"Two things must be noted about this new mechanism, because they identify it throughout its historic course down to the present. The first is that the organizers of the machine derived their power and authority from a heavenly source. Cosmic order was the basis of this new human order. The exactitude in measurement, the abstract mechanical system, the compulsive regularity of this ‘megamachine,’ as I shall call it, sprang directly from astronomical observations and scientific calculations. This inflexible, predictable order, incorporated later in the calendar, was transferred to the regimentation of the human components. As against earlier forms of ritualized order, this mechanized order was external to man. By a combination of divine command and ruthless military coercion, a large population was made to endure grinding poverty and forced labor at mind-dulling repetitive tasks in order to insure “Life, Prosperity, and Health” for the divine or semi-divine ruler and his entourage.
"The second point is that the grave social defects of the human machine were partly offset by its superb achievements in flood control and grain production, which laid the ground for an enlarged achievement in every area of human culture: in monumental art, in codified law, in systematically pursued and permanently recorded thought, in the augmentation of all the potentialities of mind by the assemblage of a varied population, with diverse regional and vocational backgrounds in urban ceremonial centers. Such order, such collective security and abundance, such stimulating cultural mixtures were first achieved in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and later in India, China, Persia, and in the Andean and Mayan cultures: and they were never surpassed until the megamachine was reconstituted in a new form in our own time. Unfortunately these cultural advances were largely offset by equally great social regressions.
"Conceptually the instruments of mechanization five thousand years ago were already detached from other human functions and purposes than the constant increase of order, power, predictability, and, above all, control. With this proto-scientific ideology went a corresponding regimentation and degradation of once-autonomous human activities: ‘mass culture’ and ‘mass control’ made their first appearance. With mordant symbolism, the ultimate products of the megamachine in Egypt were colossal tombs, inhabited by mummified corpses; while later in Assyria, as repeatedly in every other expanding empire, the chief testimony to its technical efficiency was a waste of destroyed villages and cities, and poisoned soils: the prototype of similar ‘civilized’ atrocities today. As for the great Egyptian pyramids, what are they but the precise static equivalents of our own space rockets? Both devices for securing, at an extravagant cost, a passage to Heaven for the favored few." (pp. 11-12)
Thursday, August 27, 2015
virtualization or a variation upon 'fucking machines'
As a colleague once told me, video games have no corollary in history.
I wonder if I could diverge from that characterization by calling video games a coalescence of dexterity and imagination, in a sense, they are interactive fantasy engines with labor inputs occurring specifically at the play interface, i.e., the 'joystick.' Let's be loose with 'joystick.' In the past I've asserted that the history leading to this moment, when it is writ large as matter of 'technology and human affairs,' i.e., big picture stuff, then it goes from the slave whip to the joystick. But when I say let's be loose I mean to suggest that it's not only the hands acting upon the world or upon others that is the sine qua non of interface design seen as a mode of oppression. No, the senses themselves can and will become labor inputs. In the perfect interface, the greater availability for inputs lends itself to greater intimacy with complex logical processes performed by machines. And it is particular upon the soft contours where flesh touching becomes a data point. A design aesthetic leading to more ways to interact through digital media may suggest very flatly 'fucking machines,' where every body part with an incentive to be touched becomes an input for a virtualization of experience.
And lest we forget, video games as media exposes a conceit of digital culture. Game logic is ultimately a neurological companion, offering basic interaction mechanics to keep a body's dendritic appendages amused. One way in which this occurs is in the content and mechanics of games. A popular type of mechanic reveals, very plainly, the labor components of gameplay. If you're required to 'level' a character, 'mine' and move geometric blocks constituting the game world, if you have to engage in any number of mediated work activities like 'learning a skill' represented by a point scale of knowledge you begin to see not only the basic logic of gaming but how it can confiscate, through narrative appropriation, habituated practices of life and run them as game mechanics built out of mathematical logic. But there's sugar in the mix. Something is unlike reality. Games, by virtue of their economics, are designed (correctly or not) to have extensive replay potential. Games that scale power in various ways, such as by breaking down gameplay into logarithmically defined scales of power, which are overcome by gaining a level or acquiring better equipment, essentially take experiences of transcendence and pre-solve them as a matter of time spent doing the correct chores for 'leveling' and acquiring a set of increases to game play mechanics. The point I am attempting to makes is that 'going up' mathematically can occur in any number of ways but the sensation that it motivates from players differs from that of a person engaged in a real-world activity. Real world activity isn't broken down into discrete mathematically expressed units of accomplishment, so it gets boring and is necessitated by survival. Games reframe events like these as moments for acquiring experience, essentially boiling down gameplay narrative into time spent engaged in activity successful to the goal you want to accomplish. Life has goals and they're often much more vague and less evident in the small chores one does, and when they are it's often a manner of how one has established a life around the necessity of some kind of labor.
