As stated, fortuitous break through inasmuch as I have the feeling that barring unforeseen catastrophe we're going to be cranking up the music end again. I'm sitting on four CD's worth of stuff already, but actually the best way to make music is to do it at one shot - that way the tune is fresh in your mind and you have an idea of what to do, and everything is at hand - but I wanted to upgrade both skills and hardware in terms of mastering - Have been very impressed on the difference that makes - plus I wanted to do some things mastering wise that would be new - having done the Same old Same old for years - plus I was just in a bitchy mood as far as the music industry goes - I feel that someones got to be in charge and it;s been left to me.
In any event did you ever read Wagner's auto- bio?
Amazing how verbose some of these chaps can be? Isn't it? I say there - can't you hear me? I said amazing how verbose some of these people, these music people can be - I wonder why? What do you think? Er, can you hear me? Can you hear me - Hey duh what's the problem? cat got yer tongue?
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Today I awaken to find myself in the footsteps of Columbus for several reasons. Neither of us is possessed of the greatest theoretical knowledge of our times, but correspondingly our practical experience using the tools of the available science of the day is not , that I know of, superseded.
My skills are not of the best, the “deepest” or most complex, but they are of a wide range – much like the self educated man must needs resort to the canonical literature, not having a mentor to instruct him in what is currently in fashion, or useful.
All importantly however is both he and I set out to find one thing and found another. In fact this paper will refer to several interrelated discoveries, which, since they may appear in the context of other things I will describe immediately.
In the field of Artificial Intelligence or robotics, since the inception we have sought to increase man/machine integration by making a machine more like a man, be it the ability to run, or human interface guidelines, but the real adaption, which is occurring already and we don’t see it, is man is becoming more like a machine.
Like many of us I was apprehensive about the seeming loss of freedom from the apparent growth in the domination of economics and manufacturing by machines and machine intelligence. The sciences as we know them point us outward – to new spaces and worlds which are then mapped and identified, but they don’t always tell us how to control the things we discover.
We know that the conventional responses to the allocation of new powers, religion, ethics, the moral sense, are not always sufficient to override the genetic response of seeking domination, but when several sciences are combined and seen in the light of each other, the problem becomes far more manageable. The older sciences, economics and psychology seem adequate for their former tasks but apt to be overwhelmed by the powers established from the domination of context.
The greatest psychoanalyst around is not going to “cure” a person who lives with a psychotic. The only cure is to find a new way or place to live.
Semiotics and Chaos theory, on the surface have little in common, but together, and only together they can serve as forms by which the human race, as it evolves into the new species, can determine the directions it would like to choose. The symbol will provide the monad, the chaos will provide the gravitational field within which the monads will create the structures that man inhabits.
The important thing about chaos, is that while at any given moment, in it’s pure form it is unknowable,it is yet capable of a transformative action. Again, we cannot follow Pi to the end of it’s journey to infinity, but we can establish it as long as the time period we have to deal with. (and like, time, it moves in one direction, although description of that direction is impossible, as far as I know all we can say is time moves into “the future”)
I see know that the implications of what I have just said may not be immediately comprehendible, but they are practical. In the same way people rushed to discover the weak spots into the net so far they will continue to do so as attempts to monetarize it increase. Likewise no declaring of something as off limits will succeed unless all parties, globally agree, and it is not in their interest to do so. Plus theres the THX-1138 factor which states that one must not seek to enforce laws that cost more to enforce then the benefits accrued by doing so.
The difficulty, historically, with law is that it is too often meant to protect property and unless the property is distributed equitably law cannot be enforced.
For those who have difficulty seeing technology (Teknos) in any other sense then machinery it might be helpful to read the books of Lewis Mumford. He views the original Teknos, as did the Greeks, to be the creation of the city. When disparate units or monads, are combined or co-ordinated to perform a common task that is Teknos. The monads can be anything, nuts and bolts, bits and bytes or him and hers.
What became for me a crucial sentence in the present work was the observation many years ago, that Germany and Japan were the original technostates and to defeat them it was necessary for the United States, Russia and the allies to take upon themselves the characteristics of the technostate. If this was so then must we also expect to see the brutality and indifference to life of the totalitarian regimes? Is dystopia inevitable?
