Not a video clip

This is the age of the internet video clip. There could be a series of clips featuring a person or some location except that all of the footage is extremely shaky, purposefully so, by waving and shaking the camera around. There may or may not be anything going on, not that you could easily tell. Or perhaps you could tell from the soundtrack or other features. The soundtrack could be deliberately misleading. These clips would be made to be deliberately unwatchable. What is this? A cry against some aspect of the video clip age, or making fun of something that gets lots of attention, or the fact that we ourselves are not participating in it? Is this always the first kind of video clip that anyone or everyone tries to make? There could be a very long sequence of video clips wherein we see all the elementary ingredients that make up video clips - pushing buttons on the phone or camera, aiming it somewhere, trying to stay balanced on two feet, using phonemes to build up the sounds of spoken language, using a suite of muscle and limb movements to put together the varieties of human physical motion, seeing somehow the very electrons moving in circuits and wires, the operation of the human brain, everything that’s ever happened.

Problem solving

We might encounter something mysterious, confusing, or surprising - something that we at first do not understand: an unknown. We might consider to what extent this collection of things - the unknowns - is the same or similar to the collection of all things that are problems. Certainly not everything that is unknown is a problem, and not all problems will include aspects which are confusing or indistinct. But whereas things that are unknown are at least in principle amenable perhaps to understanding or to analysis - to becoming known (or better known) - perhaps also things that are problems are amenable to solution (or to becoming known better through analysis). We might therefore look at all the things which are problems or at least unknowns, and we might say that all of these things might admit of solutions or improvement (where we assume that coming to know something is an improvement over ignorance of that thing, which might not always be the case). Problems can be understood better and fixed, or at least improved upon, and things which are unknown, insofar as this is a problem or is the object of curiosity, can be studied and known better. Everything can be sorted out, or so we imagine, or so we like to think, or so we can try to achieve, even if ultimately limitations of time and human energy will doom this project to failure in the end. We look to achieve until finally we fail: this is the story of life.

And what is the “surface” of anything? A planet like the earth compared to one like Jupiter or compared to the Sun. What is the visible outer layer? And at different scales we will answer this question differently.