The
Loa.
Zero
point theory, the singularity the virtual state
this
piece is sloppy even for me but the simple fact is I don't have a
great interest in explaining things to you. If I can trigger some
response that's preferable - as Dylan said the best you can do is
inspire.
An
homage to certain characters. Wittgensteins influence might be discernible – I increasingly work in the disjuncted paragraphs that
made his blue book such a fun read. It is also a style put to good
use in the Koran.
&
secondly It's time I sent a word about Jack Kennedy
- none of us are perfect – be both had bartenders on both sides of the family and both had families that were enriched by the prohibition. His family was never referenced by Scott Fitzgerald on the other hand. More importantly both of us lived lives in the shadow of medicine and sickness and both realized that a good enemy was worth a dozen friends.
much
of what follows ought be comprehend able to those familiar with my
work – the new concept is Loa which is the African version of a
polytheistic entity. We have long been aware that the difference
between the greeco-roman pantheon and the African one is that the
greeks modeled the gods after themselves whereas the africans
transmuted themselves via mask and dance into the gods.
Thus
far it hasn't made them rich and powerful but we are entering a new
era – one where the ability to transform the self becomes far
more important.
For
instance the reason google makes a lot of money is because they
can reliably inform customers about who you are- what you like, who
you dream of fucking and so on
the
NSA exists for the same reason – all information services need to
know who they are dealing with - this is something of a change but
the only way it can be defeated is to develop mental abilities.
For
instance in a classical attempt at mind thought alteration you might
think the thing to do is to remain constant in you believe that for
instance the sun is purple, but once the crack is in and they have
broken you via drugs, or sound or whatever, you will tell your
interrogators what they want to know.
They
will use this to enslave you in the way they are now. When bank
corruption is paid for by the poor it is but a small example – and
comparatively harmless . Subsequent to the singularity such
concepts as genocide will have to be re understood in light of new
realities and the 95 % who die must do so willingly
the
must go to their graves willingly because the human race has never
had the physical power to enforce the hierarchy any other way.
============================================
Today
I’ll conclude the multiple popular topics essay, AKA buzzwords
for geeks. Like most
of what we deal with here these are survival concepts. I don’t
deal with the specifics, after all they are constantly changing. As
well, perhaps as well I no long address questions of causality or
potential modification of coming factors.
To
state this in the vulgate, my audience is aware that there is some
weird shit coming down. As such on a one to one basis the individual
probably cannot win, but I am not so pessimistic as to believe that
consciously or sub consciously systems of survival will not be
allowed to remain in place.
And
to get to these avenues will not be easy nor a matter of chance.
Part of the challenge is philosophical. Two similar models of
cultural cohesion are the Kelts and the Jews. Interestingly enough
the Kelts did it without language and in the case of the Jews
language was the primary determinant . What they had in common was
both groups were able to withstand the pressure to disintegrate under
conditions of diaspora.
To
restate this, cultures and nation states have traditionally
identified themselves within territorial boundaries, such as
Egypt, one these are moved along with the sacred spaces they contain,
the connection is broken,
That
the cohesion of nation states is torn asunder is no long questioned –
increasingly we see questions of nationality, religion and race are
made irrelevant. For multinationals in the post colonial era the
matter is settled. In terms of actual family life this will take
some adjusting to. When the robot nanny wish to apply aversive
stimulus to a boy with his hand in the cookie jar she will merely
apply electroshock to the miscreant via cranial implant.
Perhaps
the most important variation of technology from it’s gradual
innovation in the past is not so much the type of change but it’s
speed. Both Gliech and Kurzweil have taken pains to indicate the
difference between arithmetic and exponential change.
One
minute we are making distinctions between Zulu’s and Americans and
the next between humans and post humans.
Then
this in turn is demanding of us that we identify not only linear
determinants such as which town precedes which on the railroad line
but contextual ones such as what town is within fifty miles of the
route.
These
all revolve around the famous needle and the haystack. Google,
Enigma, recursive searching, all involve asking questions of what in
the past would be considered chaos.
Psychologically
it is a bitch. One has to sort of let things go and let for
instance products develop themselves. After the singularity and to a
large extent even today human interference with production can only
be retardant of the process.
And
in a strange way this may explain the continued existence of the God
concept. In the past I had suggested that the unity of the God, even
based on nonsense, translated into a tribal unity that provided and
an advantage over other groups
The terror that post
humanity holds for many is very real and perhaps for good reason to
reduce it yet further in imagery what we are about to experience will
take the role hitherto played by the unconscious mind out if the
context of the individual.
What
follows are ideas. What characterizes them are two things – they
are important and they have only come into being in the past fifty
years. For a long while in the beginning I would casually mention
the Tamlinmediaco as the most important site on the web. Like most
of what I do it was an experiment – the goal being to ascertain the
average intelligence of the visitor and/or the famed seven degree of
separation.