Tokyo was, in the eighties, thought of as the city of the future. In reviewing some walk throughs on Youtube one can see the many little alley between the buildings in the nearby areas – places where people grab a bite to eat, get a little video, smoke, drink and talk. Now the title of most futuristic city probably goes to Shanghai, but for our purposes Tokyo will do.
The reason why is because between MITI and the conservative banking system there is the apparent contradiction of a quick moving, yet conservative establishment. The rice industry in Japan is famous for it’s many small family owned farms. While it might seem at first contradictory, neither a top down , nor bottom up market system, I don’t think it’s the case. In effect I don’t either sector bothers much with the other.
This points out a curious aspect of the technological revolution that has had little attention paid to it. It has also led to confusion when the question is incorrectly postulated. Because we can’t see anything wrong with the possibility of supply side boosting does not mean it will work in the real world. This is another example of how you can get everything right and do wrong. This leads to irony and paradox.
What we may have is an extremely modern, sophisticated fortieth floor and a bottom level unchanged for hundreds of years. We may not want this. There may even be efforts to eliminate this bottom level. I caution against over zealous purification's however for sometimes it is in the dark corners of our worlds that viral strains uncontaminated by the norm, remain
I will go into greater detail in the following. The boundary less state, and the technostate which are two sides of the same coin, will be the ground upon which the show proceeds. It is important to be aware that we are all human. We have common needs, eating, sleeping, and emotional connections.
By inclination we all want to live in penthouses, on drugs, in soft surroundings and pleasant sounds, and we can suggest that every cop wished every criminal lived such a life. How pleasant to be like James Bond, following beautiful lady secret agents through the glamour spots of the world.
England’s King Alfred, on the other hand saw his father and brothers slain by invaders. Of all the isle only the southernmost kingdom of Wessex, his, survived. Had he lived in a court his days would have been numbered, but he did not do that. Instead he went to ground. He lived in swamps, and forests. He gathered aid where he could find it.
To my brothers and sisters on the scene I send greetings. To others who might wish hegemony over us I send this warning. You will never win, you have never won because you can’t trust those beside you and you have no idea of who is beneath you. The only power any of us can rely on is fairness and truth and love.
part two - actually written first - this was the break through but I wanted to present as clear a picture as possible as soon as possible given the difficulties - and you know - it's not that difficult to understand this- In the same way a child can understand a light bulb today, but a genius could not understand one in the eighteenth century - it has to do with our seeing what we expect to see.
Plus to reiterate - this paper has two contexts - the socio-political - how the state will evolve, via the waves of understanding driving the mass public and secondly how the individual will evolve as it subsumes formerly individualistic characterists into the hive mind.
Note I am no friend of the hive but this is the way it's going to be and we may as well get used to it.
Also as to formatting - I haven figured out a way to retain the word formatting through open office and into blogger - so you'll have to live with this clumsiness. and yes, I'm still farting around trying to figure out what I'm going to do with Google - WHATEVER HAPPENED TO "DO NO EVIL?"
My policy has always been Newtonesque which is to say I tend to regard communication with the public as something of a necessary nuisance - I mean it's not like I ever met anyone online with the same work ethic or anything. Everything sucks. They give stuff away - they lie about being your pal and then they screw you - hallelujah I'm a bum
BTW the dictionary on Word is extremely limited - they should put out a version for smart people.
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In the event anyone wonders why there have been so many military observations and parallels in recent weeks you can relax about one thing at least. - We are not, in the form of earlier revolutionaries, interested in picking up guns or blowing things up. If we went that route then we should have already lost the battle – for more then one reason.
The significant difference in geopolitics between this century and the one gone by is that physical possession of money, or land, no longer dominates our thinking. What is crucial however remains the answer to the question “Who controls the land and the wealth?”
From the present vantage point it is difficult to see colonialism as a major factor, whereas it was tin the nineteenth century the overriding factor. What we refer to as neo-colonialism, sometimes called globalization may seem frightening at first but the more egregious aspects of it can usually be controlled by the national state. A greater threat to stability results from a form of corruption that is not seen as such. It occurs when the social fabric is unable to withstand the changed environment brought about by technology.
