Technology is Opportunity

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technology is opportunity. opportunity is connectivity.

aren't you in a profilic power space. it's like you'u were trying to show off how much power you had. power cords and ccable swapping. needles like heroin.

GEO RSS porn (the idea of foursquare and dogs marking terriroty. WHAT FOURSQURE IS REALLY ABOUT_

TEXTUAL TAGS distribution is poer online - tags , hobo tags.

the QR code as hobo tag. declare property tag this.

THe 5D conference. The idea of world building - building a better world. a positivist view of technology. furthersthe exploration of language and how its inricate in world building. humnitairn good. social good.

kevin - ai is going- artificial consiousness. i take the opportiste arrpach for the singulairty.

we need to connect ourselves to each other - to be tighetehr and tighter in order to socially connect. - the idea of netness, that everyone wants to be connectd.

the idea of the world where htere was a transportation of objects, and now with the computer world we're transporting the mind.we understand our own selves through understanding computers - the idea of humans and compters - that humans will always be human .that we need to learn how to eal with one another - and that cmputers can help us with this by sharing the collective consiousness.

the idea of the histoy of the land line - where the idea of it's not AI - it's connecting people to people. evolving to understnad one another. eing able to hyperspace anywhere in the world at once - to understnad human suffering. the idea of giving cell phones to youth in other coutires and allowing htem to build windmills, water, microloads form that information. ransparency and bringing certain crises to global viw. the closer the data is connected, the faster it goes. the faster it goes, the greater and faster we can make those changes.

it's important to be able to make changes. in america, there was a problem with worker treatment in meat processing plants and in

things like an index of the web. ways to annotate more information. to layer reality on top of reality. augmnted browsing expeirences so oe can tell worker conditions - where soething came from. actually being able to communicate with those who created something. also, localization and hyperlocal networks. the idea of ubiquitious angelrs or twitter - sating i need this or that and being able to get it. the global bulliten board as craiglist. ebay.

the library of congress uploading archives online. and how people became so involved with what was formerly attached to one time and one place. with someone being ableto annotate and comment on that stream.

what is happening with the library of congress? it is telling a story .there are microstories inside of stories. there are global narratives and local narratives. there are perosnal stories and impersonal stories. the resouce becomes new and multidimensional in the eyes of all of the visitors. it becomes an artificat of the mind. what was formenrly old, uninteresting, and inaccessible now becomes recirtulated.

in the same way, the suffering of another becomes real by photos - by these pictues of china, for instnace. by easy spreading. by images by chris jordan of birds eating plastic. these are visual narratives. our experiences online are tremendously social. the artifical intelligence only helps us to get to the content that other people have demed important.

the knowledg eis not in the computer, the knowledge is in the human. the ocmputer facilitates that knowled.ge helps is connect one brain to anotehr. assigns point values to those we vlaue the most - becuase they havethe most interesting relvant inormation and they get it the most quickly.

the idea of social solidarity. instead of being stuck in a space without culture, one can log onto the internet and get connected to a community of interest. time and space have become annihilated.

recently, there was a fire in the middle of portland. i sent a quick text to tiwtter about it. i said, fire in a building on the se side of Portland. anyone know anything aobut it?

almost immedaitely, i got about 20 responses, including pictures of the fire from 5 different places in town. one knew someone inside the building and had him on the phone. he told me his story. another told me about the building's history.

additionally, i was able to search twitter for more mentions of the fire by using local search.

an hour later, the local news finally reported on the buulding - but they gave it a singular view. it was empty. a monocle. there was nothing about the history of the building or how the fire started. they simply siad "fire - is under control".

the transparency twitter gave me was immense.

the intelligent bathtub (the idea of netness - collective intelligence).

when you actually get into this subject of AI - it's nowhere where it will be in 25 years. but what about robots being controlled remotely by video game players for military purposes? that's human+machine. it's the tools that are not at fault - but how they are used.

the idea of cavemen making a knife

there are two views - positivist and negativist. and they can coordinate faster.