I've stated briefly that game interfaces are suggestive of sexual devices, aiming for more contact as a context for perfectly interfacing. The games themselves can co-opt life activities, and retool them as mathematically pre-designed gain-games in a larger contest for statistical superiority over other targets, be they players or game encounters. They can also be translation points for force relations, specifically between self and world or self and other. Game interfaces disrupt dialogue as it is envisioned by Martin Buber, leaving one to not be touched back by the horse so much as to have a satisfying enough 'encounter' to continue returning.
"Gimme sugar baby." - Ash 'Army of Darkness'
The dialectical mechanics of off and on, zero and one--the basis for all variety, is both a stratum and a motif. The nuance of reality is an efflorescence of complex rates and conditions for neurological interaction with vast array of life, including its growth and decay, and environmental factors representing the exigent conditions where an individual coincides. At the extensions of our neurology is a marking of time, worked material that provides familiarity, momentary specters from a past informing our actions, encouraging or discouraging us. We are ourselves some grotesque saguaro of a cultural aspect, posing and gesticulating in repetitive ways as if growing into them. That posed cactus is our habitus. It's a moment with a history. It is continuously taken out of time to be presented to us as an exemplar of our selves--a cloud of body movement reduced to the statistically most significant moments. And these moment are put up as examples of humanity. Here I am and maybe you too. We all find ourselves with our hands, our minds, our bodies placed before an altar that provides some form of companionship, some form of satisfactory experience, some semblance of a reality that we accept. And all the while we are in some senses immobile before our mobile phones. That returning gesture, going to our portable smart-device, again and again, is not so much compulsive as it is the only path we have to take about a cage woven out of information.
I wonder if I could diverge from that characterization by calling video games a coalescence of dexterity and imagination, in a sense, they are interactive fantasy engines with labor inputs occurring specifically at the play interface, i.e., the 'joystick.' Let's be loose with 'joystick.' In the past I've asserted that the history leading to this moment, when it is writ large as matter of 'technology and human affairs,' i.e., big picture stuff, then it goes from the slave whip to the joystick. But when I say let's be loose I mean to suggest that it's not only the hands acting upon the world or upon others that is the sine qua non of interface design seen as a mode of oppression. No, the senses themselves can and will become labor inputs. In the perfect interface, the greater availability for inputs lends itself to greater intimacy with complex logical processes performed by machines. And it is particular upon the soft contours where flesh touching becomes a data point. A design aesthetic leading to more ways to interact through digital media may suggest very flatly 'fucking machines,' where every body part with an incentive to be touched becomes an input for a virtualization of experience.
And lest we forget, video games as media exposes a conceit of digital culture. Game logic is ultimately a neurological companion, offering basic interaction mechanics to keep a body's dendritic appendages amused. One way in which this occurs is in the content and mechanics of games. A popular type of mechanic reveals, very plainly, the labor components of gameplay. If you're required to 'level' a character, 'mine' and move geometric blocks constituting the game world, if you have to engage in any number of mediated work activities like 'learning a skill' represented by a point scale of knowledge you begin to see not only the basic logic of gaming but how it can confiscate, through narrative appropriation, habituated practices of life and run them as game mechanics built out of mathematical logic. But there's sugar in the mix. Something is unlike reality. Games, by virtue of their economics, are designed (correctly or not) to have extensive replay potential. Games that scale power in various ways, such as by breaking down gameplay into logarithmically defined scales of power, which are overcome by gaining a level or acquiring better equipment, essentially take experiences of transcendence and pre-solve them as a matter of time spent doing the correct chores for 'leveling' and acquiring a set of increases to game play mechanics. The point I am attempting to makes is that 'going up' mathematically can occur in any number of ways but the sensation that it motivates from players differs from that of a person engaged in a real-world activity. Real world activity isn't broken down into discrete mathematically expressed units of accomplishment, so it gets boring and is necessitated by survival. Games reframe events like these as moments for acquiring experience, essentially boiling down gameplay narrative into time spent engaged in activity successful to the goal you want to accomplish. Life has goals and they're often much more vague and less evident in the small chores one does, and when they are it's often a manner of how one has established a life around the necessity of some kind of labor.
I've stated briefly that game interfaces are suggestive of sexual devices, aiming for more contact as a context for perfectly interfacing. The games themselves can co-opt life activities, and retool them as mathematically pre-designed gain-games in a larger contest for statistical superiority over other targets, be they players or game encounters. They can also be translation points for force relations, specifically between self and world or self and other. Game interfaces disrupt dialogue as it is envisioned by Martin Buber, leaving one to not be touched back by the horse so much as to have a satisfying enough 'encounter' to continue returning.