By
and large humanity failed the test, Actually, being generous, it
would be better to say that the information systems that serve
humanity failed the test. Had they worked in an optimum fashion they
would have triggered a response somewhere down the line telling some
interested party that here was a source of the description of some
things of immense power.
The
problem apparently is that the information retrieval and dispersal
systems are not sensitive to power as such, but rather tend to focus
on monetary goals. In some regards this is not a bad thing.
Montezuma,
for example , had a great deal of gold but was defeated by the power
of a few Spaniards with guns. Gold is always deceptive in that way.
The later day Romans also had plenty of gold but because their
society was so diverse they had no one capable of turning that gold
into military power and hence were slaughters by the northerners.
In
my own life I owe something of a debt of gratitude both the
destructive senseless economic policies of later day America and to a
mother with a compulsive gambling problem, because it was not until I
lost a considerable amount of money and went essentially broke that
gold, or currency , was stripped of its hitherto semi divine
qualities.
So
today when I come across someone with a one track mind - making
money- I regard that as a weakness and not a strength. Cecil Rhodes
was speaking with Rudyard Kipling one time about a subordinate who
was so concerned with advancing his career that he was borderline
useless as an employee and would never go anywhere. Kipling remarks
that thirty years on Rhodes predictions had come out to be true.
So
today I will introduce you to four concepts that were you not the
superstitious slaves of the technostate you probably would have
heard of. If you have heard of them give you self a pat on the back.
All of them have had numerous books written on them byt people with
long strings of letters written after their name.
The
are , Loas, Zero Point Theory, The Singularity and the Virtual
State. I present these concepts from the abstract to the practical.
The
twentieth century proved a watershed in the discovery of the
mechanisms of myth. Much of this had to do with man’s discover that
the myths he considered eternal truths existed in other times and
places, some of which seemed to have no connection with each other.
The
myth of the God who dies for three days and then like the dark moon
is resurrected, obviously could not be seen for what it is until the
sense of a supernatural entity was removed. As is often the case it
was the quantitative amount of evidence that finally won over the
nay sayers as to for instance evolution.
That
said it does nothing to remove the reality of religion, or dare I
say, the need for it. Most of use adopt the political and religious
codes of our parents and most societies in turn have a predominant
code which they take with them when they move. Likewise when a
culture moves to a new place they invariably are either absorbed by
or replace the extant culture.
Hence
the stone age myths and religious ideas were replaced in Europe
first by the Greco-Roman “thundergods” and then by the messianic
religions.
Christianity
(and now Islam) moved north and westward from its origins in the
euphemistically named holyland. This also happened with the Romance
languages and both religion and language pushed the previous cultures
to the extreme western shores , to Brittany and to Ireland.
That’s
why if we want to study the myths of central Europe in the Stone age
we must go to Ireland, where cattle raids, a ritual kingships and
such remain.
One
of the reasons for the continued strength of religions is they give
the “believers” an advantage over the non believers – that
being the shared system. Plus the modern religions tend to be more
specific as to rulership then the ancient ones. Christianity
justified kings and wars and the same held true with Islam in
Northern and Western Africa. Further more Africa was subject to
intense colonization, one result being the destruction of African
ways.
And,
as well, we know that along with political failure there is often the
sense that the native gods, or God has failed the people and have
consequently lost their power. Note we need not concern ourselves
with chicken or the egg questions.
Quite
often as well there’s a rural, urban dichotomy. When Red China
sought to suppress democracy activism they brought in soldiers from
the conservative provinces. In the late Egyptian Empire that same
was done when Alexandria grew restless and in the current United
States the urban rural spread results in definite differences of
opinion.
Like
Ireland then, Haiti alone, in the Black diaspora, can provide us with
a glimpse of the African religious ethos. It was the first
independent black state and the very fact that it was French speaking
instead of English helped isolate it from prevailing influences.
Suffice
to say however, as in the case of Jamaica, where ganga smoking and
Rastafari is frowned upon by the upper classes, the further up in
class one goes in Haiti, the less the influence of the Voudon
(Voodoo) religious constellation.
Let
me begin by noting that much of the “Civilized” world purports to
believe in Messianic religions. They believe in other words that a
single semi-divine semi human individual provides a conduit between
this world and the eternal supernatural world. The world religion
itself indicates this - it means “the linkage.”
The
oriental world does not believe this as such, but there are strong
similarities between the teachings of the Christ and the Budda.
The
great question that religion resolves is “do I exist and if I do,
am I eternal?” Unfortunately this is not a dialectical exercise. B
movie screen writers in Hollywood occasional refer the problem to the
rose solution.
“The
rose is the symbol both of lifes beauty and it’s transitory
nature.”
