Electron Dreams, The Psychosis Of Civilization and Ghosts In The Machine

But things are changing and have changed. So-called technological advances occur at incredibly rates in the race to discover a new explanation of a previous discovery or the race to prove that a centuries old discovery is true and verified by our perceived reality. Does that mean Heisenberg was wrong?

However, technology has allotted some conveniences. No longer are humans faced with the same worries of survival. We are well taken care of. You have only to type in a few words and at your fingertips is the information a data engine has gathered. But co-existence with this so-called leap of human evolution is the ancient practice of starvation, vulnerability to the elements, and covering up. Western Culture can have this pre-assembled and delivered to your door. That changes things. People become hooked into their environment in order to do anything. It is as if you have to know the way to work to get to work. But what happens when that environment is virtual and augmented? How does that affect neurons in the brain? What if you believe in that augmented universe, do you then believe that your life is dependent upon a screen?

Information comprises a culture, so when the information changes as does that culture. There is technology, so it is ridiculous to return to pre-microchip or something. Humans cannot return to the primitive era. It is somewhat difficult to believe that, is it not? What exactly would we do with everything? Would that not mean the industrial age was built to return to the primitive age? Recycling is already a problem and dumping garbage all over the earth already happens. Look at the streets in your town, litter everywhere!

The reality is the industrial era is over. It is the digital era now. And the digital age changes much rapidly than the industrial. From conception to execution in the digital age is mere seconds to months whereas the industrial age took years from concept to execution. But what is the cost? I do not know. I have not been around long enough on the planet.

The Sharing Economy. Why not share skills and expertise rather than create jobs for profit? Under the current economy, everyone becomes a corporate cabal, elsewise no one would have value (cost, price, money). If money is currency, is not the act of current (flow) more important than the object selected to represent that flow? See, symbols have replaced conscience. Therein lays the alienation and excommunication so many fear, so we fear what we have already become.

“Never underestimate the power of denial.” ~American Beauty

This is the psychosis of civilization. Self-denial. We deny that we dislike the current state of affairs, so we cast lots in hopes that our denial is unfounded. Yet, unhappiness and misery continue unabated. Now, we have reproduced ourselves into that which we wish to be: avatars, profile pictures, images on the screen, a permanent state of Hallowe’en, save midnight never arrives and we need never worry over the grand unmasking. Self-denial to an artificial intelligence downloading dreams forgetting that we are what is real. And the “line” between actuality and virtual actuality continues to fade. No longer do we pursue (or lament) the American Dream, it is the Electron Dream. We want to be ghosts in the machine.

 

Decentralization: The Psychic/Psychological Revolution

Who are the children of tomorrow? Who shall carry the baton of the future kite runners? Certainly not the all-encompassing, top-of-the-heap occupiers known only as the Elite.

Who are the new “They”?

No longer can the planet sustain this top-heavy critical mass leaning tower of power. Despite the insistence of the old oligarchic royal gentlemen’s club that power can be trademarked, patented, and copyrighted, free access tears down that Berlin Wall with bloody fingernails tapping upon backlit keys. Keylogging and not registration determines a new more diverse and dispersed absence of power.

1337 marks the beast. . .

Virtual Nebulae 0001*Image Credit (work used with permission through CC license)–
“Virtual Nebulae 0001” by Andrew Ostrovsky
“Sky city” by Luca G.

Related Posts–

 

Radical Openness

RADICAL OPENNESS – An anthem on the power of IDEAS created by Jason Silva at Therapy Studios.

Presented at TEDGlobal 2012

Inspired by the ideas of TED, Chris Anderson, Richard Dawkins, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Steven Johnson, Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil, Imaginary Foundation and many others.

Dedicated to those who believe in IDEAS WORTH SPREADING!!

[quoted from the description box of the video on Vimeo]

The Essence Of Living Free In The Digital Era: Beyond The Industrial Age

Light within all living beingsSpirit to me is synonymous with essence; animals can have spirituality. I have seen it with my own eyes. I have seen animals regard me, look directly into my eyes, and really see me; they can know me on levels humans cannot, like through smell. They can smell everywhere I have been and know whether I am native to the woods or not. They can detect pheromones, the chemistry of my essence. Am I in fear? Am I predator? Am I not predator but dangerous? Have they encountered me before? All this knowledge attained in a whiff. Our essence, our spirit, exudes without our bodies. We are Spirit, Essence. Our moods, our humors, our emotions emanate from within. It is why someone can be said to be glowing and why beauty is beyond the skin (although skin can be beautiful, but true beauty is more than the physical).

meeting the black wholeSuperpowers–Mental acuity can be another way to denote superpowers. Superpowers can make for, what is called, an evil person, but superpowers themselves have no direction (i.e., no intrinsic implication of good or bad, right or wrong), it is the spirit that possesses them (by possess, I don’t mean in the sense of possession in need of a priest, but in a filling of space, to occupy or influence). Superpowers are very real, though. They are what humans can attain. Today’s protrusion of superpowers can be seen in autistic savants (some famous ones are Daniel Tammet, Kim Peeks, and Temple Grandin), or prodigal genius, or in synesthetes, or in people who have had some kind of head injury or have epilepsy and can perform great feats of calculation or memory. See, I think that humans, in general, are capable of these kinds of feats.