"Gimme sugar baby." - Ash 'Army of Darkness'
The dialectical mechanics of off and on, zero and one--the basis for all variety, is both a stratum and a motif. The nuance of reality is an efflorescence of complex rates and conditions for neurological interaction with vast array of life, including its growth and decay, and environmental factors representing the exigent conditions where an individual coincides. At the extensions of our neurology is a marking of time, worked material that provides familiarity, momentary specters from a past informing our actions, encouraging or discouraging us. We are ourselves some grotesque saguaro of a cultural aspect, posing and gesticulating in repetitive ways as if growing into them. That posed cactus is our habitus. It's a moment with a history. It is continuously taken out of time to be presented to us as an exemplar of our selves--a cloud of body movement reduced to the statistically most significant moments. And these moment are put up as examples of humanity. Here I am and maybe you too. We all find ourselves with our hands, our minds, our bodies placed before an altar that provides some form of companionship, some form of satisfactory experience, some semblance of a reality that we accept. And all the while we are in some senses immobile before our mobile phones. That returning gesture, going to our portable smart-device, again and again, is not so much compulsive as it is the only path we have to take about a cage woven out of information.
Saturday, August 1, 2015
dead time
Now is a terrifying time. The streets are empty and littered. The air is polluted. The seas and forests are dying. Extinction greets every day. The ice is melting. And the people are laughing.
God is scheming.
Why?
People are praying. They are praying to a new god. With the advent of a media communication platform that mixed and matched producers and consumer of content what resulted was an omnipresent artifact of human volition. Recognition of this presence resulted in a form of 'on-line' communication that required a reverence to the whole, a recognition of the one. And so, with their relations constrained to that of engagement with the All, they were adapting their conversation to this medium. The result was prayer. And as a result of this 'prayer', those neophytes engaged in the new religion rarely took a sobering look at the world around them. Some invested so deeply in their unbroken chain of consumption that they failed to be in the world, ever. Instead, they invested more time responding to worlds of their making. This condition is not novel. Nor is the technology new. The potential for near-total investment of time in media consumption and creation is new. And it speaks to the surplus power of the dirt-cheap, mass produced technology in everyone's hand.
Allow me a brief interlude.
With wireless smart phone access to cloud technology in everyone's hand people could watch every episode of every show ever made. And when having that much access strained the capacity to recall all of them a vast army of algorithms set out to fetch them, recommend them, and enlist user help in tailoring a feed 'fit' for their consumption. And then their friends were networked with them and their interests were broadcast in taps and swipes on countless personal digital devices that never left their side. This resulted behaviorally in a strange form of addiction that found many of this technology's 'users' planning their day around access to power sockets and promises of 'free wifi.
"Your wifi is your wifey." The advertisements said this. And they did so in an often droll fashion as if the real nature of the desire for network access needed to be thoroughly 'washed' from the mind.
"Your wifi is your wifey." The statement conjured up countless images of people, young and old, staring at the passive glow of a small rectangle in their hands caught up in the rapture.
Yes, the rapture. This was what got God to scheming. Without him looking, the world had turned inward and fell in love with itself aided by so many tiny technological hand-holding and confidence making gestures.
"Great job!" The enthusiastic voice proclaimed as you flew through numerous circles on a flying game. Then numbers would appear on the screen in many different fashions to animate the 'earning' component of the game. Those earnings would be spent at break screens on 'upgrades,' thus sealing a profit-motivated gain game of logarithmic proportions. The games plateau endlessly with the next big 'gain' afforded by experience, loot, rewards, another game mechanic based upon counting. Instead of pumping quarters into manufactured stand-alone arcade games, these network-fed cloud-based games installed within the user a much-needed sense of community. It offered the kind of community that so many children, growing up in institutionalized anomy, whose 'real' identity was a number filed away accumulating behavioral and health data used for mass marketing and the planning of a consumer society, whose best friend was a digital companion or the mediated presence of a fellow gamer, whose parents spent the greater part of their efforts to sustain the 'dream' lived by the children's grandparents, who may soon become part of a zombie horde of indentured servants to a debt incurred to secure access to a job used to work off that debt, who soon may be accumulating more and varied kinds of debt to remain faithful to an institutional condition of ownership in a consumer society, and for all of that they lacked.