A good example is the United States in the last decades of the twentieth century. Things may be improving in recent times if only because the economic disasters have sunk in to even the most think headed reactionaries. To put it plainly we do not have corruption in the sense of having to pay a hundred dollars to buy chopped meat, or gasoline, but the legislative bodies have been so severely hampered by the changing economic circumstances ( which they are to some measure responsible for) that the result has been a paralysis.
That said we are concerned with more then the sphere of governmental activities in one nation alone. Governments are only part of the story and so too one nation, however large, is also only part of the story.
Suffice to say people have noticed the coming of the internet and concluded sometimes that it may be having an impact on the way we live, but even that remains only part of the greater story which, in essence , is the story of the collection and use of data about humans on an unprecedented level. This alone, without malevolent intent on the part of users creates a loss of freedom.
Let me confess to being, in most cases, a peacenik. The old folk song about “I ain’t gonna study war no more” is part of my heritage. What changed me is two fold. Experience of watch the CEO’s of the past thirty years in action has frightened me and convinced me that many of them have developed signs of psychosis when it comes to decision making.
Unfortunately for me and those who think like me the approach of genetic domination by the few over the many has a strong scientific basis. There’s a lot to be said for co-operation but most species, like most civilizations, do not last more then a short time.For the record, I don’t know, were the tables to be turned, If I should show others the mercy denied me and those like me. Until that situation arises however it is of no concern. Remember I’ve been doing this for many years. It could be said that I am speaking for the situation that has faced tens of millions of people, but only those who have tried realize how careful major media is to avoid anything controversial.
That said, I’ll stop whinging and return to the actualities. We are always returning to the basics which are the ways that information is distributed and subsequently used as the basis of belief. The blunt term for this is propaganda.
New media however do strange things to the old advertising/propaganda paradigms. Ordinarily it is Pain or Fear of pain , which creates anxiety. Then the product is introduced which brings about relief in the form of the cessation of the original pain/anxiety stimulus. In the world as some believe it to be, it would be obvious that the pain that is alleviated is only the pain that has been created, but the mind does not have a long memory. As well , without other information it is impossible to tell the difference between reality and products of imagination.
In politics, whether Willie Horton, or the great Jewish Banking Conspiracy, the creation of fear is a normative function of the electoral process although few are as honest as Richard Nixon or Joseph Goebells in saying it.
This is all elementary. What is new is our understanding of flocking behavior. This can be seen in chaos theory and is one way of suggesting an understanding of the synchronic motion of large numbers of monads within a system. This is where the parallel with military operations comes in; because both involve primarily not individual decisions or actions but those of groups of varying size.
Look; contrary to what you may be beginning to think I am not here to scare you. I am here to prepare you for the brave new world. Where Nixon went terribly wrong we can say is he divided the world into enemies and friends and then expected people to act on that basis, but people change and as well they react differently to different actions taken against them. In the new world the very notions of enemy and friend no longer hold true.
The real implications of the existence of the unconscious are staggering even now, over a hundred years after we realized such a thing could exist. We cannot rely on old ideas of enemy and friend not because man is duplicitous, or deceitful, but because man himself is not completely aware of the origin and motive of his own actions.
As I suggested years ago, one of the difficulties of modernity is that the individual no longer counts for much in the sense that the decisions that control his life are not made on a personal basis, but often by others, human or machine, who are literally hundreds or thousands of miles away. One may be a good carpenter, a great one even, and still be out of work because the job can be done cheaper somewhere else.
Likewise we are now categorized according to the need to achieve balance of race, of religion and even sexuality in the workplace. The fact that some cultures may excel in some tasks is often overlooked.
Our normal understanding of the behavior of clouds is that they lead to more extreme decisions then those made by individuals. An individual may be offended by what they think is inappropriate behaviors, a crowd is more liable to take action against the person doing it. This is something of a truism in the study of human behavior. The essential aspect is our desire to conform to the wishs of the mob, to go along with the crowd.
When we think of the communities only there’s two possibilities I’d like to mention Group think and the suppression of individuality due to the fact that the identification of persons opposed to the prevailing order is very easy and the record is permanent. First off, let’s consider some of the limitations of propaganda. It can only do so much. As Abe Lincoln said you can’t fool all the people all the time and there comes a time when people are eating sandwiches made of paper that they are not going to believe the suggestion that the sandwiches are good food.
