Excerpt from journal found in Time Tombs excavation 12/03/23

Everything just happened at once. Boom flash. There was no in-between or introductions necessary. The planet lay splayed before us like a melon on a crisp summer day, red wet and glinting moist refractions of the sun. None of us could have expected this, but when does anyone ever expect the beginning to look like the end.

At first it came from the sky. A bright flash and a boom that rattled deep into the earth like a Himalayan tremor. No typical orange rash flash dashing the sky to bits...this was more aquamarine and aquiline, tracing the ridges of mountains against the sky, dark silhouette profiles sketched on cloud and mist. The blue grey fallout came fast and the scramble ensued. Rats on a ship going down.

Once the tremors subsided, the rains began. The clouds gathered and began pouring god’s tepid fury down on us. Wincing and whinging and howling followed for weeks and weeks. The howling never stopped. Wind worn and terrified we hovelled in caves, ditches, cellars, and culverts. The cracking and ripping peals ricocheted off of every mountain and rolled across every plain like thunder.

We were the chosen few who somehow survived, chosen by lottery at the last minute, shoved into craft not quite complete but space-worthy, and launched into orbit to watch the planet rend itself end from end, torn asunder by our own stupidity and sloth. 

Lo!

            I’m not exactly a Fortean, but I am fascinated by Charles Fort’s work. In the scope of world events and unfolding, he had a knack for finding the most curious phenomenon. Fort embraced a philosophy of “damned” evidence: anomalous events that no hard science could properly explain, or explain away. Frogs falling from the sky, rains of blood and black ink, mysterious indentations and glyphs left in cliff faces, weird sounds heard over enormous geographical spaces. The list goes on and on. His writing is a kind of manic fever dream in which shadowy things become marginally lucid and coherent.

            I couldn’t help but think of Fort when I came across an article last week in which scientists discovered strange radiation bursts recorded in tree rings about 1,200 years ago. Somewhere between AD 774 and AD 775, an enormous burst of carbon-14 (¹⁴C) hit the earth’s atmosphere. So far, the findings rule out a solar flare or supernovae. What on gods’ green earth could produce enough ¹⁴C isotopes in the atmosphere to raise the global ¹⁴C measurement to nearly 20-times its nominal level?

            Modern radio and x-ray telescopes give us the ability to look through time and into space for remnants of massive astronomic activity. However, so far, nothing is visible from that epoch to indicate a supernovae or enormous influx of γ-rays or protons. Again, we are stuck with the questions: What? How? Where? And science has no answer and would most likely refute any supra-normal hypothesis. Therein lies a problem that makes me fickle about science and the pompous poise of our age.

Science is made weak by the same conceit that makes religion feeble. The self-assuredness to explain something away theoretically without factually bringing evidence to the table is the self-same arrogance religious institutions use to control and manipulate. “Hard” science often contributes its own heresies to the collective reality by making presumptions based on past experiments and data, which may have held true in the past, but don’t adequately account for the future model of understanding. Yet, it seems every other day, new information and data is presented that has us re-calculating, re-hypothesizing, and re-thinking our reality funnel.

No one is bringing answers or possibilities to the table. This kind of discovery makes me wish for a man like Charles Fort to step to the table with a wild talent for paranormal pronouncement. What fun lies in this reality if we take all the mystery out of it?

Cortexting Neurotifications

            Remember that rad (yes, I still use this word) house party you went to last Friday? Remember the totally suave status update you posted while the cute girl you were chatting up went to the bathroom? And those pictures! Who knew you could embarrass yourself so much that a complete stranger would catch it on film and tag your drunken face on Facebook.

Now imagine these feelings, physical states, and emotions presented in ways text characters and words could never express. What if the capacity to capture the psycho-emotive-physiological state of an experience was as easy as uploading a packet of information for another to receive and re-experience?

            I find myself discussing brain-control interfaces (BCIs), EEGs, eye tracking, and similar technologies quite frequently. These technologies will unequivocally reshape our understanding and techniques of computing and data interaction over the course of the next decade. Much like in the film Strange Days, I expect a day in the not too distant future, where a “status” update will be a complex data packet capable of recreating emotion, physical sensation, and psychological state through some readily accessible and affordable hardware medium. Perhaps we should call these experiential neurobiological updates neurotifications or cortexting.

            Of course, this brings a whole host of tricky and problematic questions to the table. Privacy, security, and accessibility all linger like dark shadows in the corner booth at a smoky bar when the adytum of the soul is exposed for the world to see and dissect. The discussions regarding privacy and security on social network platforms like Facebook (e.g. persona/profile hijacking for affiliate advertising, facial-recognition and tagging automation scripts, “phantom” accounts for agitation, etc.) present a whole generation with ideas more foreign to the human mind than any generation preceding could have ever imagined. These concepts may not dominate our thoughts on a daily basis, but it is hard to deny they’ve sown deep seeds and may bring forth a new dynamic in the eons-old vacillation between knowledge of self and knowledge of other.