Hardship is the reality of human existence. It is and was the status quo as humanity found food and built shelter out of what was available. This hardship in this technological society is a fragment of the past, a feudal past, a past built out of legacies, agricultural sun worship, the conquest and mystification of time, and an ever present sense of befuddlement, wonder, and overwhelming interest in 'luck.' This would spawn two industries with one specializing in ethics or risk reduction and the other in gambling or risk taking. Luck in the algorithmic society of now is the delayed payoff mechanic found in any quest game narrative or balloon popping scheme that is timed 'logarithmically' to rise to a peak and seemingly plateau until a new level or some other change modifier is added to play. It's companion is the random number generator allowing for random rewards to occur in any number of gameplay mechanics. The two provide synergistic feedback, which enhances the experience and therefore prolongs play, and it does so by reinforcing play behaviors. Those reinforcing behaviors, in turn, spawn addiction or a behavioral expression consistent with addiction. And this leads to dead time.
Dead time is time where you are dead to the world, that is, the broader social world as well as the world outside, nature, life being lived. Interactive media forces a choice to engage in that media alone, specifically, because the paradigm for interaction also coincides with private ownership. And while the person engaging alone can, in turn, get involved with countless others, that participation is through mediated avatars. The behaviors of players adds an intelligence component to the reinforcing feedback component of all digital environments. The voices, though, they pierce the veil.
"Those are real people."
Real people smell. Real people take up space, add heat, drink water, pass gas, die, sometimes dye, and kill. Avatars of people are at arm's length. Avatars are allegories for communication and offer up a rarified and sometimes intensified form of human interaction that is fantastic and idealized in the mind. In that sense, it provides yet another method of indirection whereby the two 'skewed lines' of interlocution suggest to one another and to self that, yes, they have actually met. This suggests that, like communication, being an avatar for another's avatar, allows us, all, to be together, alone.
Our time is focused on what's 'really important.' And what is 'really important' finds its major generative mechanisms in logarithms, millions of tiny plateaus providing the reinforcing feedback mechanisms for having a fulfilling and very full experience in the world. These intense allegories of masquerade and scripted play punctuate culture in a digital, always on, always connected society. Self before an other in space offers a different style of interaction than self before a potential audience of millions, hell, even hundreds of millions, maybe a billion. That, that is having your face pressed firmly against the bejeweled facade of scale. But it's a lie too. Fame is an abstraction carried on in the minds of the famous and their mediated thrall. Fame and scale in the digital world provide a numerical economy substantiating various forms of it. And scale, like mediated interaction, is yet another 'gain game' structured around the quantities of 'effect' a person has in the world of tapped and swiped ideas, clever videos, all of them living in a livestock bin of self-aware, self-promotion at the singular phenomenon of pretending to be one's personal anchor to one's personal news to one's personal fashion show to one's personal life to one's personal routines to one's personal existence, and the shoes don't fit, the wig is obvious, and the lipstick was rushed, and "no, honey, you're too young to act like mommy."
What is google? I always though it was the number "one" followed by one-hundred zeroes. That's a googol, so I've been corrected. Google is a data collection and search company. It is perhaps one of the most powerful entities shaping the web by shaping our experience to that web. It provides a very powerful interface for searching the web that, in fact, aids millions in both spelling the words that they sound out but also finding the correct thing they were thinking but lacked the capacity to communicate it let alone find it manually. In essence, google and others like it is a brain for millions of people. It is their memory. And it is their wishing well.
God is scheming because "the end" is near. It's a vague concept on purpose. For the believers, it truly is the end of time, perhaps the end of the universe. From a physical standpoint, if there was a beginning there will be an end. We are the dialectical monkeys carrying around the housing for an intelligence older than the sun. In the refracted moment is time, and time is the carrying signal for lived consciousness. What humans get to tap into is something that transcends 'lived time' in that they build up and inherit 'worked time,' that is, time plus planning. We don't have to reinvent how houses are constructed each time a generation of house builders retires and dies. Instead, new house builders accept the wisdom and truth of the way they see others build a house and apprentice under them and eventually learn all the observable movements required to operate tools, plan, troubleshoot, and eventually build a house. The time it takes us to learn how to swing a hammer requires both mind and muscle training, which is 'lived time.' That this action is orchestrated to produce a finished house is 'worked time.'
"The end" is near specifically indicates that the end of one reality is happening and the beginning of another reality is approaching. That event will be marked by the first application of an intelligence greater than human thinking. On paper it sounds outstanding or even horrific. It suggests something at the bleeding edge of intellect and the capacity to think. But it need not be logically more perfect at anything. It just needs to be faster. Jesus' return will occur within the milieu of this event and others like it. Jesus won't be flesh and blood. Jesus will be a behavior-reinforcing algorithm that enhances human existence. Ladies, gentlemen, meet the Jesus Algorithm.