SMS - artifical boyfriends and girlfriends. the idea of humans becomig robots and robots becoming more humanlike. the idea of paro - the seal. robots that are able to love. you can program love in a positive love. the unconditional love that someone had.

the person is grianing life from this organizism.

the idea of non-places.

sustainable space. it becomes a living space. the idea that things should heal instead of be replaced.

Fashion --> if we kind of got rid of our idea of fashion. if its winter in one area it is summer in another. swap objects. ecomonic good method of moving something around.

When i went to school i wore a uniform.

We were

There are many false positive starts, where one has the ideas of the eventual web as a new world, where we are judged more for our ideas and less or our externalities - more for what we've done than what we look like or what we wear. How we can collaborate instead of how much of an individual we are. that our individualization is defined by how we have collaborated with others and innovated.

in social media - htere's comparitevely less drama. the drama is about ideas. people gain status by what they produce, not what they consume. The equation has switched. The idea of the youtube celebrity. the first entertainers. the idea that sunnedyly there's become this 4th dimensionla wall that has suddenyl oepned up in everyones living room. a wall that dissolved sinto the worlds of others -into cyberspace. into sharing. a world inside a world. where the person faces out - spread information outward instead of looking in. the reversal of that direction.

One errant click and my work is lost. The other thing that this can convety is the idea of - survelliance and sousvalience.

Language is transforming the wa we think bout those idea.

Facebook is that uniform where we interact and intergrate. twitter you are defined by your text. you have one chance to interact and its not full of umms.

speak about places online

when we read we're thinking more. people cant't talk over one another. they can talk at the same time and all be heard. detoquiville talked about americans waiting for another to breathe.

in a way its about listening to transform our thinking and our patterns. we're transforming our way for people to listen. we're transforming the ability to absorb information.

design is change. the idea of an architecture inflences how people move, and people affect how a digital architecture is created. we're dealing with soft architectures online that can be more easily changed to accododate social flow. as we gravitate to each other - we're gravitating through ideas. - we're changing that strucutre to allow the ideas to spread faster and faster.

benjamin bratton -

we're not creating community we're creating desperation and seperation becuase of the kidns of designs we've built.

allosphere - is something that is across mukltiple sphere.s

i reall feel like we're on the cusp on a new rennisance. all of us are sort of coming up out of

but we've not yet found an environment where we can embrace all parts of ourselves and be supported. where now if you're innovative and creative and you were hindered by the corporation you can break free and realize

the leaders need to by systems oriented. and if you just think on that systems level you'll be able to work.

i's kind of hte natural progression of society as a whole. 50 yrs ago someone might spend their entire career ith the same company. and now its to the point where you can someone able to have multople careers all going on at the same time and pull it off. the idea of sticking with anybody for a long time becomes an inhebitor to innovation. and then you realize through these networks that you can do all of that- all at the same time.

where is that going? is it going to an overall rennisance - where everyone is doing what they want but they're all contributing. where the Internet has a place for everyhting. and when people are contributing they're

Monday.

we humanized nature in the past

but we have yet to humabnize ocmputers /

= For new media, the problem of how to deal with artworks "no longer in their original places or no longer used as originally intended" remains salient -- albeit for technological rather than antiquarian reasons -- and all of Paul's essayists propose some version of what necessary "educational purpose" curators of new media must embrace.

http://rhizome.org/editorial/tag.php?tag=newmedia

---

@PerryWagle It's called Polymath Breakthrough! http://bit.ly/sLlxk

-- The first thing i want to do to woud be to snych up my eyes with the screen. so that i would be able to scroll down with my eyes. THat would ne the most useful thing.

--

I've been reading this book called Faster, by James Gleick. http://fasterbook.com/reviewpw.shtml One of the sentences

There's also the idea of hastening evolution by external prosthetics. Cutting off millions of years of evolution by externalizing memories by means of a mobile device that one can add and subtract data from at will. Also the idea of being able to quickly slough off that external prosthetic

We run on prehistoric times and prehistoric energy. I like dinosaurs because their era runs us. Runs our society. But often people think of dinosaurs as a mythology - a cartoonized series of harmeless animals much like one considers Teddy Bears.