What’s more, these are not feats of the mind; I think that these are ‘normal’ processes, well within the faculties of mind. We are only talking about a kind of comprehension (or maybe apprehension), just a kind of quintessential conversation, a matter of substantial concentration, are we not? Once humans are able to exorcise the mind of unnecessary anxieties, stresses, dis-eases (those habits and grooves of the outgoing society and culture, wherein grooves conceptualize the habits, as well-worn ruts in the synaptic connections, like ditches in grey matter), than we can again realize our full abilities.

SphinxThe internet can be looked at as hive mind/collective consciousness made explicit, like an emergent consciousness arising from the intangible infrastructure of the World Wide Web. I think wireless technology can be perceived as modeled of energy and spirituality. That is (for example) email, web pages, or radio stations transmitting and being received like spiritual messages. You just tune to the frequency and get or give what you need. This is how I see wireless technology. I think Tesla’s idea of wireless technology is the same, he was a man who knew electricity, and if we are just talking about the movement of electrons, then messages are conveyed every time an electron is stimulated. I mean, talking is the same as wireless technology on a certain level. Sound waves received and transmitted as vibrations. What is vibrating? I do not think any thing is vibrating; just that the act of Vibrate exists. It is like saying that there is no driver of the car; we are driver, car, wheel, etc. Therefore, is not wireless technology a kind of telepathy?  Just as television was/is a kind of telepathy, there is a communication with the mind, a sympathetic vibration, an equilibrium, a harmony.

This is what I am most like when in nature, a harmony. This is what I think humans have also lost. Not that humans can ever return to indigenous tribes, but that we can reconnect with our environment at a new point. This is the way I think human suffering can be selected out.

space timeA question emerges: how then do we make sure not to let (or continue to let) the use of technology become a substitute for real intimacy and human connection? To not escape into fear of our own minds and selves — which is what we sometimes run from when we lose ourselves in a screen and if we cringe from human contact and the vulnerability and uncertainty in being seen and experiencing with another? This is what disturbs me most about the internet or about such online “games” as Second Life. Second Life, even the name gives me shivers. It is as if life itself can be replicated (and I do not mean in the sense of reproduction because that is not a replication. There is no copy, not a cloning. A child is an independent being of its parents, not an exact copy), like Frankenstein’s monster, a horrible attempt at mimicry. So, Second Life takes over real life, to the point that real life pales in comparison. Well, online, you can be anything (like a permanent Hallowe’en, save there is no unmasking), a permanent anonymity (or the illusion thereof). Therefore, people take bigger risks, because it seems as if there is no risk at all. This is the mistake of the internet. I think it is because we do not really understand the internet, or the World Wide Web, as we do not really understand ourselves. So, we play with fire. We play with What before we know Why. We are like children, humans, in the universe. Just because we inhabit terra firma does not mean we know everything. I think we fear the uncertainty.

It seems that people are afraid of freedom, really to let go. It is like jumping off a cliff and free falling, except the cliff and the jump were an illusion. I think the part in The Matrix where Morpheus tells Neo to jump from one building to another symbolizes our fear of freedom well. The jump is freedom, jumping into the unknown. The unknown is not the dark abyss that Nietzsche wrote of (at least I do not agree), it can be, but that is in the eye of the beholder. The unknown, to me, is a release, a relief, peaceful. That fighting is unnecessary and that really things are quite simple (thank you Occam’s razor). All the way down to the essence of being, and in all directions simultaneously. This is what humans have forgotten in our ever-pursuit of more, further updates, the next greatest gadget, and the like. We must first remember that we are born free before we can accept that we are consciousness, embodied.

*Image Credits (all work used with permission through CC license)–
“Sphinx” by Eddi van W.
“meeting the black whole” by Eddi van W.
“space time” by Eddi van W.
“Light within all living beings” by Stefan Perneborg

Related Articles–

Happiness In Sadness

Louis C.K., delivered in his talented, comedic way, illustrates the reason why his girls do not have cellphones. He makes a valid point in his philosophy that it is okay to feel alone and to just feel, to be present in loneliness, sadness, and empathy; as from this emotive dance comes happiness and gratitude. Louis C.K. points out that cellphones can disconnect human beings from being present with their feelings, from learning to empathize with other human beings. Although, humorous, his point has veracity.

