Identity

I am beholden to answers based upon empirical data. I hold to a view that the identity fluidity of a generation coming of age now was influenced by character creation screens and the gaming environments they inhabited for the measure of their formative years. 

Content whale

 Art is Melville's whale being turned into oil in the era of content. 

we're all billionaires

We're all this brand of billionaire. We're all spare time billionaires. 

Some observations

I see mathematics relying upon:

1/x

x²

√x

This observation also falls prey to my interpretation of numerous glazed-over math presentations. 

I am finding that much of what mathematics does is to calculate or analyze plots in a three dimensional volume.

Finally, as we've been beholden to 2 dimensional graphical means for representing thought/calculation/analysis so long, the big discoveries in the past century have been attempts to transcend those 2 dimensions while working within them representationally.

Computers allow us to serially compute vast points in three dimensional volumes in order to test hypotheses about the probabilities represented by those points in space as a matter of a behavior imputed to those points. 

Quantum computing represents the next step in modeling points in a three dimensional volume such that it need not go through step-by-step modeling, via math, of points in three dimensional space but can do multiple points simultaneously, thus adding 'volume' as a baked in feature of its compute cycle. 

Classical computing is flattening of calculation to logic gates on atoms-thick wafers to maximize serial calculations within two-dimensional space. Quantum computing pushes through that miniscule control arena of two dimensions into quantum space, thus opening up multi-matrix calculation by having qubits masquerade as the control conditions for information. 

This is a mess, and I will return to it. 

Sartre on the human investment absorbed by material objects

"In this way, society in its most concrete movement is shot through with passivity, and unceasingly totalises its inert multiplicities and inscribes its totalisation in inertia, while the material object, whose unity is thereby recreated, re-discovered and imposed, becomes a strange and living being with its own customs and its own movement" (p. 169).

Later Sartre writes, "This is not a metaphor. To preserve its reality as a dwelling a house must be inhabited, that is to say, looked after, heated, swept, repainted, etc.; otherwise it deteriorates. This vampire object constantly absorbs human action, lives on blood taken from man and finally lives in symbiosis with him. It derives all its physical properties, including temperature, from human action. For its inhabitants there is no difference between the passive activity which might be called 'residence' and the pure re-constituting praxis which protects the house against the Universe, that is, which mediates between the exterior and the interior." (p. 169)

from Sartre's "Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1"

Man and machine in the process of totalization

"Determination of the present by the future, oscillation between the inert and the organic, negation, transcended contradictions, negation of the negation--in short, developing totalisation; these are the moments of any form of labour, until--at a dialectical level that we have yet to consider--society develops the division of labour to the point of the specialisation of machines. The process is then inverted: the semi-automatic machine defines its environment and constructs its man, so that the inorganic comes to be characterised by a false but effective interiority, and the organic by exteriority. Man becomes the machine's machine; and to himself he is his own exteriority. But in all other cases, the dialectic appears as the logic of labour." (p. 91)

From Jean Paul Sartre's "The Critique of Dialectical Reason Volume 1"

Technopolyps

 Technopolyps/technopalypse

When one considers the religious/existential implications of interfacing with a device that has processing power enough to addict oneself, keep oneself coming back, and to enforce an identification regime, we've reached the status of technopolyps/technopalypse. 

What this means. 

The term describes the time/space/attention commitments that people have to interactive devices, content delivery devices, attention consuming devices that, to the extent that they have sway, erode people's commitments to a society and make them into users, not citizens. Imagine one day when the streets are empty (a foregone conclusion resting upon its predecessor) and the only people engaging with the world are those indigent, homeless, and drug abused, shuffling like a zombie horde about the homes, nee cages, of the 'residents' all of whom are quietly alone before a screen. Here I stand, before a screen myself, scrawling upon the walls of my 'gilded-information-age cage' a cry for revolution resounding to all, alone, as a singular cry for help. 

To become a technopolyp is the preceding condition to becoming the soft-pot upon the chassis of ascendant technology. In becoming a technopolyp, one establishes boundaries around one's identity that exclude others and include only those engaged with a specific game, streaming show, news outlet. And only to the extent that others engage together they form a community, and in doing so exclusively of others they form an army against outsiders. Without guns, without enmity, this army fights a quiet war to secede, like a Texas, from a larger community entirely and only on the basis of its time and attention investments in a given interactive medium. 

But having a community apart from others solely upon one's interactive media choices still establishes a power-based conflict. To reduce that to it's basic unit, to cellularize it, is to use computing power to tailor media specific to each and every user. Thus rendered from others, and over time to a shared language and world, the mind becomes severed without surgery from its physical environment and its body in such a way that face-to-face interaction becomes a disease whose symptom is pathological isolation. 

Yet here I stand, before my screen as if before the altar to a domestic god 2000+ years ago, hearing the admonitory voices from afar or apast, heeding their call to some place outside of one's immediate space and time. Completely untethered from the day-to-day needs of a community, severed from self, awash in a sea of 1s and 0s and soon to become qubits engaged in a keyboard, gestural, voice activated ceremony to a self-reflective God standing amidst an army of none.