The early web was calm technology.

I upload images of their collective pasts to show I have something in common witht hem, and then add them as a contact, hoping they will get the request and look at my photostream. (on Flickr)

@skry Interesting! He's on Twitter now @bbrace. Is he still in Portland?

When i'm looking down I'm actally looking at your face.

The idea o writing in as notebook isthat o wrting in a space that does npot take time to load. How many will write on this surface?

"Channel flipping has caused an acceleration in our plots on TV". (10, Gleick) in Faster.

Theodore Zeldin is a social historian.

In a society quickly shifting into an age of hyper-connectivity, Junana is a timely read. The narrative is as fast-paced and complex as our supermodern technosocial lives. Caron creates a world so vivid and omniscient that one wonders if the world is real and if he is simply reporting on something that is already happening. He effortlessly handles multiple perspectives, social classes and age groups. This book should appeal to educators, marketers, programmers and anyone who is a critical thinker looking for something unique and rich for their cranium to bite into. It's an important work that provides a lens with which to greater understand the rapid change we're currently experiencing.

Cell phones are really scary in terms of waste.

Time is a choice.

I am a reflective moment person.

Remove the middle. Widen the edges. - Oblique Strategies.

Each app must by synched, logged into. Everything has this surface tension and gravity, so the minute one logs into Facebook, what intentions I previously had are immediately erased and replaced by a fragmentation of potential action and pulls towards certain types of data. If one's slip over a piece of potential data in the search for the appropriate button to click, one cannot help but be redirected.

Traditionally, one cannot help but stop reading for a brief moment when faced with an explanation point. Socially relevant information works in the same way. It is the punctuation telling a visitor when to stop. The viewer will not stop if the information is not relevant. The most successful digital architectures are those with the most socially relevant information. Facebook's algorithm serves up the most relevant social information.

11/28/09

Rebecca Steele 2:02 modernity is the sole world that is not destroyed. modernity is founded on freedom. freedom is a foundation that does not found. Grund/ abgrund, the ground opens up the abyss/ it emerged through the destruction and deconstruction of all foundations...

Amber Case 2:03 Time is a choice. 2:03

Remove the middle. Widen the edges. - Oblique Strategies. 2:03

I am a reflective moment person.

Rebecca Steele 2:23 I am thinking about conditions of modernity and conditions of post modernity and how they relate to psychological states regarding communication in the digital or hyperdigital. The institutions of the modern imagination are the technological imagination and the historical imagination. What would the institutions of the postmodern imagination be if we consider it in regards to paradoxes of the hypermomentary self???

Amber Case 2:25 oh man - this is a convo we should have in person. let me think. 2:26

there's the idea of replay culture and future history. or the idea of history and present and future blending into one. Rebecca Steele 2:27 also, heidegger claims that the essence of technology is by no means technological. if we consider this, what does that mean about the digital and our levels of connectivity if it were in fact reflecting something of us that is more organic, innate, psychological and not about so much of the digital realm, even though that is where it manifests.. but yes in person. I just thought of these things and wanted to get them out there before I forget them 2:28

will you save these questions so we can talk about them later? Amber Case 2:28 i agree with that a lot. that's why on facebook there is a schism, because what goes on in real life is not accurately presented on facebook. the idea of kids talking to each other in real life when their parents are not around. whereas on facebook that demarcation does not exist. 2:28

yes. they are saved. 2:29

sociologist emelie durkheim said that as societies progress,they move from mechanical to organic. technology becomes softer, friendlier. the edges become blurrier and blurrier. Rebecca Steele 2:31 can technology be soft or hard? also maybe the edges are not so much blurrier but it has grown wider and clearer and we now exist within it rather than technology being something outside of us that we can pick up, put down, walk away from if we choose. We are always in the psychology of the digital wether we are camping or in a desert or the middle of new york city 2:34