Classically
the body is transitory and the soul is eternal. There are nearly a
limitless number of illustrations of this concept.
As
a little catholic boy the nuns would lecture us continually about the
notion that when we pray before a statue of a saint we are not
praying to the statue but rather to the saint that the statue
represents.
A
Similar thing happens in Voodoo where the Loa, or God is not
localized or even personified but the spirit of such and such a
thing. Thus Acqu is not the ocean, nor water, but the oceans spirit.
The ocean is like the statue, a transitory materialization.
And
to refer to a term that is often misunderstood Legba, or Papa Legba,
is not so much the toll collector at the crossroads as the man in
the doorway. He’s in other words a more benign spirit then
westerners often suggest.
In
the American Blues tradition he’s often associated with a devil
who’s primary goal is to trap ones soul. This recalls th western
concept of the dragon, a natural force which wants our goods and
would castrate us, as opposed to the oriental idea of the dragon as a
fortuitous symbol of luck.
I
seem forced to spend more time then I want explaining this in western
terms but it seems necessary. Hence most recent religions, the
Mormons, the Japanese Family cults are messianic in form. One
advantage these systems have is nearly always you have hard evidence
of the transitory aspect of life, meaning the founder dies.
The
term Loa itself is capable of multiple definitions. The black
population in Haiti comes from about a dozen nations, or tribes in
west Africa. This is the Africa of the Jungle and the people were
taken as slaves from internecine warfare in a comparatively short
period of time.
Voudun
itself is most often practiced with a mixture of Christian ideology.
Unlike the spirit guardians of Tibetan Buddhism, the bodhisattvas,
or the “noosphere” the loas are principles or even styles such
as crane style, and monkey style in marital arts.
These
are not saints in the sense of once being mortal men and women and
herein we hit upon the critical difference between this system.
ordinary polytheism, and messianic religion.
I’d
even go so far as to suggest it is capable of post messianic
religious impulse. Rather then to invoke the presence of the God
through the ritual the goal here, through drumming, dance and even
masks is to transform the participant into an agent of the God, a
manifestation.
This
then invokes a different relation ship to what we call “Sin”. One
has to be careful here. The sin concept is so deeply embedded in the
west, all with retribution that we can hardly conceive of existence
without it.
As
well, at first mention it is a deeply frightening thing. The idea
that those who do wrong will be punished , sooner or later, is one of
the glues of our society. Even as we know that very bad people have
no problem sleeping at night.
And
as well when we become, as god, in the dance, it may not be the same
all powerful being that we ascribe to in our religions. We are
taught, in effect to follow the leader but this can be taken a
little too far.
Dante
tries to explain this in El Paradiso. The inferno, of course is
totally hierarchal - everyone has a place and everyone knows their
place, whereas in heaven in the presence of God each place is as
good as everyone other place and since everyone is so full of the
joy at beholding the Godhead there is no competition for a better
seat, so to speak.
Now
of course the point is if we don’t watch ourselves we are heading
into a technological inferno.
The
joke about nuclear war used to be it was bad enough so that the
living envied the deadm and don’t kid your self what google and
all the rest of the web does is it creates a hierarchy / You are
because you consume and the more you consume the more you are.
My
flirtation with wealth in the 1990’s taught me the truth of the
saying the poor pay more. And lets be real, it is not going to be
easy to convince the privileged to give up those advantage’s. Not
being interested in starting a religion I see my task as energizing
the monads.
Maybe
it’s yours as well. I hope so.If it is not that’s not my job to
correct, but I won’t protect you either.
Appendix
One
Go gog go (The limitations of language and historical parallels between concepts
of "Knowing" and the physical world.) Several years ago I introduced a hypothesis which has held up fairly well.
It suggests that our understanding of the physical world is paralleled by
our epistemological concepts. So you have the rigid world of Aristotle
and the Gods, - then in the time of Locke we understand how "Truth" could
be shaped by the means of perception - the tabula Rosa, which in turn
could be compared to the gravitational constant of Newton.
In 1905 Einstein suggested that both perceived and perceive r
were in flux and this soon led to the suggestion that we could
know either location or direction, but not both. Quantum information
theory is a strange bird indeed. Wittgenstein despaired of ever getting
language to make sense other then perhaps as the thing in itself, but like
hope from Pandoras box, the fact that we remain must contradict all such despair.
We might well draw an analogy with religion, which wile not proving the
existence of a God, nevertheless proves the existence of man's desire to
believe there is. It is as if by transmitting one letter of the alphabet
we would be able to convey an encyclopedias worth of information.
The problem, which I make no claim to be able to solve, is how to
find the correct original unit out of a near infinite number of
possibilities, or perhaps an infinite number of possibilities.
