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.
Thursday, August 27, 2015
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.
Sunday, July 26, 2015
On-line is like in-car
On-line is like in-car; each provides a template for mediation around a rectangular viewing screen through which one experiences the world as a detached spectacle punctuated by distracted operation of a machine.from Frankenfame
Friday, July 17, 2015
playing with the undead
Monster High is a popular mash up doll set, combining elements of Barbie, Bratz, and Boris.
Boris Karloff.
By my own personal experience of the dual process of maturation and matriculation through various institutions I understand an aesthetic embrace of the melancholy. While not necessarily a sociopathic adolescent lifestyle orientation it is inescapably a reactive stance to a set of presumptions held by this maturing youth as a form of group discipline through mimicry and followership. One possible way out, and sometimes perhaps an expression of a 'variance' in one's mental health, is to dress apart, stand apart, and ultimately be apart. And in a social setting framed in so many ways by group affiliation to be without one is not only a reactionary stance to the presumed arbitrary and self-perceived 'unfair' pressures to join but is itself, as a result, a way of being. Because the outcome of group affiliation is a group identity, which informs, enables, but disables the way members act and interact, thus producing the evidence of one's identity for others and oneself.
All that gobbledygook was required to tell you that dressing 'gothic' or oriented around an aesthetic cue to funerary culture, melancholy, or the macabre is and is not a symptom of institutional forces acting upon and forming self-identity. It is because the turn to identifying through outward signs of dress and behavior is an attempt to break set, to divert in some way from the norm. And second, it is not simply in that this gothic aesthetic is a collection of choices appropriated to establish an outward appearance, which appeals to the individual engaging in it. It's greater significance is an effect of others, from their standpoints, judging what one's "gothic" dress means. In other words, it is not because human motivations and values are enigmatic, multifaceted, and quite often hidden from the conscious choices that people make all the time. Ask yourself for example, "why do some men bend their ball caps and others do not?" Some reasons may be as plain as seeing that someone else is doing it, but the origin of these kinds of choices in how we present our clothing are beyond the scope of individual practitioners of a ball cap bill bend. And even more plainly, people can and do chose to bend or not to bend based upon his/her impression of what's most popular and either following along, doing the exact opposite, or making an informed decision in front of the mirror.
Clothing choices are quite arcane yet so damn ubiquitous that you can ask anyone, anyone--prisoners, children, elderly--and most will have some kind of pragmatic rules that they follow and can explain. That being said, let's move on, and back to the subject at hand without getting too mired in the minutiae of everyday style.
The choice to appear dead or simply fixated upon death, dying, melancholy, sadness, or being alone is, if we widen the frame, a way to strike against a culture and the forms of expression it makes readily available and sanctions through group affiliation. The one inescapable irony to a style choice is the inescapable association to a larger group with similar tastes. In one sense, we can never be apart from groups. Even rogue shooters belong to a group of mass murderers using guns that has grown its ranks in the last decade.Let's get back on task. Black metal, death metal, and other forms of heavy metal music as well as industrial music and 'dark' music in general are recognized by people who study them as a way to express power in a world that seemingly has reduced all initiative choices made as a consumer to follow to scripted lives and model behavior.
With all this said, we have to return to a context in which this death-orientation in style choices would be 'taboo' and one place where that occurs is in the suburban school classroom. Suburbs are many things to many people. Generically speaking, they represent a retreat from the problems of density, diversity, and decay. So the suburbs, as new housing developments, fresh communities, represent both freshly rooted lives, new starts, a solution to social ills, and so on. Suburbs have a normative, positive, life-affirming valence, or they should. But their foundation is economic, which encourages countless selfish ownership-oriented behaviors. And what the suburbs often become are nascent sites of arbitrary cultural patterns, which get questioned, overturned, and reacted against in ways that recreate the social ills that the suburbs were set up as a refuge from: drug abuse, crime, youth in revolt, and so on. But more than all these factors the condition of being or becoming an isolated consumer, an "atom of consumption" as Noam Chomsky would say, has the greatest effect upon people, their fears, affiliations, and ultimately their pathologies. And these pathologies are ubiquitous and become normalized by the economic system that supports this dominant form of living. What results are various forms of cultural malaise orbiting an economic nexus. With money and accumulation of material goods comes the fear of losing them to thievery or circumstances. Out of this spins fear of others, retreat and defense from others, paranoia and suspicion of others. Most importantly one stands always and evidently near the precipice of an existential threat as simply as losing power, losing water, losing internet, losing cable tv--a set of first-world problems with grave consequences. What it results in are any number of home defense or surveillance products to allay fears and reclaim a sense of safety. Insurance and supplementary insurance industries cater to this fear, this sense of risk, and when most conveniences are centrally provided and controlled those risks are quite evident and often too real.