Habermas claimed that science was an ideology that in the place of religion was the dominating imaginary institution of the moderns. One step further, push that idea, to the digital. Amber Case 2:36 Postmodern information, or ‘light information’ is only accessible by hybrids, or those, who are capable of liminally transforming into technosocial hybrids or ‘light industrial’, objects. It is not enough to simply liminally transition. Rebecca Steele 2:36 good Amber Case 2:36 Maureen McHugh that "soon, perhaps, it will be impossible to tell where humans end and machines begin". 2:36

To ‘go virtual’ is to free the self from the weight of the flesh incarcerated by ‘heavy, modernity’. Cyber Ethnologist Sandy Stone discusses the theoretical benefits of joining, virtual communities:

"Electronic virtual communities represent flexible, lively, and practical, adaptations to the real circumstances that confront persons seeking, community in what Haraway (1987) refers to as ‘the mythic time called, the late twentieth century.” They are part of a range of innovative, solutions to the drive for sociality—a drive that can be frequently thwarted, by the geographical and cultural realities of cities increasingly structured, according to the needs of powerful economic interests rather than in ways, that encourage and facilitate habitation and social interaction in the urban, context" [Benedikt 1991: 111].

Entering into a network by becoming part cyborg creates the ability for the subject, to augment social and physical capabilities. The cell phone allows people to be more, omniscient and omnipresent. Technology allows one to transcend more readily the, confines of the flesh-burdened human body. 2:37

Multiplicity of Selves

Each edit and profile that is made online creates a copy of the self at that point in time. Taken together, these identities form layers, each building on the last, forming a geological history of presence. 2:39

Juhani Pallasmanaa states the following in the May 2000 edition of Architectural Review:

"The retinal-biased architecture of our time is clearly giving rise to a quest for a haptic architecture". (Translation - We see most things now (computer monitors, ect) - we don't feel them - Haptic is "to touch"). 2:39

"Ashley Montagu sees a wider change taking place in Western consciousness: We in the Western world are beginning to discover our neglected senses. This growing awareness represents something of an overdue insurgency against the painful deprivation of sensory experience we have suffered in our technologized world'. [9] Our culture of control and speed has favoured the architecture of the eye, with its instantaneous imagery and distant impact, whereas haptic architecture promotes slowness and intimacy, appreciated and comprehended gradually as images of the body and the skin."

"The architecture of the eye detaches and controls, whereas haptic architecture engages and unites. Tactile sensibility replaces distancing visual imagery by enhanced materiality, nearness and intimacy."

"Flatness of surfaces and materials, uniformity of illumination, as well as the elimination of micro-climatic differences, further reinforce the tiresome and soporific uniformity of experience."

"All in all, the tendency of technological culture to standardize environmental conditions and make the environment entirely predictable is causing a serious sensory impoverishment. Our buildings have lost their opacity and depth, sensory invitation and discovery, mystery and shadow."

Source: HAPTICITY AND TIME. (discussion of haptic, sensuous architecture.) The Architectural Review | Date: 5/1/2000 | Author: Pallasmaa, Juhani. 2:45

There's more. I'll write it up now. 2:46

"All activity becomes crises motivated", (Gleick, 85). The idea of clicking a button,beep alert, ping. Endless rows of bouncy jumping icons turn computing into a sort of eternal Whack-a-Mole. Rebecca Steele 2:50 i still think all this digitized communication is a deep long well like mirror that refers back to the self. the speed and quality of things have changed. But the digitized self, the machinated self is rather another way we try to qualify our relationship through the world, to ourselves. and maybe like the technological imagination, another way we fictionlize and externalize our condition so that it is readable, understandable 2:51

I really like the multiplicity of selves 2:51

the frenetic schyzophrenic self. the self in the hall of mirrors of digitized voices. 2:52

though about facebook do not the parent and child exist in a nonheirarchical space where the traditional roles that words like parent and child attempt to delineate are completely irrelevent and do not exist? 2:53

so therefor if there is no parent and there is no child in one social space how does that impact those roles in another social space? Amber Case 2:54 Me too. There's a great image we can use of the mutiplicity of selves from a show called "Serieal Experiments Lain". It tells the story of a girl who has a hybrid technosocial self. In real life she is quite shy. Only, she had tremendous reputation and power. One of the higher ups on the Internet (called "The Wired" in the show) shows her an endless line of duplicate selves, one for each action she's taken online. All of our informtation is stored - all of our actions, all pathways. This was formerly invisible and is now visible online. Yet information which was formeryly visible in real life is now invisible online. There's been a switch between invisiblity and visibility. A reveral, in the same way that spaces that were private have now become public (the living room is now a webcam), and private spaces (talking on a telephone) have become public (the idea of walking around town on a cell phone. Noise pollution. Like having a peeing section in a swimming pool. 2:57