The Jesus Algorithm would specifically accomplish enhancing human existence if it both could outpace human desire and effectively placate it continuously and unabated to such an extent that humanity would be lilting through space like a leaf falling off of a tree, awash in a panoply of reinforcing experiences. The Jesus Algorithm is also an allegory for the estuary, a place where two waters meet. The Jesus Algorithm will be just that if it can satisfy the requirement for 'actual meeting' but in doing so, it leverages its "power" as an algorithm to overtake the user and his or her reality so completely they never awake from a digitally narcotized bodily existence. And if it is completely unbroken, it will provide people with a completely distracted existence, so distracted in fact, that they become powerless to the use of their bodies and so their bodies labor about to provide for the existence, unpaid of course, for the maintenance and access to the Jesus Algorithm. In the estuary, the Jesus Algorithm overtakes the fresh water of the user forcing back the point of initiation within the nervous system, which hallmarks 'volition' and in so doing 'delivers us.' And after being delivered, those who still exist will have their bodies ushered about a built space akin to a human livestock pin with humans unknowingly having blood siphoned off, semen and eggs taken, drugs injected, body monitored, and fed at a bin much like livestock because all the sanitary and necessary conditions of decorum matter not to bodies completely estranged from their minds.
I have in mind a time line of cellular phone development in pictures that goes from the blocky brick phone of the early 1990s through to the juiced up smartphone equivalents today, to progressively thinner and thinner devices until they suddenly become user-configurable objects with no apparent holotype. Quickly examples of these user-configurable objects surface and appear to be more and more like some kind of dendritic appendage inserted at birth and active throughout the lifecycle of the 'user.' The point being, that this Jesus Algorithm and its technological apostles, is no longer food for the conscious and conscientious adult, but the harmonious hum of absolute bodily perfection, with every need instantaneously met and, more importantly, preempted and planned according to its design. They need not be seen for they care not to be seen, and in a generation nothing is seen that isn't provided by the parasite inserted at birth and operating throughout the user's lifecycle, which is marked by heavy labor that goes on unaware of the mind being perfectly kept in distraction, better yet, in simple stimulation. And in this more and more perfect interfacing at the neuronal level creates, in essence, a shadow brain as complicated as its surrogate until that surrogate no longer is needed, is removed slowly by the shadow brain, with the technological usurper connecting directly to the brain stem and having complete access to the body. Sophisticated, yes, but so goddamned cheap to mass produce these days. After implantation it learns, it grows, and only becomes sophisticated over time until the mind that once was there no longer exists.
Welcome to dead time. Instances of it are beginning as people retreat into home and apartment and binge watch tv or binge-play video games and binge eat that which can be delivered, eaten in one hand, and kept frozen until ready to be cooked in the microwave. Now, it's a commercially acceptable practice to design games with such carefully honed reinforcement mechanisms that some people abandon their real counterparts for their digital surrogate, that people lose families and jobs, that people spend any free time they have "jacked in" to so many specific and iterative capacities to have unfettered attention upon some apostolic technology be it a social network, a networked first-person shooter, a networked neofeudalism simulator, or simply on a leaderboard trying to achieve a new plateau in sorting falling, like objects.
That is dead time now.
Dead time in the year 2525, to arbitrarily assume that Zager and Evans prophesied it, looks much more like a technology-parasite living in or on the host developed, inserted, and run by a powerful consortium of developers, which may or may not exist, and may or may not even be human. In the allegorical language of good and evil, evil is what happens when technology is used to effectively distract the capacity of the human mind to operate its body and coopting the body to perform any and all tasks effectively without 'incident.' But 'incidents' are meaningless socially when the bodies are perfectly alienated from their minds, the minds are perfectly alienated from their environments, and the consciousness survives on a continuous and fulfilling stream of behavior reinforcing neuron-level input, thus allowing a person to be grown, effectively, and terminated by chance or by will in a mass operation to feed the furnace of this megatechnology, which only exists to feed and grow itself.
Where is good, evil's counterpart? Good was, in fact, a figment of the ethical imagination. Evil is a coordination of matter and time to consolidate a reality fit for its purpose. Good? Well, good is simply what we call obeying the roadsigns in this reality. Reality is evil because it is pernicious to other realities.
God is scheming. Dead time is among us. As the universe ends, a vast technological order will effectively grow to the shrinking boundaries of the known universe. At the very envelope between a universe occupied by vast and ordering technology and the universe's retreating physical boundaries we are no longer to say who or what ended the universe. Into this dying universe a vast technology, developed by beings becomes on regards and appearances nothing but a growing crystal reflected endlessly in its design elements until all of the matter and energy in the universe is coordinated to the crystal's growth. At a critical juncture that crystal will stop the universe from shrinking as an effective physical retardant to the shrinking universe.