There are several ways in which the claims of misinformation can be refuted by reality. One is if the truth is somehow so obvious the lie becomes unsustainable – this is rarely a cause for difficulty since the lie can be tailor made to fit any given situation. The second element is time. Lies tend to have limited lifespans and so must either be supplanted by other lies (and thereby changing the subject) of in some other way made of unconcern to the targeted population.
Classically then the benefits of communism for the common man became increasingly mythic and unsustainable to promote as the years and decades went by. On the other hand the imaginary threats facing the the third reich only had to be sustained for a decade and thus never had the chance to be refuted by facts. It ought be taken as a given as well that totalitarian regimes have to wield a two edged sword – on the one hand they need the enemies to justify their oppression and on the other hand they have to prevent counter information from expediting the arrival of that time when the axiomatic lie is no longer believed.
The dictator, the criminal, the chess player and the corporate buy out artist have one thing in common which is that they operate on a limited basis with an exit strategy in place even prior to the initiation of the project. Some may wonder how a CEO can tolerate seeking their businesses crash and burn – but they don’t realize such bankruptcies are not failures – they are successes for they allow the board of directors to loot the assets of the corporation and then walk away scot free.
As an aside when a corporation gets a bailout it’s not only management that benefits – management would benefit either way – if anything a bailout prevents management from getting immediate access to guaranteed salaries. If you want, here’s another seemingly lopsided statistic. Ninety five percent of the money stolen in the US is done by white collar criminals, who in turn make up less then one percent of the criminal population. This is a little off the present subject but realistically it is difficult to tell a man not to steal a few million dollars when he faces no more then a year or two imprison - at most. It’s a deal too good to be true, but such is not really our concern, because there the law of competition works it’s magic. Meaning that your competition is no longer the legal system , but rather your erstwhile associates who are eager to steal as much as they can before you do.
The hive, the flock, the school of fish – these are all images called to mind when we think of how beliefs and opinions change in the sensorium that is the internet and associated networks. Our understanding of how it is that flocks can swerve so fast to avoid crashing in to things is incomplete but we are fairly certain that it is not as if the lead bird sends out a signal. It is more like all the other birds are keeping an eye of the one ahead of them and when it changes direction so too do they. This is one example of how information flows. Viral information isn’t the same since the population is not looking for the meme to occur, even though in most cases the point of interest is some sort of human or animal behavior.
In science fiction movies , such as “Dune” we are asked to consider the possibility of the navigation of space time by basically “Feeling our way.” Presumably this entails moving ever constantly to ever “thinner” until one reaches a point where the doorway between the dimensions we know is wide enough to permit travel though it. This can also be thought of as analogous to the way differing belief systems will coexist in the coming centuries.
Theory suggests that persons in large groups will tend to have more extreme beliefs and take more extreme actions but this does not always hold true . The traditional poetic image for seeking direction as to how to live a life is being lost in the woods, as in the case of Dante. This is often elaborated to where the potential seeker sees an exotic animal or bird and follows it, thereby losing contact with his companions and allowing the journey to selfhood to begin.
When we speak of flocking behavior in chaos theory there are several ways we can go about it, and likewise several ways to image it. The flock of birds, with a single bird at the point is a way of thinking about the strange attractor that “sinks” into non Euclidean space and hence creates the shadow forms known as fractals.
That is the most directed, “tightest” form of fractal directionality. Then we could move over to the actions of schools of fish and from there we can see the loosest form of fractal creation which could be represented by leaves in a windstorm, or dust devils. In these later cases the objects in motion that we are aware of, the leaves, have no action input into the process of motion. They are simply reacting to environmental conditions the way a rock would roll down a hill. Of course the hill is infinitely high, which takes some adjustment in order to visualize.
Incidentally this area, between tightly delineated chaos and, chaotic chaos, is an area that needs more research. When things can be seen as determined and then they are not then it’s a good guess that the determination continues only by means that we are not aware of.
So now we come to Semiotics. It’s amusing to thing of a Unified Field theory of language – one that would matter the bricks that the house of knowledge is made of, with the order in which they are laid. (Then Wittgenstein could rest easy.)
I , for one, hesitate to do so and I’ll tell you why. First off I’m assuming you know much more about these subjects then you do, but if I don’t approach things this way I’m liable to never get around to the essentials.