As it stands however such challenges need not be undertaken if
world domination is our simple goal. Here's the kicker -
as technology amplifies the data field it consequently
simplifies the amount of information needed to be transmitted
in order to effect a response, in particular from the human population.
In other words in dealing with a school of fish or a flock of birds
in flight you no longer have to convince each one of them of the
direction you want them to go. All you have to do is "convince"
the point bird. To draw the quantum analogy further consider
a wall of doors. Each of the hundreds of doors has a number on it.
You wish to convey a great deal of information but your means of
doing so is limited. What you do is tell the bird the right door
to open - so it only need to know one thing even as it provides
he receiver with a wealth of info. The problem facing mankind today
is just this. It is a two sided sword. We control the masses by controlling
the lead birds in the flocking behavior; behavior which has been made
possible by the ubiquitous presence of media.
nd in turn we control any contrary messages by arresting people in extreme
cases - but ignorance has a subtler and vastly more effective way of
advancing it's purposes. And once again, we create “opinion leaders to
give the masses condoned thoughts, even, as in the case of the Soviet
Union's “Krokodile”, or the John Stewart show to the extent of officially
sanctioned opposition and then at the same time does not reach the level
of exposure as to even require censorship. Hackers, libertarians and people
on all sides of the political spectrum, consciously at least, express
concerns that the world is taking on the model of 1984. It's important to
remember though that Orwell was not speaking about right wing or left
wing political systems - nor was he even speaking about the excesses
of the technostate. Difficult as it may be to accept one of the primary
criteria for the existence of a 1984 is that the celebrity has taken the
God role. It simply refuses to admit the validity of anything that
opposes it's core principles. The NRA, which I do not oppose offhand,
suggested that the way to prevent mass killing of schoolchildren was
to arm five year olds and give them lessons in shooting. They did not
understand how out of place this seemed to be to most people. We create
things, sometimes even things meant to do good, and they get out of hand.
Thus along with promotion of the official line there is the seeming
ignoring of the non sanctioned points of view until under the guise of
preservation of the state offenders are silenced. In my own life, in a
case that I've seen happen to many others as well, I began as something
of a writer researcher who worked for the government and as I continued
learning I became less employable as the years went by. My understanding
was not the understanding that gets paid for. I was not saying what the
employers wanted to hear. Or consider the case of Reagan. He's a guy,
whatever you may think of him that provokes widely varying reactions from
the public. some see him as the savior, others as a monster, and It's save
to say neither side is being duplicitous. The key factor here is that, as in
the case of politics and business as well, technology favors market domination,
which means it does not tolerate differences of opinion - the gun and the
bow and arrow may coexist for awhile- but not for long.
Appendix two Prelude to a new world
For behold, we venture forth to a new world
a world where fame comes to they who do nothing
and achievements are ground into oblivion where right and wrong,
good and bad and ye even life and death are predicated by no more
then the wheel of fortune where nothing adds up
Where the gods preen before their mirrors and their
dogs sign checks with paw prints The Senators bathe at three
Children carry the firewood The “little fishes” age
prematurely on the Isle of Capri
"When I return the dead shall rise from their graves
and they shall outnumber the living"
Ishtar, Sumerian goddess, circa 2500 BCE
Conclusion: The Technostate has two requirements;
1) It must be free to create and expand markets*
2) It must be rendered immune from prosecution for anything done in
furtherence of the creation of markets *By the expansion of markets
we mean markets for business to flourish in. What it means
It means that no one is safe from the fluctuations of systemic variance
- you personally may do a good job at what you do but that does not
prevent the decision to move to somewhere where economic advantages
are greater. And I repeat - one does not have to be convicted of a
crime to be punished. The trial itself becomes the critical object,
not the verdict. The trial demonstrates to the system that actions
are being taken - that the controller/decision makers have a desire
or direction that they want to see instantiated. We witness here
technology taken to it's fullest extent - to wit- to the "world lever",
amplified beyond any previous abilities.
You can think of it in terms of flo
cking behavior, or schools of fish. Think of the incredible ability
of flocks to turn as directed by the bird at the point.
In classical democratic decision making paradigm each
individual would consider the options available and reach a
conclusion that would be best for them- but in the technostate
that does not happen - under the quite possibly questionable belief
that what is good for one is good for all.
This sometimes false belief in the commonality of interest
can in turn be manipulated for the interest of very small
segments of society through propaganda. The tendency of humans
groups to surrender individual thought in favor of the crowd has
long been known and studied. As the case may be many technological
developments of the past century have served to create a sense of
intimacy which in turn has replaced actual direct human communication.
This is evident from radio, to movies, to television, and now to Facebook
- all of which bring the semblance of human lives into our own
There is a difference however that should be obvious.
A friend in real life may be one of maybe ten people, on face book
it is one of 50,000 - hardly comparable.