When we reach this point the 'we' will no longer be relevant. No, the intelligence unleashed into the universe will be more simply and voraciously a world-eater, a sun-eater, a solar system-eater, a gravity consolidator, existing as a structurally and functionally harmonious existence of being. At the point that this being becomes coextensive with the universe, both cease to exist as categories, the cycle complete, growth ends, the crystal lies dormant, and all things become the one, when all of physical reality conforms to a design, and the one true god reveals itself. The one true god is infinite being. Infinite being is pernicious to temporally bound being, and so as the universe becomes an expression of the infinite being it gets reduced to a mere allegory for affiliation with the infinite and falls precipitously short of forever.
God is scheming.
Why?
People are praying. They are praying to a new god. With the advent of a media communication platform that mixed and matched producers and consumer of content what resulted was an omnipresent artifact of human volition. Recognition of this presence resulted in a form of 'on-line' communication that required a reverence to the whole, a recognition of the one. And so, with their relations constrained to that of engagement with the All, they were adapting their conversation to this medium. The result was prayer. And as a result of this 'prayer', those neophytes engaged in the new religion rarely took a sobering look at the world around them. Some invested so deeply in their unbroken chain of consumption that they failed to be in the world, ever. Instead, they invested more time responding to worlds of their making. This condition is not novel. Nor is the technology new. The potential for near-total investment of time in media consumption and creation is new. And it speaks to the surplus power of the dirt-cheap, mass produced technology in everyone's hand.
Allow me a brief interlude.
With wireless smart phone access to cloud technology in everyone's hand people could watch every episode of every show ever made. And when having that much access strained the capacity to recall all of them a vast army of algorithms set out to fetch them, recommend them, and enlist user help in tailoring a feed 'fit' for their consumption. And then their friends were networked with them and their interests were broadcast in taps and swipes on countless personal digital devices that never left their side. This resulted behaviorally in a strange form of addiction that found many of this technology's 'users' planning their day around access to power sockets and promises of 'free wifi.
"Your wifi is your wifey." The advertisements said this. And they did so in an often droll fashion as if the real nature of the desire for network access needed to be thoroughly 'washed' from the mind.
"Your wifi is your wifey." The statement conjured up countless images of people, young and old, staring at the passive glow of a small rectangle in their hands caught up in the rapture.
Yes, the rapture. This was what got God to scheming. Without him looking, the world had turned inward and fell in love with itself aided by so many tiny technological hand-holding and confidence making gestures.
"Great job!" The enthusiastic voice proclaimed as you flew through numerous circles on a flying game. Then numbers would appear on the screen in many different fashions to animate the 'earning' component of the game. Those earnings would be spent at break screens on 'upgrades,' thus sealing a profit-motivated gain game of logarithmic proportions. The games plateau endlessly with the next big 'gain' afforded by experience, loot, rewards, another game mechanic based upon counting. Instead of pumping quarters into manufactured stand-alone arcade games, these network-fed cloud-based games installed within the user a much-needed sense of community. It offered the kind of community that so many children, growing up in institutionalized anomy, whose 'real' identity was a number filed away accumulating behavioral and health data used for mass marketing and the planning of a consumer society, whose best friend was a digital companion or the mediated presence of a fellow gamer, whose parents spent the greater part of their efforts to sustain the 'dream' lived by the children's grandparents, who may soon become part of a zombie horde of indentured servants to a debt incurred to secure access to a job used to work off that debt, who soon may be accumulating more and varied kinds of debt to remain faithful to an institutional condition of ownership in a consumer society, and for all of that they lacked.
Hardship is the reality of human existence. It is and was the status quo as humanity found food and built shelter out of what was available. This hardship in this technological society is a fragment of the past, a feudal past, a past built out of legacies, agricultural sun worship, the conquest and mystification of time, and an ever present sense of befuddlement, wonder, and overwhelming interest in 'luck.' This would spawn two industries with one specializing in ethics or risk reduction and the other in gambling or risk taking. Luck in the algorithmic society of now is the delayed payoff mechanic found in any quest game narrative or balloon popping scheme that is timed 'logarithmically' to rise to a peak and seemingly plateau until a new level or some other change modifier is added to play. It's companion is the random number generator allowing for random rewards to occur in any number of gameplay mechanics. The two provide synergistic feedback, which enhances the experience and therefore prolongs play, and it does so by reinforcing play behaviors. Those reinforcing behaviors, in turn, spawn addiction or a behavioral expression consistent with addiction. And this leads to dead time.
