groping, the scene was understandably a soothing one.

Not only that, but every mediocre feature of that city that night from the kitsch public statues, to the moderately drunk market owners, who, as one of my friends puts it, on their priority list socializing with customers is anterior to doing business, to the semi-blinding darkness that besets it in almost every direction, infiltrated by few rays of light coming from Salt to the west, and disturbed by the glare to the south, emanating from somewhere in Amman, every trivial feature of that town that night had the ballast of an identity element.

But that was only part of the story of my recent dalliance with Amman...

I Use the Internet Therefore I Exist

I use, and not surf, as "surfing the internet" should be dropped out of the internet experience lexicon. It is nothing but the outdated legacy of web 1.0, when the non-technical internet user role was passive, at the receiving end. Now things are different. The current non-technical internet users are potentially gods. They build and shape the internet, vindicating the Idealists' conception of our world as merely a one of ideas a, in which the internet is nothing but an extension of our thinking capabilities and realities.

At the core of internet users experience has always been the constant venturing into unknown, to them, sometimes prohibited, worlds and ideas, circumventing obstinate societal structures, that are erected for no other reasons than maintaining their own existence, and the interests of those who find their interests protected by those structures. That experience has embedded into it the potential of maturing beyond the mere circumventing of such mental chains into pressuring forces that remold, reshape, and break them in a reality where the internet itself is inseparable to our existence as societies.

More than once I caught myself thinking change in terms of demand. "We should ask for teaching hardcore evolution and not the laissez faire version they teach at our schools if they ever teach it", this is what I once wrote, reflecting how immature my experience of this online world has been thus far. A one in which I am only voicing and expressing my opinions, not realizing the potential capability that such a tool can endow me with in striking back firmly at the physical world, the potential of a promising attempt at taking things into my own hands as a user.

The well structured, experienced, and sophisticated apparatus of censorship that had been screwing with our kids brains at schools for so long now can be easily toppled with some content that goes viral, which might be, the virality that is, a matter of a year long ad campaign costing no more than one JD per day. A swift strike coming out of no pre-calculated where toward such a structure of censorship, no matter how invulnerable it may seem, can toss it into a final state of chaos from which it may never recover. Added to this is the fact that these keystones of despotism are interdependent on each others, effecting a tossing, ipso facto, of the whole status quo into one last performance before its cessation.

But this potential might be the subject of a surgical removal that is being silently and subtly carried out right now, and it won't be a surprise if the newer generation of internet infrastructure, once laid out, enable some sort of centrality that grants very few select political agencies, or commercial companies acting on behalf of those political agencies, full control over the internet, comparable, in some aspects, to that which governments maintain in the physical realm. The newer generations of search engines are already limiting your experience online without telling you that they do so (read here).

For the sake of fairness, our experience on the none user-optimized engines used to be limited by our very personal habits, and by technical matters that don't pertain to the content mapped to, but that was as far as it went; it was not a conscious limit, or a one that served conscious sinister goals, so to speak. Even if there was no sinister plots lurking beneath factoring your geographical location into your search results, which is more worrying in the case of searching for commentary on international events than for brands or commercial services, it is highly unethical, according to most of the ethical notions out there, to do such a thing without explaining it clearly enough to users, whom the overwhelming majority's conception of the internet is too primitive to fully distinguish between google and the internet.

That is, in my opinion, where anarchism finds a new lease of life. There, the anarchist vision of a world where power is distributed and never accentuated embodies itself, rightly, in the form of the not so coincidentally called distributed services (e.g. distributed search engines and social media networks, Diaspora being an example on the latter). And this is why it is a necessity that any effort seeking spreading an awareness of the internet as a tool for change should integrate the concept and importance of distributed internet services into its curriculum.

As a closing remark, I need to state that I am not fully against non-technical search engine optimization. I advocate some sort of randomness in the search outcomes of engines for the different users regardless of any personal or geographical factor. This may help in making the internet experience unique for each and every user, instead of presenting knowledge through search engines as too rigid and parochial.