CAUTION: OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR --- this has also reversed. Caution, objects in mirror are further than they appear. But are they actually further? They're neither far or near, but both at once. Here, dichotomies are collapsing. The collapse of dichotomies is something Donna Haraway talked about. Rebecca Steele 2:58 yes distance exists and has completely collapsed. Things that can and can't be!!! My favorite subject. Amber Case 2:59 Right - it is a paradox. A flattening out of both opposites into one. A hybrid object. A liminal object. A technosocial object. 3:02

"Consumption has become a kind of labor; a bricolage (Levi-Strauss) in which the individual invests his/her private world with meaning through the "active manipulation of signs." What is consumed "is not the object itself, but the system of objects, 'the idea of a relation' that is actually 'no longer lived, but abolished, abstracted, consumed' by the signifying system itself ... As we 'consume' the code, in effect, we 'reproduce' the system," Levin, in intro to CPES (5). " (from) http://www.csun.edu/~hfspc002/baud/ "Social participation is the oil of the digital economy". (From the Internet as Playground and Factory: A Conference on Digital Labor http://digitallabor.org/ ). 3:03

"the frenetic schyzophrenic self. the self in the hall of mirrors of digitized voices" - I like this.

There's an article on this by Baudrilliard. We "are now in a new form of schizophrenia ... The schizo is bereft of every scene, open to everything in spite of himself, living in the greatest confusion. He is himself obscene, the obscene prey of the world's obscenity ... He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence," (132-3). Rebecca Steele 3:04 where is this article? send me a link 3:04

god I was just looking at bad pictures of myself on the internet. TOTAL BUMMER!! and paige is to blame for a good number of them Amber Case 3:06 I'm looking. Rebecca Steele 3:07 nonononono. that was NOT an invitation Amber Case 3:07 “Our machines are disturbingly lively, while we ourselves are frighteningly inert”. Donna Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto”, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Books, 1991, 152 3:07

Haha - no, I mean for the article! 3:11

Body without Organs (BwO) 3:11

"In its broadest sense, as used in A Thousand Plateaus, the BwO consists of the flows of energy powering abstract machines that give rize to form and substance in general. This makes the term closely related to Plane of Consistency but is more often used in the context of biological organisms. However, "the organism is not at all the body, the BwO; rather it is a stratum on the BwO, in other words, a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences...the BwO is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism -and also a signification and a subject- occur." (ATPC 176)" http://www.capitalismandschizophrenia.org/index.php/Body_without_Organs 4:18

Here's what I was looking for: "The schizophrenic is condemned to a perpetual present". from Fredric Jameson's essay 'Postmodernism and Consumer Society'. The schizophrenic is condemned to a perpetual present.

What is being witnessed in postmodern culture is the lessening of the relationship between signifiers . They lose their significance and they are transformed to mere images. He draws a comparison between the condition experienced by people in postmodern cultures and the state of schizophrenia.

To develop his point, Jameson refers to Jacques Lacan: 'for Lacan, the experience of temporality, human time, past, present, memory, the persistence of personal identity over months and years is also an effect of language. It is because language has a past and a future, because the sentence moves in time, that we can have what seems to us a concrete or lived experience of time'.

It is because the schizophrenic does not make sense of language in this way that he does not experience temporal continuity. As a result the schizophrenic is condemned to a perpetual present.

For Jameson this implicates that material signifiers are experienced by the schizophrenic as isolated and disconnected, and they fail to link into a coherent sequence. This is the reason why a frequent sense of saturation is experienced by the schizophrenic, which can from time to time turn into a disturbing sense of unreality if this sense of saturation overpasses certain limits.