            I can recall many times, sitting there staring at the blank update box, wanting to say something that might stir the same overwhelming emotion or feeling that put me in a “loss of words” state in the first place. Driven by some sick hope that if I were able to select just the right words, just the right rhythm, the right moment, that little box could bare my essence to others so they might understand. More often than not, I find the words and ideas chosen to communicate those candid thoughts presented in a solipsistic manner. Quick as I was to share that feeling, I often wipe the slate clean and go back to some other distraction or sublimation of emotion.

            It strikes me that the possibility of tapping into the neural network of the human body to advance the trend begun by social networking will have many folks up in arms. Oddly enough, I find myself wont to embrace and apply such a technology. However off-kilter it may seem to the reader, a part of me perceives such a wild technology fostering the capacity to achieve the effect social networking ought originally have been designed for: to put us intimately in touch with one another; to increase cross-cultural and pan-global understanding and empathy; and to dissolve the geo-political borders which parochial, xenophobic governments have put in place to barricade us from embracing the next phase of human evolution.

Truncating Communication via Space Travel

            “Splashdown successful!! Sending fast boat to lat/long provided by P3 tracking planes #Dragon.” – @elonmusk

            This Tweet changes many things. It changes the way we look at the future of space travel and exploration. It changes our perspective on what is possible once the individual endeavors to excel where the governing institution resigns to irrelevance and extinction in matters of exploration and discovery. Most importantly: it changes everything about the way we communicate.

            If you pay attention to technology and science trends (and how can you not in this day and age?) you probably know Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) put their flagship rocket, Dragon, into orbit last week. It delivered its payload to the international space station then completed re-entry yesterday, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean not too far off the coast of California.

            You might find yourself asking: “How does the future of private space exploration change the way we communicate?” Well, let me explain. It isn’t really the space exploration; it’s the Tweet. This transformative platform of communication isn’t exactly new. Twitter, SMS messaging, and Facebook have contributed significantly to this new paradigm. What I see as the impetus for future dissemination of information is that we’ve surrendered to this hyper-truncated method of communication. Complex thoughts, data, and emotion need to fit in 140 characters. This means conveyance is shifting towards rapid-fire exchanges of 0.14kb of data or less. Given the volumes of data we now handle on a daily basis, this seems, perhaps, miniscule.

            Take it one step deeper with me. To understand the Tweet at the beginning of this post, one needs to have an encompassing awareness of many trends and events for the context of the Tweet to make any sense. For most of us, this comes through our array of RSS feeds, hardcopy or digital newspapers, or word of mouth. Hold that thought for just a second: word of mouth? Whereas this predominantly shaped our means and method of communication of news for several centuries (post, social gossip, town crier), the advent of newspapers shifted that transference of information into high gear. The parturition of the Internet took that from high gear into interdimensional overdrive. I have to pause here for a moment, because I can only think of Spaceballs when Rick Moranis takes “Spaceball One” from ridiculous to ludicrous speed and says, “My brains are going into my feet!” That scene succinctly captures the feeling of what we face—word of mouth becoming near instantaneous, pan-global awareness in 140 bytes or less.

Twitter’s enmeshed use of the hash mark (#) and the ampersand (@) as identifying classes for objects, ideas, and persons is not groundbreaking. Anyone who has spent time developing with or learning an object-oriented programming language has experiential familiarity with these codifications. The uniqueness lies in the crossover from the cold, digital cyberworld into the neurobiological wetware of the human brain’s left hemisphere. We find ourselves trying to adapt to the staggering volume of information coming in; and in so doing, we’ve created shortcuts to navigate the cybersphere that cross-correlate to classifying identifiers in our own minds. This psychological matrix, to survive in the digital future, finds it necessary to produce routines and algorithms unique to each individual to keep pace with the data, events, and ideas coming in on all fronts.

Two years ago, I spent a semester teaching expository writing to college sophomores. I didn’t quite suspect it then, as I do now, but I knew we stood on the precipice of a huge shift in the linguistic structure of our verbal and written communication systems. When I discovered the first “u” as replacement for “you” in an academic paper, I was furious. It undermined the whole system of grammar and attention to language I fostered as truth just as a priest wields a Bible like a cudgel. However, I now see and accept this transition and shift in communication as inevitable. Just a few days ago, I was reading through an old historical record on the history of Witchcraft in the British Empire during the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Middle and Old English seem foreign languages in comparison to modern American or British English. Inevitably, future variations and linguistic aberrations will manifest, so the English of as little as five to ten years from now will in no way be recognizable. How else will we keep pace with complex communiqués in 140 bytes or less? 