But a complete host of behaviors, a lifestyle, and a living situation all revolve around a model of 'essential consumption.' 'Essential consumption' is reliance upon municipal systems for power, sewer, and water as well as food, drink, and a large amount of leisure choices. These activities secure the legitimacy of the system and frame the practically experienced reality. With access to services essential to life paid for by money made doing labor that is abstracted from everyday life patterns, we find that this monetary or economic system-based living offers nothing substantial to nourish the soul outside that which can be bought. Sadly enough, labor and everyday crisis are essential companions to forming a satisfying existence. In a system where most of these get relegated by the practical reality and institutionalized norms to outlier behavior, we are left living in a wasteland of effort. Everything races infinitely toward meaninglessness lapping up the milk nestled in the bosom of a static lifestyle afforded by modern convenience. And from this empty life, where parents toil away the days, children move from one scripted activity to another, and intimacy gets soiled by so many modern distractions that humanity is left unformed by constant human direction and companionship. Without crucial family bonding the next generation pathologically clings to childhood companion objects replete with comic and cartoon narratives, action figures, games, candy, books, folders, clothing, backpacks, and movies bearing its likeness. Being raised by a screen leads to life before the screen.
What the Monster High doll represents, aside from any specific cultural pattern, is the unique ability of capitalism to take any reactionary movement and subsume it under its rubric and turn expressions of revolt and alternative living into lifestyles fit for consumption. Better yet, it shows how humans living within capitalists systems produce societal 'tumors' fit for capitalist appropriation and consumption once again. In this ouroboros culture of capitalism people function as livestock, input, and product. The living literally consume culture, pollute irreversibly, and revolt against society's rules. And every expression of this consumer culture reflects the cult of the consumed, and so what society shits out it eventually eats.
After all, aren't pet rocks something that cave men first acquired?
Boris Karloff.
By my own personal experience of the dual process of maturation and matriculation through various institutions I understand an aesthetic embrace of the melancholy. While not necessarily a sociopathic adolescent lifestyle orientation it is inescapably a reactive stance to a set of presumptions held by this maturing youth as a form of group discipline through mimicry and followership. One possible way out, and sometimes perhaps an expression of a 'variance' in one's mental health, is to dress apart, stand apart, and ultimately be apart. And in a social setting framed in so many ways by group affiliation to be without one is not only a reactionary stance to the presumed arbitrary and self-perceived 'unfair' pressures to join but is itself, as a result, a way of being. Because the outcome of group affiliation is a group identity, which informs, enables, but disables the way members act and interact, thus producing the evidence of one's identity for others and oneself.
All that gobbledygook was required to tell you that dressing 'gothic' or oriented around an aesthetic cue to funerary culture, melancholy, or the macabre is and is not a symptom of institutional forces acting upon and forming self-identity. It is because the turn to identifying through outward signs of dress and behavior is an attempt to break set, to divert in some way from the norm. And second, it is not simply in that this gothic aesthetic is a collection of choices appropriated to establish an outward appearance, which appeals to the individual engaging in it. It's greater significance is an effect of others, from their standpoints, judging what one's "gothic" dress means. In other words, it is not because human motivations and values are enigmatic, multifaceted, and quite often hidden from the conscious choices that people make all the time. Ask yourself for example, "why do some men bend their ball caps and others do not?" Some reasons may be as plain as seeing that someone else is doing it, but the origin of these kinds of choices in how we present our clothing are beyond the scope of individual practitioners of a ball cap bill bend. And even more plainly, people can and do chose to bend or not to bend based upon his/her impression of what's most popular and either following along, doing the exact opposite, or making an informed decision in front of the mirror.
Clothing choices are quite arcane yet so damn ubiquitous that you can ask anyone, anyone--prisoners, children, elderly--and most will have some kind of pragmatic rules that they follow and can explain. That being said, let's move on, and back to the subject at hand without getting too mired in the minutiae of everyday style.
The choice to appear dead or simply fixated upon death, dying, melancholy, sadness, or being alone is, if we widen the frame, a way to strike against a culture and the forms of expression it makes readily available and sanctions through group affiliation. The one inescapable irony to a style choice is the inescapable association to a larger group with similar tastes. In one sense, we can never be apart from groups. Even rogue shooters belong to a group of mass murderers using guns that has grown its ranks in the last decade.Let's get back on task. Black metal, death metal, and other forms of heavy metal music as well as industrial music and 'dark' music in general are recognized by people who study them as a way to express power in a world that seemingly has reduced all initiative choices made as a consumer to follow to scripted lives and model behavior.