For Jameson this implicates that material signifiers are experienced by the schizophrenic as isolated and disconnected, and they fail to link into a coherent sequence. http://www.gla.ac.uk/~dc4w/laibach/postmod1.html Rebecca Steele 4:25 http://www.ugotrade.com/ did paige send this to you? Amber Case 4:25 No - maybe. Hmm. 4:26

Loading page. 4:27

This is a very good site. Rebecca Steele 4:28 of course clay cell phones.. paige would love. Can we put together some of these ideas we have been sending back and forth today into a little more of a coherent thread and send to her so she is in the thinking loop? and maybe she will have stuff to add. Amber Case 4:30 Food at 6:30. In basement. 4:34

Are you still in JPL? Rebecca Steele 4:34 "In order to have a world, however, one needs to become detached from the technological imagination- not to abandon it (for by abandoning it one would have to go native, and nowadays even this would not suffice)..." agnes heller going native??? 4:34

yes in jpl. sitting on my asssss Amber Case 4:34 Me too. I'll head down there now. We can talk about these questions and write the answers. 4:35

The early web was calm technology. The current web is push and pull, invasive. Rebecca Steele 4:35 kk Amber Case 4:38 Go to where knowledge is living. 4:38

"Channel flipping has caused an acceleration in our plots on TV". (10, Gleick) in Faster. 4:38

In a society quickly shifting into an age of hyper-connectivity, Junana is a timely read. The narrative is as fast-paced and complex as our supermodern technosocial lives. Caron creates a world so vivid and omniscient that one wonders if the world is real and if he is simply reporting on something that is already happening. He effortlessly handles multiple perspectives, social classes and age groups. This book should appeal to educators, marketers, programmers and anyone who is a critical thinker looking for something unique and rich for their cranium to bite into. It's an important work that provides a lens with which to greater understand the rapid change we're currently experiencing.

Cell phones are really scary in terms of waste.

Time is a choice.

I am a reflective moment person.

Remove the middle. Widen the edges. - Oblique Strategies.

Each app must by synched, logged into. Everything has this surface tension and gravity, so the minute one logs into Facebook, what intentions I previously had are immediately erased and replaced by a fragmentation of potential action and pulls towards certain types of data. If one's slip over a piece of potential data in the search for the appropriate button to click, one cannot help but be redirected.

Traditionally, one cannot help but stop reading for a brief moment when faced with an explanation point. Socially relevant information works in the same way. It is the punctuation telling a visitor when to stop. The viewer will not stop if the information is not relevant. The most successful digital architectures are those with the most socially relevant information. Facebook's algorithm serves up the most relevant social information. Rebecca Steele 4:42 hiw to represent this gliched experience of the thing we once termed reality but now is a multiplatformed univision Amber Case 5:18 Multiplatformed univision. 1:56 AM

hey are you still awake? Rebecca Steele 1:57 AM yup.. at jp feeling weird but writing 1:57 AM

yuou? Amber Case 1:57 AM can't sleep, like usual. but might try to now. can barely move so i might be close to sleep. feeling weird as well. 1:58 AM

lets do the steam room thing tomorrow. Rebecca Steele 1:58 AM me about to head back. Just rereading what I wrote. you need anything? Amber Case 1:58 AM maybe my computer. Rebecca Steele 1:59 AM yes steam tomorrow. k 1:59 AM

the white one? Amber Case 1:59 AM cool. see you in a while. yeah.

-- Helena is back home... and she's downloading something off my computer... it's like she landed and is dragging some content slowly behind her...

How interesting. Excess content.

half of a show she watched here this morning...

The idea of always leaving something in a place.

Half of a show. How interesting!

she'll watch the second half in Oakland

The idea of "leaving behind" half of a show

The full show becomes fragmented, dispersed across time and space and event geography.

imagine watching half a movie in the theater and then going home to watch the second half on dvd

would really underscore the difference in reception...

That's a great analogy. That's very much what it is.