Big Road Blues (A Look At Humanity’s Alienation through Industrialization)

With the advent of the automobile, civilization changed greatly and at great speed. Henry Ford, the first to use the assembly line technique to build his Model T cars, also created (unbeknownst to him at the time) the precursor to scientific management and the alienation of Man from his humanity. When skill and mastery were removed from work and delineated along an assembly to many people (who need not have the skill) performing the same task repetitively over many days, months, years, Man became divorced from his own sense of accomplishment, efficacy, and benefit from the fruits of his own labor. His being was reduced to numbers and algorithms, he became quantified and thus his trajectory towards a life of drudgery and misery. Rather than the life of leisure at first thought promised to civilized Man, his life became one of automation and robotification. Empty and emotionless.

This music video is an attempt to illustrate that story.

Credits (all clips are public domain or used with permission through CC license)–
Music:
“Big Road Blues” by Tommy Johnson from Internet Archive
Clips:
“American Road 2” from Prelinger Archives
“Wheels of Progress (circa 1927)” produced by U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, Department of Agriculture, Educational Film Service from Prelinger Archives
“Black Girl” by livedtap
Stock Footage filmed by NIKOtheOrb
Edited by NIKOtheOrb

Other music videos.

 

Act Locally

Grow things in the garden of your mind. . .

 

Across The Universe no.49Let us talk a bit about Locality. There exists now a famous slogan making its rounds around the earth: “Think Globally, Act Locally.” But what does that mean? Local? Is that your household, your street, your neighborhood, your township or borough, your city, your state (or province as the case may be), your country, your continent, your planet, the Milky Way Galaxy, the Universe, the 3rd dimension? Which of these is local?

What the internet has done is to reinvent AT&T’s wheel. Despite distance, the internet suddenly tears through the limits of distance and someone in the US can talk to another one in the UK through Skype in what is called “Real Time”. A bored mother, while her husband may be at work and the kids at school (or a bored father) can sit and talk to her BFF on the other side of the planet through instant messaging. A teenager curious about the how the latest video games work (or perhaps the day it will be released) summons the great oracle Google and knows 1 million anwers from all over the globe in Other Worlds (NASA, Sailing With NASA, 10/24/09)nine-tenths of a second.  So, what do you think when you think local? When you think of your friends, are they all offline? When you think of your aquaintances, do they all live in the same town as you?

If we cannot truly define “local”, then how is it possible to truly define right or wrong? What is against or for law? Or how do we define law?

Mom’s gonna fix it all soon.
Mom’s comin’ round to put it back the way it ought to be. ~”Aenima” by Tool

FantasiaUnfortunately, such philosophical wanderings belong to the future of humanity, where (perhaps through or with the help of advancements in technology and perhaps because through the internet one mind can read another) boundaries (which are not unlike prisons in some way, are they not? Imprisoned by one’s definition or opinion of locality?) are not prisons, but recognized as illusions, nothing more than shadows on Platos’ wall.

What of humans who realize without indoctrination or neuromarketing or teaching or conditioning that locality does not mean a space where one shares likeness of nationality, ideology, color, mentality, or philosophy?

What does that future hold?

Ours is a journey toward simplicity, toward quietness, toward a kind of joy that is not in time. In this journey out of time to “NowHere,” we are leaving behind every model we have had of who we thought we were. This journey involves a transformation of our being so that our thinking mind becomes our servant rather than our master. It’s a journey that takes us from primary identification with our psyche to identification with our souls, then to identification with God, and ultimately beyond any identification at all. ~Ram Dass

*Image Credits (all work used with permission through CC license)–
“Across The Universe no.49” by Derek Davalos
“Other Worlds (NASA, Sailing With NASA, 10/24/09) by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center
“Fantasia” by spitfirelas
“the guardian” by Chris Tarnawski

Out with the Old, In with the New Culture

Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order….I believe that it’s the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world. Evolution works through indirection: each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next.”

Planet 8000 background by Courtney RhodesMuch like the hippies, the hepcats, the mods, hipsters, flappers, etc., the culture of the constitution and the work ethic, of the social etiquette and clearly defined boundaries, the impunity of bloated, over-regulated bureaucracy and the absence of accountability are on its way out.

Web 2.0 Digitage 2012 by Maureen Flynn-BurhoeWelcome to the electronic culture.

Science fiction writers forewarned of this inevitability for years. Although, we cowered and enjoyed the show heed was not paid. Now, the ideology that one must work hard at one’s career in order to reap the most benefit from the American Dream no longer applies.

The incoming culture does not seem to want the promising career, as they understand that the dream has popped. Go to school, graduate with your [enclosed] classroom mates in a building on a stage; go to college, work for more money to afford necessities, graduate in an old-fashioned building in uniformity and lockstep. Then get a job, pay your student loans, work until retirement, pay your taxes to The Man, pay into social security, get a mortgage and a family, start accumulating debt, do this for 30-40 years and retire. . . broke and sick. This is not an American dream it is a nightmare.