Semiotics, as popularized by Umberto Eco, is the study of the meaning of signs. This includes words but many other things as well. My first hesitation comes about when I think of “Zohars Book of Dream’s” This was an encyclopedia of what elements of dreams were supposed to mean. In a way it’s rubbish because no dream means anything without it’s context in the waking world – bet such books have always been with us, dating at least to the Egyptians. Therefore a monkey means one thing, a toaster means another and put them to gether and you find out what the dream means. It is something like a science of monads, where we have constituent elements but only extremely dubious connections between them.
I believe Mr Eco has some understanding of this, if only because he’s aware of what sells and what doesn’t sell. My own hesitation is based on what I call the Hitler Paradigm
Politicians, merchants and movie makers all spend much time and money trying to figure out what the public wants. I jest that I,l like most of us, have known a fair share of Cassanovas, always tall, handsome and confident and I daresay they never seemed too concerned with asking themselves what women want. They know.
The Hitler Syndrome, which is to be taken seriously says that all the research not with standing every once in a while someone will come alone and be able to know the mind of the public – because he is one of them – warts and all. Stalin and Alexander were the same things. When Alexander cut the Gordian knot it demonstrated how single minded he was. It also demonstrated, as if we needed it, the single mindedness of the guy. Had he unraveled the knot all he would have would be two ends of rope.
Hitlers attitude towards someone being potentially a trouble maker was to take them outside and shoot them. In other words he had no interest in potential, only actual. To understand how this effected me one has to go back to the beginnings of my writing online. This was in the days of the LoD (Legion of Doom), 2600 and other hacker groups and most of us were not wealthy. Bluntly stated either you broke the law or you got a job pumping gas. I won’t lie. I wasn’t the gear head that Phiber Optic was, nor did I have the social skills of Kevin Mitnick or Bernie S. I was a musician after all- caught between two worlds, neither of which understood or cared for the other.
Plus we think of rock and roll as a tough life but by the time I got to the Dreamland BBS in 93, a large percentage of those there were on probation and had little use for a newbie. These were guiys who were valedictorians in their schools and went to Cooper Union, a free school with a very high scholastic level.
The major problem I faced, like so many others, was that I had worked and studied hard in highschool and college and then there was no place to go. Three generations of rising living standards came to a dead stop with me. Right wing radio announcers preach their messages of hate but they have an audience of men who feel that all the advantages have gone to women, minorities, and foreigners. I can’t live by that mentality but the task of psychological survival confronted me nevertheless.
Blame it on my proletarian upbringing, but this is why I have trouble thinking of myself as an artist, and prefer I be thought of as a craftsman and so too “art for art’s sake” never really rang my bell. Returning to the subject at hand, as well, one would hardly accuse the lawmakers of the United States of being motivated by the disinterested discovery of truth. To prevent our annihilation at the hands of the notoriously bloody western European mind we have to prepare ourselves.
In actually it’s not good to promise more then one can deliver and for most of us the primary determinant of what happens to us in life is the family, but there are other things at work as well. And in truth I am not that familiar with Semiotics. I’ve done some reading and can’t argue with what is said, but don’t know how much is said. Perhaps I think of it as hundreds of postcards blowing in spirals in the wind. That, like the Bingo Game of the Gods, would not be so bad, but those post cards, monads of information, are not going to be left alone. People will seek to appropriate them and use them for profit.
And it just gets weirder from here.
Consider you’re a parent and you have the opportunity of “cleaning” your offspring’s genetic code. Not only will they be disease free but they will be several times smarter then you, so smart in fact that they find you intolerable. When they grow up they need not marry but are allocated a “special child,,” (one each , please) by the state and they go to the zygote bank and have a choice not unlike a Chinese menu, one from column A, on from column B, and so on.
You’re a sentimental fool so you ask what it would cost to have aperson in the form of your parents, recreated, from DNA – No they don’t do that anymore – the insurance rates got too high.
Millions of years of evolution comes to a sudden stop – replaced by the market system and a generally agreed upon series of desirable personal characteristics.
John Stewart Mill had one of the highest IQ’s ever recorded. He was reading and writing Greek at five. He wrote with big words and tried to convince his fellow nineteenth century brits that the golden rule was best.
“The greatest good for the greatest number.” he said The people thought “This means he want me, who have somethink, to give to one what ain’t . Blimey. Fat chance of that happening.”
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