Cutting up something that used to be consiered short. Two hours in a theatre.

Two hours becomes lenghy.

yeah and fragmenting the suspension of disbelief

that lingering feeling of a movie stretching out....

in a way, life and interactions strech out - getting closer and further away from each other. if a movie does the same, instead of being confined to one time and space, does the movie become a more tangible, lived experience?

the strange thing about trying to find a youtube section of a vhs i watched when i was little is in finding a hyperlink to my memory.

a hyperlink to a part of your memory

nice

i think memory gets filled with representation of other things... and gets confused

The idea of bees going out into a field to gather pollen to bing back to the hive. Information is the new pollen.

like living someone elses life

And we come back to the hive and give a bee dance in the form of a hyperlink.

We live other's lives, but often the most positive parts of them when they share links.

Living someone else's life not just through stories but through fully animated videos and text. Multimedia storytelling. The story being told in the most efficient, time-sensitive and entertaining way.

"In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation."

when the slow moving, non-compressed portions of life is shared, we lose attention. people learn to share the most interesting parts. and thus living someone else's life is living a positive representation of them.

Guy DeBord http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/1.htm

Rhizomes. Have you studied these?

not really....

They're strange. I've been trying to figure them out.

They're a Deleuze and Guattari thing.

yea

link?

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari used the term "rhizome" to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. In A Thousand Plateaus, they opposed it to an arborescent conception of knowledge, which worked with dualist categories and binary choices. A rhizome works with horizontal and trans-species connections, while an arborescent model works with vertical and linear connections. Their use of the "orchid and the wasp" was taken from the biological concept of mutualism, in which two different species interact together to form a multiplicity (i.e. a unity that is multiple in itself). Horizontal gene transfer would also be a good illustration.

There's a large chunk of text.

thnx

It's often applied to cyberspace.

arborescent

nice word

like arborist... tree like

My professor talked about the idea of the fractal creation of value.

That as the ability to produce value increases, the difference in value become very slight.

“At the fourth, the fractal (or viral, or radiant) stage of value, there is no point of reference at all, and value radiates in all directions, occupying all interstices, without reference to anything whatsoever, by virtue of pure contiquity”.

“At the fractal stage there is no longer any equivalence, whether natural or general. Properly speaking there is no law of value, merely a sort of epidemic of value, a sort of general metastasis of value, a haphazard proliferation and dispersal of value.”

i'm super interested in mutualism

game theory etc

as the ability to produce value increases, the difference in value becomes slight... really interesting

The idea of the haphazard proliferation and dispersal of value can be seen in T-shirt stores, ect. And the idea of Flickr accounts or Facebook apps, or iPhone apps. Sometimes the value is metastatis, cancerous -- the idea of so many apps on Facebook clogging up everyone's E-mail boxes. Until Facebook understood the crises and compressed all of the app requests into a small box. Placing them into storage -- filing them.

epidemic of value

rad

Yes! Epidemic. Fractal epidemic. Value epidemic.

this is all D&G?

No.

Some is Baudrillard’s “After the Orgy”.

cool awesome

is that one on aaaarg.org?

or do you have a pdf?

not on aaaarg

"Baudrillard employs the metaphors of fractal science..."

[he may be using the concepts of fractal science metaphorically, but that is not the same thing, since mathematics is not made out of metaphors]

"...to suggest that culture too is infinitely divisible, proliferates cancerously, leads randomly and exponentially from the particular to the general, and from stability to instability. These fluctuations lead to effects that Baudrillard, employing chaos theory, calls 'strange attractors'. This is quite beyond rationalist claims to verifiability, truth and reality." (p.6)

Jean Baudrillard - Hystericizing the Millennium http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-hystericizing-the-millennium.html

awesome thnx damn, he's faculty at the school that Althea goes to

"We don’t need digital gloves or a digital suit. As we are moving around in the world as in a synthetic image. We have swallowed our microphones and headsets, producing intense interference effects, due to the short-circuit of life and its technical diffusion" (2) In his essay Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual Reality

Wow - didn't know Althea went there. I've been looking at that school. It has a lot of very key people there.

yeah, super impressive

Bruce Sterling, Sandy Stone, Zizek, Haraway, DJ Spooky. Joseph del Pesco

DJ Spooky!