Euphoria by HartwigHKDThe incoming culture seems to embrace a familiar, yet, new and improved for the 21st century paradigm as well as advocating a simpler, less regulated lifestyle. Social morality and responsibility that seems to have been inspired by Kohlberg’s scale of moral development, post-conventional level has replaced conventional social roles, norms and mores of daily behavior.

Economically in the upcoming culture, quality is far more valuable than quantity. Quantity is synonymous with junk, but junk that can be cheaply modified into a quality product. Shopping for quality, the most return (worth) on a single item, or purchasing in bulk to save money seems to be favored over mass-produced products planned for obsolescence. As shopping malls along with other box stores close, much more informed shopping waits in the wake. Now, a desired item can be price-compared across the planet with an easy Google search. The best quality items can be bought to exact and personal specifications for a small price; even a car, land and home can be purchased this way. Much more productive and constructive actions can be performed online at home, than can be accomplished by, at or in many obsolete jobs of the outgoing culture.

Eole Airlines by Eole WindThrift shops offer many name brand fashions at 70%, 80%, 90% off the regular price, leading to the understanding that you can look sharp at pauper’s prices. Eating healthy: the adage You Are What You Eat seems to have gripped the public imagination (or at least the media’s).

Further, the incoming culture seems much more informed than the outgoing culture. As the incoming culture becomes more wise to the wiles of social engineering—as that culture having grown up on the internet uses social engineering for practical jokes and pranks—media like FoxNews ceases to be the sole source (or even preferred source) of current events around the world. The internet serves as a much more organic and dynamic source of current events, like the rise of Twitter as a relevant and reliable news source. The heroes of the incoming culture do not include the founding fathers, but such instantly recognizable figures as Bill Nye, MythBusters, Carl Sagan, Charlie Bukowski, Bill Murray, zombie apocalypse, and the unending fleet of viral memes like Antoine and, recently, Homeless Kai.

From another dimension by HartwigHKDGod and organized religion have been fired as even FoxNews shows the glaring hypocrisy contained therein. Now, genuine and sincere acceptance (rather than tolerance) for anyone to be who they want to be as long as no harm becomes another is the mantra of fellow humans (see the new niche, Random Acts of Kindness). Religion (and to some degree science—see noetic sciences) has evolved to interdisciplinary perspectives that combines science, the esoteric and occult, and the mystical.

Sex is great and awesome as much as possible with consenting parties, free love 3.0. The incoming culture knows much more about the political arena (and not what comes sold on TV, or hired out to speechwriters and/or lobbyists). The incoming culture knows the political game and are not only playing it when the need presents Dematerialization by HartwigHKD itself (i.e., when one of the outgoing culture exits stage left), but are satirizing, criticizing, scrutinizing, and parodying the game. They know and understand the lingo and jargon and they have hawk eyes that see through the drivel. Creativity abounds and is nourished (oddities are accepted and oftentimes poached by corporations).

The status quo of the outgoing culture has ended, supplanted by the incoming culture and their more eastern-influenced and indigenous ideals. The new maxim might become “Come One Come All, Just Don’t Be A Douchebag”.

“Each epoch continues the evolution of information through a paradigm shift to a further level of ‘indirection.’ (That is, evolution uses the results of one epoch to create the next.)”

TL;DR by Skinned Mink

Image Credits (all used with permission through CC license)–
(in order of appearance)
“Planet 8000 background” by Courtney Rhodes
“Web 2.0 Digitage 2012” by Maureen Flynn-Burhoe
“Euphoria” by HartwigHKD
“Eole Airlines” by Eole Wind
“From another dimension” & “Dematerialization” by HartwigHKD
“TL;DR” by Skinned Mink

*Quotes by Ray Kurzweil

The Wave Of The Future

“I’m not interested in the future. I’m interested in the future of the future.” ~Robert Doniger

Photography Is A Drug by RHiNO NEAL

 

WHERE WE WERE

 

WHERE WE ARE

 

WHERE WE WILL BE

 

 

Credits (for Where We Were)–
Clips (All clips are in public domain):
“How Our Country Grew”, Prelinger Archives
“Soybeans For Farm and Industry”, Prelinger Archives
“Miracles In Agriculture 1960”, Prelinger Archives
Atomic Bomb Test 1955, Stock Footage
“Nuclear Test Review 1945”, FedFlix
“Hydrogen Bomb Test 1952”, Stock Footage

Music:
“Babylon” by Kevin MacLeod, Incompetech.com
“Blipotron” by Kevin MacLeod, Incompetech.com

Image:
“Photography is a drug” by RHiNo NEAL