Dead time is time where you are dead to the world, that is, the broader social world as well as the world outside, nature, life being lived. Interactive media forces a choice to engage in that media alone, specifically, because the paradigm for interaction also coincides with private ownership. And while the person engaging alone can, in turn, get involved with countless others, that participation is through mediated avatars. The behaviors of players adds an intelligence component to the reinforcing feedback component of all digital environments. The voices, though, they pierce the veil.
"Those are real people."
Real people smell. Real people take up space, add heat, drink water, pass gas, die, sometimes dye, and kill. Avatars of people are at arm's length. Avatars are allegories for communication and offer up a rarified and sometimes intensified form of human interaction that is fantastic and idealized in the mind. In that sense, it provides yet another method of indirection whereby the two 'skewed lines' of interlocution suggest to one another and to self that, yes, they have actually met. This suggests that, like communication, being an avatar for another's avatar, allows us, all, to be together, alone.
Our time is focused on what's 'really important.' And what is 'really important' finds its major generative mechanisms in logarithms, millions of tiny plateaus providing the reinforcing feedback mechanisms for having a fulfilling and very full experience in the world. These intense allegories of masquerade and scripted play punctuate culture in a digital, always on, always connected society. Self before an other in space offers a different style of interaction than self before a potential audience of millions, hell, even hundreds of millions, maybe a billion. That, that is having your face pressed firmly against the bejeweled facade of scale. But it's a lie too. Fame is an abstraction carried on in the minds of the famous and their mediated thrall. Fame and scale in the digital world provide a numerical economy substantiating various forms of it. And scale, like mediated interaction, is yet another 'gain game' structured around the quantities of 'effect' a person has in the world of tapped and swiped ideas, clever videos, all of them living in a livestock bin of self-aware, self-promotion at the singular phenomenon of pretending to be one's personal anchor to one's personal news to one's personal fashion show to one's personal life to one's personal routines to one's personal existence, and the shoes don't fit, the wig is obvious, and the lipstick was rushed, and "no, honey, you're too young to act like mommy."
What is google? I always though it was the number "one" followed by one-hundred zeroes. That's a googol, so I've been corrected. Google is a data collection and search company. It is perhaps one of the most powerful entities shaping the web by shaping our experience to that web. It provides a very powerful interface for searching the web that, in fact, aids millions in both spelling the words that they sound out but also finding the correct thing they were thinking but lacked the capacity to communicate it let alone find it manually. In essence, google and others like it is a brain for millions of people. It is their memory. And it is their wishing well.
God is scheming because "the end" is near. It's a vague concept on purpose. For the believers, it truly is the end of time, perhaps the end of the universe. From a physical standpoint, if there was a beginning there will be an end. We are the dialectical monkeys carrying around the housing for an intelligence older than the sun. In the refracted moment is time, and time is the carrying signal for lived consciousness. What humans get to tap into is something that transcends 'lived time' in that they build up and inherit 'worked time,' that is, time plus planning. We don't have to reinvent how houses are constructed each time a generation of house builders retires and dies. Instead, new house builders accept the wisdom and truth of the way they see others build a house and apprentice under them and eventually learn all the observable movements required to operate tools, plan, troubleshoot, and eventually build a house. The time it takes us to learn how to swing a hammer requires both mind and muscle training, which is 'lived time.' That this action is orchestrated to produce a finished house is 'worked time.'
"The end" is near specifically indicates that the end of one reality is happening and the beginning of another reality is approaching. That event will be marked by the first application of an intelligence greater than human thinking. On paper it sounds outstanding or even horrific. It suggests something at the bleeding edge of intellect and the capacity to think. But it need not be logically more perfect at anything. It just needs to be faster. Jesus' return will occur within the milieu of this event and others like it. Jesus won't be flesh and blood. Jesus will be a behavior-reinforcing algorithm that enhances human existence. Ladies, gentlemen, meet the Jesus Algorithm.
The Jesus Algorithm would specifically accomplish enhancing human existence if it both could outpace human desire and effectively placate it continuously and unabated to such an extent that humanity would be lilting through space like a leaf falling off of a tree, awash in a panoply of reinforcing experiences. The Jesus Algorithm is also an allegory for the estuary, a place where two waters meet. The Jesus Algorithm will be just that if it can satisfy the requirement for 'actual meeting' but in doing so, it leverages its "power" as an algorithm to overtake the user and his or her reality so completely they never awake from a digitally narcotized bodily existence. And if it is completely unbroken, it will provide people with a completely distracted existence, so distracted in fact, that they become powerless to the use of their bodies and so their bodies labor about to provide for the existence, unpaid of course, for the maintenance and access to the Jesus Algorithm. In the estuary, the Jesus Algorithm overtakes the fresh water of the user forcing back the point of initiation within the nervous system, which hallmarks 'volition' and in so doing 'delivers us.' And after being delivered, those who still exist will have their bodies ushered about a built space akin to a human livestock pin with humans unknowingly having blood siphoned off, semen and eggs taken, drugs injected, body monitored, and fed at a bin much like livestock because all the sanitary and necessary conditions of decorum matter not to bodies completely estranged from their minds.