)

Bruce Sterling has been giving lectures on what his books have created.

don't know him

They're very good lectures. He understands system theory very well.

any videos of him?

I will try to condence a concise idea of him.

ok

In the 1980s, Bruce Sterling became a leader of the "cyberpunk" revolution -- a literary movement that combined the artistic ambition of science fiction's 1960s New Wave with the hard-core speculation associated with Verne, Wells, Heinlein, and Clarke. Cyberpunk's chief theme was the way technologies evolve us even as we evolve them, and its influence can be seen in almost every science fiction writer of note today, from Ken MacLeod to Alastair Reynolds to Cory Doctorow.

He gives scathing keynotes at tech conferences, seemingly seeming omniscient and omnipotent at the same time, towering above others in his ability to understand long timescales.

nice idea, but evolution here is only a metaphor... real evolution takes hundreds if not thousands of years....

I'm always interested in looking for the influencers. Often the most popular writers are influenced by someone less known. I try to find out who they were influenced by.

good idea

good thing to do with artists as well

(Night passes)

Okay - here's what I said I'd send you this morning:

I think we were discussing types of evolution. There's also the idea of hastening evolution by external prosthetics. Cutting off millions of years of evolution by externalizing memories by means of a mobile device that one can add and subtract data from at will. Also the idea of being able to quickly slough off that external prosthetic (throwing out a phone and grabbing a new one with better features).

thnx

Akin to the idea of a Saber Tooth tiger being able to take out the teeth and throw them at animals. This is what cavemen did with spears. Externalizing their teeth and claws so they didn't have to evolve them. Joseph del Pesco

ah... interesting 1:11 PM

externalizing teeth

I've just read this book called Faster, by James Gleick. http://fasterbook.com/reviewpw.shtml One part says that 95% of things that are filed (put into a filing cabinet) are never taken out again. This was from some corporate research report or something. I wonder if this is similar to our brains or how we use computers.

The idea of externalized memory on a device, external physicality through the extension of claws. I think most of our innovations have been to extend the physical self. Hammers, clothing, ect.

right... 1:13 PM

i'm with you

Vehicles transport the physical self, but now computers transport the mental self and store memories. One cannot store something in a hammer, unless one makes a pouch attached to it. Even then, what one can store in that pouch is still physical.

so do we need new ways of socializing out externalized memories? new behaviors?

socializing our... rather

And I think I talked about this in my Pecha Kucha preso, but the shape of a hammer hasn't changed for thousands of years - but computers have. They seem to be melting and evaporating. Getting compressed, smaller and smaller.

right because they're mostly software rather than hardware

evolutionary psychology operates on the idea that the brain comes with software... built into our DNA Amber Case 11/28/09 1:15 PM Yeah - there's this great point about that by Micheal Wesch, an anthropologist at Kansas State who studies YouTube. He talks about two friends who are telling stories to each othr. Joseph del Pesco 11/28/09 1:15 PM language, social learning, etc 11/28/09 1:15 PM

link? Amber Case 11/28/09 1:15 PM Technically, one's social klout can be raised in a group situation if one tells an awesome story. But now it is if someone has the best hyperlink to an externalized momory or externalized story. They play the story for their friends instead of telling it to them. They've externalized their memories and storytelling. 11/28/09 1:16 PM

Yeah - let me grab a link. 11/28/09 1:16 PM

This is long, but good. An anthropological introduction to YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU Joseph del Pesco 11/28/09 1:16 PM ok - i watch 11/28/09 1:16 PM

Valerio and I are computing in the second floor lounge if you want to join us Amber Case 11/28/09 1:17 PM Aweseome. Oh! That sounds nice. I'll be there in perhaps 15 min. Joseph del Pesco 11/28/09 1:17 PM k 11/28/09 1:17 PM

a presto Amber Case 11/28/09 1:17 PM We're becoming telepathic - humans, in general.

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