With all this said, we have to return to a context in which this death-orientation in style choices would be 'taboo' and one place where that occurs is in the suburban school classroom. Suburbs are many things to many people. Generically speaking, they represent a retreat from the problems of density, diversity, and decay. So the suburbs, as new housing developments, fresh communities, represent both freshly rooted lives, new starts, a solution to social ills, and so on. Suburbs have a normative, positive, life-affirming valence, or they should. But their foundation is economic, which encourages countless selfish ownership-oriented behaviors. And what the suburbs often become are nascent sites of arbitrary cultural patterns, which get questioned, overturned, and reacted against in ways that recreate the social ills that the suburbs were set up as a refuge from: drug abuse, crime, youth in revolt, and so on. But more than all these factors the condition of being or becoming an isolated consumer, an "atom of consumption" as Noam Chomsky would say, has the greatest effect upon people, their fears, affiliations, and ultimately their pathologies. And these pathologies are ubiquitous and become normalized by the economic system that supports this dominant form of living. What results are various forms of cultural malaise orbiting an economic nexus. With money and accumulation of material goods comes the fear of losing them to thievery or circumstances. Out of this spins fear of others, retreat and defense from others, paranoia and suspicion of others. Most importantly one stands always and evidently near the precipice of an existential threat as simply as losing power, losing water, losing internet, losing cable tv--a set of first-world problems with grave consequences. What it results in are any number of home defense or surveillance products to allay fears and reclaim a sense of safety. Insurance and supplementary insurance industries cater to this fear, this sense of risk, and when most conveniences are centrally provided and controlled those risks are quite evident and often too real.
But a complete host of behaviors, a lifestyle, and a living situation all revolve around a model of 'essential consumption.' 'Essential consumption' is reliance upon municipal systems for power, sewer, and water as well as food, drink, and a large amount of leisure choices. These activities secure the legitimacy of the system and frame the practically experienced reality. With access to services essential to life paid for by money made doing labor that is abstracted from everyday life patterns, we find that this monetary or economic system-based living offers nothing substantial to nourish the soul outside that which can be bought. Sadly enough, labor and everyday crisis are essential companions to forming a satisfying existence. In a system where most of these get relegated by the practical reality and institutionalized norms to outlier behavior, we are left living in a wasteland of effort. Everything races infinitely toward meaninglessness lapping up the milk nestled in the bosom of a static lifestyle afforded by modern convenience. And from this empty life, where parents toil away the days, children move from one scripted activity to another, and intimacy gets soiled by so many modern distractions that humanity is left unformed by constant human direction and companionship. Without crucial family bonding the next generation pathologically clings to childhood companion objects replete with comic and cartoon narratives, action figures, games, candy, books, folders, clothing, backpacks, and movies bearing its likeness. Being raised by a screen leads to life before the screen.
What the Monster High doll represents, aside from any specific cultural pattern, is the unique ability of capitalism to take any reactionary movement and subsume it under its rubric and turn expressions of revolt and alternative living into lifestyles fit for consumption. Better yet, it shows how humans living within capitalists systems produce societal 'tumors' fit for capitalist appropriation and consumption once again. In this ouroboros culture of capitalism people function as livestock, input, and product. The living literally consume culture, pollute irreversibly, and revolt against society's rules. And every expression of this consumer culture reflects the cult of the consumed, and so what society shits out it eventually eats.
After all, aren't pet rocks something that cave men first acquired?
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
branded memory
Branded memory.
It's the most powerful thing to come from our consumer culture. Our past is remembered through objects from our adolescence. Those objects were toys.
Today, we engage in that childhood conceit, those moments when we'd invite our friend over and keep him or her at arm's length while we dive into our toy chest and literally bury ourselves in toys and bask in the giddy joy of being watched enjoying ourselves.
That's the only attainable zenith behind the promise of toys, and it occurs within the frame of being a consumer amidst them. What characteristically is this zenith? Outside of enjoying ourselves with toys alone we force others to bear witness in order to validate that experience. In that way, our enjoyment eclipses other's self interest if only momentarily.
Branded memory is this toy chest moment, writ in so many software 'app' permutations of being together yet alone and with ample opportunities for display tied to software that can allows massive scale. We're all famous, because in our branded memory moment we slip into the skin of these consensually held fantasies and wear the mask of childhood nostalgia. The only value in these acquisitive contexts rests upon the number and rarity of the things acquired.And number and rarity in a consumer context serve only to mythologize the object in question and to drive its acquisition.
It's the most powerful thing to come from our consumer culture. Our past is remembered through objects from our adolescence. Those objects were toys.
Today, we engage in that childhood conceit, those moments when we'd invite our friend over and keep him or her at arm's length while we dive into our toy chest and literally bury ourselves in toys and bask in the giddy joy of being watched enjoying ourselves.
That's the only attainable zenith behind the promise of toys, and it occurs within the frame of being a consumer amidst them. What characteristically is this zenith? Outside of enjoying ourselves with toys alone we force others to bear witness in order to validate that experience. In that way, our enjoyment eclipses other's self interest if only momentarily.