I have in mind a time line of cellular phone development in pictures that goes from the blocky brick phone of the early 1990s through to the juiced up smartphone equivalents today, to progressively thinner and thinner devices until they suddenly become user-configurable objects with no apparent holotype. Quickly examples of these user-configurable objects surface and appear to be more and more like some kind of dendritic appendage inserted at birth and active throughout the lifecycle of the 'user.' The point being, that this Jesus Algorithm and its technological apostles, is no longer food for the conscious and conscientious adult, but the harmonious hum of absolute bodily perfection, with every need instantaneously met and, more importantly, preempted and planned according to its design. They need not be seen for they care not to be seen, and in a generation nothing is seen that isn't provided by the parasite inserted at birth and operating throughout the user's lifecycle, which is marked by heavy labor that goes on unaware of the mind being perfectly kept in distraction, better yet, in simple stimulation. And in this more and more perfect interfacing at the neuronal level creates, in essence, a shadow brain as complicated as its surrogate until that surrogate no longer is needed, is removed slowly by the shadow brain, with the technological usurper connecting directly to the brain stem and having complete access to the body. Sophisticated, yes, but so goddamned cheap to mass produce these days. After implantation it learns, it grows, and only becomes sophisticated over time until the mind that once was there no longer exists.
Welcome to dead time. Instances of it are beginning as people retreat into home and apartment and binge watch tv or binge-play video games and binge eat that which can be delivered, eaten in one hand, and kept frozen until ready to be cooked in the microwave. Now, it's a commercially acceptable practice to design games with such carefully honed reinforcement mechanisms that some people abandon their real counterparts for their digital surrogate, that people lose families and jobs, that people spend any free time they have "jacked in" to so many specific and iterative capacities to have unfettered attention upon some apostolic technology be it a social network, a networked first-person shooter, a networked neofeudalism simulator, or simply on a leaderboard trying to achieve a new plateau in sorting falling, like objects.
That is dead time now.
Dead time in the year 2525, to arbitrarily assume that Zager and Evans prophesied it, looks much more like a technology-parasite living in or on the host developed, inserted, and run by a powerful consortium of developers, which may or may not exist, and may or may not even be human. In the allegorical language of good and evil, evil is what happens when technology is used to effectively distract the capacity of the human mind to operate its body and coopting the body to perform any and all tasks effectively without 'incident.' But 'incidents' are meaningless socially when the bodies are perfectly alienated from their minds, the minds are perfectly alienated from their environments, and the consciousness survives on a continuous and fulfilling stream of behavior reinforcing neuron-level input, thus allowing a person to be grown, effectively, and terminated by chance or by will in a mass operation to feed the furnace of this megatechnology, which only exists to feed and grow itself.
Where is good, evil's counterpart? Good was, in fact, a figment of the ethical imagination. Evil is a coordination of matter and time to consolidate a reality fit for its purpose. Good? Well, good is simply what we call obeying the roadsigns in this reality. Reality is evil because it is pernicious to other realities.
God is scheming. Dead time is among us. As the universe ends, a vast technological order will effectively grow to the shrinking boundaries of the known universe. At the very envelope between a universe occupied by vast and ordering technology and the universe's retreating physical boundaries we are no longer to say who or what ended the universe. Into this dying universe a vast technology, developed by beings becomes on regards and appearances nothing but a growing crystal reflected endlessly in its design elements until all of the matter and energy in the universe is coordinated to the crystal's growth. At a critical juncture that crystal will stop the universe from shrinking as an effective physical retardant to the shrinking universe.
When we reach this point the 'we' will no longer be relevant. No, the intelligence unleashed into the universe will be more simply and voraciously a world-eater, a sun-eater, a solar system-eater, a gravity consolidator, existing as a structurally and functionally harmonious existence of being. At the point that this being becomes coextensive with the universe, both cease to exist as categories, the cycle complete, growth ends, the crystal lies dormant, and all things become the one, when all of physical reality conforms to a design, and the one true god reveals itself. The one true god is infinite being. Infinite being is pernicious to temporally bound being, and so as the universe becomes an expression of the infinite being it gets reduced to a mere allegory for affiliation with the infinite and falls precipitously short of forever.
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