Low-Tech Classified Ads

There is a growing awareness about two divergent paths our species could follow from this point in our bewildering milieu. The first presupposes that our technology will continue to advance exponentially toward beautiful (or perhaps terrifying) outcomes and horizons of possibility. The second shivers with the fear of a planet-wide collapse of society and technology, spiraling us into a new “dark age” of low technology and primitive social structures.

I follow Klint Finley’s blog, Technoccult, and appreciate his insight and attention to unfolding trends in technology and society. He recently began a thread with this question: “In a low-tech, post-apocalyptic world, what would you want your job to be?” I still haven’t found an answer to this question, but it began ticking at the back of my brain.

This question spiked to the forefront of my mind again yesterday, after receiving an email from my dear friend Carolyn, about low-tech booby traps setup alongside popular hiking trails in Utah. The article got me to thinking about another angle on Finley’s question; and made me pose my own: What if persons already committed to a low-technology future are already placing bids on their jobs in the post-apocalyptic world?

Our entire culture, at this very moment, is white knuckling the steering wheel into a tunnel with no light at the other end. Our collective future is shadowed by Fukushima, increasing tension and violence between “law” enforcement and citizens worldwide, and a persistent fear-based media that aims to unhinge citizens young and old and create divisive reefs between people who have more in common with each other than the governments who represent their interests (and I use that word loosely).

I’ll admit I’m not ignorant, or without consideration, of a possible low-tech society in our immediate future. During a conversation with a friend on his birthday last week, the notion of a “ten-year” plan popped up. He has two kids, seven and five-years-old, so for him, there is a stronger notion of a necessity to plan for the future. I’m single and have no children, but the concept hit me pretty hard. What will the world look like in ten years? What do I want my role in whatever world unfolds in ten years to be? How do I start placing my bid on that role now?

Tying rocks and spiked stakes to ropes in trees is definitely not the best answer. Neither is arguing moot political blunderings until we’re all blue in the face or parading in the streets alongside violence tourists. The only answer I’ve discovered to this point, is the same notion I’ve tried to build my life on for the past ten years: learn to be a boundless being in this culture which tries, with all its might, to incarcerate you, whether it be in a job, a house, or a tailor-made personality marketed on the web or television. It is up to you to decide your own role in the post-apocalyptic, zombified world, which is already upon us.

Diagnosis -- FREE Reaktor Ensemble!

I spent a few hours fooling around in Reaktor today and built this slick little wide-pan stereo modular synth. It has 2 oscillators, a multi-pass filter, and several modulation generators. Requires 5.6.2 update to work properly. Have fun!

Click to download.

Project Glass: Another step toward embracing the Godgle

            It isn’t exactly cutting edge news as the announcement managed to hit most media and press releases in early April of this year, but I think in keeping with my supporting the super-intelligence candidacy for Godgle, the Google Project Glass prototype deserves another look.

            I mentioned the science fiction author, Vernor Vinge, in a recent post and would like to visit a concept from his 1999 novel A Deepness in the Sky. The milieu for A Deepness is perhaps within a thousand years in an alternate dimension or universe to our own, as the technology is slightly advanced, but in many ways very similar. Without delving into a dissection of this fabulous novel and its plot (which I highly recommend!), I’d like to focus on one particular piece of technology Vinge envisions. In his book, Vinge refers to them as head up displays or HUDs. They are, by no stretch of the imagination, the exact same technology as Google’s Project Glass: glasses or goggles, which allow interaction with both local and wide-area networks through voice command and eye-tracking.

            Google unveiled this project to subtle fanfare. When we perceive how Bluetooth headpieces brought us fully into the futuristic musings of Gene Rodenberry’s Star Trek transcoders, we can also see how this new project undertaken by Google will bring us into a whole new way of encountering and interacting with the datasphere. This is big-time stuff. This is going to make the iPhone, the iPad, and all other tablet and touch technologies look like the cave man who kept pushing rocks up a hill after another guy discovered the wheel.
             While the eye-tracking implementation may not have found incorporation into the design yet, I can assure you the technology exists and will find its way into the design shortly. Further attention and development with EEG and BCIs will allow technologies like Project Glass to take us directly into the virtual or augmented reality we are all collectively building on the web.

            Sergey Brin of Google appeared recently on the Gavin Newsom Show to demonstrate the technology. While we don’t get to see the user’s perspective, the brief interaction with this profound piece of R&D boasts a staggering future of computing possibilities.

            After seeing these specs in action, I can only stand out in the crowd waving my arms wildly in the air, yelling “Hire me to Google X Lab! I want to help design and conceptualize this kind of stuff, too!!”