Branded memory is this toy chest moment, writ in so many software 'app' permutations of being together yet alone and with ample opportunities for display tied to software that can allows massive scale. We're all famous, because in our branded memory moment we slip into the skin of these consensually held fantasies and wear the mask of childhood nostalgia. The only value in these acquisitive contexts rests upon the number and rarity of the things acquired.And number and rarity in a consumer context serve only to mythologize the object in question and to drive its acquisition.
Friday, July 3, 2015
life, time
Come to grips with humanity.
The life of humanity is a bag of fluid draped around a mineral skeleton.
Humanity is a grub. Its time is so much dirt. This primordial conception of a person in time is a filthy coincidence with this bag and its history, writhing about gestating deep underneath.
This place, below, is a metaphor for obfuscation or simple ambiguity
This vague, cashew-shaped lifeform, deep under ground, gestating. It is a historical remembrance of us. This faint-white cashew creature with its horrific tribal mask mahogany brown and its peristaltic fuselage a saintly hue, that is us. It is our occurrence and its remembrance, in time.
Our childhood is the 17- or 21-year-long dream, remembered as a deep slumber constituting the inner, rotting wood, that sweet-smelling humus, the sacred compost for our identity, to be shared with no one but to be reveled in privately. In our adulthood, this soft cashew of monastic consumption hardens into a shell housing a metamorphic process that reduces our life's form to a viscous fluid of cellular material, organs, muscles. nerve fibers, which hardens into the adult form that we take.
Adulthood is an endless, horrific sensation of repeated self-abnegation while staring at the pulsing abdomens of our companions. Each of us stands perched atop a larva encased in a cell that each formed from a paste of spit and mud. We find ourselves having made our home inside a rusting pipe on a pipe rack in a weed-grown lot of an abandoned building in a decaying industrial district of a declining city in an impoverished nation on a poisoned planet orbiting a dying star in a solar system orbiting a collapsing galaxy falling toward a collapsed star on the event horizon of a black hole. This configuration pulls gravity in a way that creates a timeline for existence that is oriented toward birth, development, decline, death.
Death is the rhythm of our universe. It's exaltation is sung into the cavernous halls of a leviathan's esophagus with its ribbing and arteries faintly seen from within. That esophagus becomes a sarcophagus, preserving all existence as it passes the event horizon into the black hole.
What's on the other side? The believers tell us that it's god, a god, the god, the unspeakable name, the all, the one, the light, the truth, love.
In every spectral dimension the truth holds the same. The answer occurs both for the very large, the very small, the very ultimate, the very intimate, the very far from "very." The same shapes take form in our telescope as in our microscope.
The life of humanity is a bag of fluid draped around a mineral skeleton.
Humanity is a grub. Its time is so much dirt. This primordial conception of a person in time is a filthy coincidence with this bag and its history, writhing about gestating deep underneath.
This place, below, is a metaphor for obfuscation or simple ambiguity
This vague, cashew-shaped lifeform, deep under ground, gestating. It is a historical remembrance of us. This faint-white cashew creature with its horrific tribal mask mahogany brown and its peristaltic fuselage a saintly hue, that is us. It is our occurrence and its remembrance, in time.
Our childhood is the 17- or 21-year-long dream, remembered as a deep slumber constituting the inner, rotting wood, that sweet-smelling humus, the sacred compost for our identity, to be shared with no one but to be reveled in privately. In our adulthood, this soft cashew of monastic consumption hardens into a shell housing a metamorphic process that reduces our life's form to a viscous fluid of cellular material, organs, muscles. nerve fibers, which hardens into the adult form that we take.
Adulthood is an endless, horrific sensation of repeated self-abnegation while staring at the pulsing abdomens of our companions. Each of us stands perched atop a larva encased in a cell that each formed from a paste of spit and mud. We find ourselves having made our home inside a rusting pipe on a pipe rack in a weed-grown lot of an abandoned building in a decaying industrial district of a declining city in an impoverished nation on a poisoned planet orbiting a dying star in a solar system orbiting a collapsing galaxy falling toward a collapsed star on the event horizon of a black hole. This configuration pulls gravity in a way that creates a timeline for existence that is oriented toward birth, development, decline, death.
Death is the rhythm of our universe. It's exaltation is sung into the cavernous halls of a leviathan's esophagus with its ribbing and arteries faintly seen from within. That esophagus becomes a sarcophagus, preserving all existence as it passes the event horizon into the black hole.
What's on the other side? The believers tell us that it's god, a god, the god, the unspeakable name, the all, the one, the light, the truth, love.
In every spectral dimension the truth holds the same. The answer occurs both for the very large, the very small, the very ultimate, the very intimate, the very far from "very." The same shapes take form in our telescope as in our microscope.
Friday, June 19, 2015
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