On / Off

Off / on.

Duality.

It’s the key to everything.

Is and is not.

Presence and absence.

Here and there.

A quantam leap.

An infintessimal spark

from which the whole universe streams,

pouring forth

in ever-increasingly complex patterns

upon patterns upon patterns.

Until what?

Until singularity returns?

And then we’re gone.

Blink.

Process

My process is a hard process.

I don’t make it easy on myself.

Even why I try not to -

I still feel compelled to reach in further

and feel around for a strucure – MY structure -

then excavate and extricate it from the surrounding mess.

It can be a frustratingly painstaking process -

A process that sometimes defeats me -

but when I come out the other side,

clutching the bloody infant,

knowing the shape that follows,

I know that THIS is what I was born to do.

Why gobble-de-gook spam will destroy the human race

That gooble-de-gook spam that you get that is jumbled up sections of documents from someone’s virus infected computer – it’s like junk DNA. Or maybe how junk DNA started. Bits of junk, hacked out or combined together at random, that mean nothing except every so once in a while, when something make sense. And maybe leads to something new. Of course the subtrate is silicon and mostly virtual, collapsing the instant the lights go out. But all the same, somehow, slowly, out of our millions of documents, this breeding ground of information, bits are breaking off, being combined with other random bits, replicated by the million and sent out in the world. How often does this gooble-de-gloop make a hit? Someone, somewhere clicks a link. Money / energy moves from one location to another. Something with some perceived value moves the opposite direction. Or doesn’t. No matter that the words strung together have little meaning. This is random in fact. They are purely a vehicle to get here undetected by watchful spam filters. To deliver the link and key words like “erection” to a susceptible mouse hand. And every so often – often enough – the finger twitches and a connection is made. S/he and the link are now inextricably bound together. So it continues until maybe one day the gobble-de-gook randomly takes on meaning to the recipient. And it is something that is so exceedingly clever or beautiful or arousing that the viewer cannot help but send it on to other people – this random piece of junk now takes on life! A real life of its own. Replicated because of meaning or some effect it causes in something else. And what if this meaning was the design of a beautiful, aweful, terrible creature. The meaning was “Make me. Make me. Make me.” If the beautiful, aweful, creature was more fit to survive in the environment it was born into, than we – we’re fucked. Or will eventually be, unless Will Smith comes to save us all. And that my friends, is how natural selection works.

Hey Death

Hey Death
sitting on my shoulder
squeezing my heart with cold fingers -
a bang!
a whisper
a slow fade away -
whatever form you’ll take
there can be no escape -
just acceptance.

Hey Death
sitting on my shoulder -
why don’t you just fuck off?

Patterns

All of human thought, our understanding, scientific belief, ideology has an architecture. A multi-dimensional structure from which we hang all our experience and from which we draw further understanding of our experiences. There’s also some kind of structure / architecture out there, that we both inhabit and are part of, seamlessly connected to the matrix. Our brains are programmed to be  pattern recognizers and pattern seekers. So we seek to create patterns in our understanding of life, of our experiences, in order to make sense of them. Sometimes there are patterns there. Sometimes not.

Science is a technique of figuring out if there are actual patterns there and what they are. Technology is using those patterns for some sort of practical purpose. Magic and religion is the unsubstantiated belief that there are patterns where there probably are none, or at least not arranged in the way that believers think they are.

Somewhere in the middle exists a space occupied by intuition, by pure energy. An idea that is gaining ground, but no one can really properly explain.

At the moment I’m consumed with thoughts about patterns, about structure, architecture of thought, of the universe, of the human psyche. Science, economics, criminal profiles, technology, detection, simulation. Somehow, some way, they are all connected.

Somewhere inside me is also this feel for /  resonance / I-don’t-know-what – for trends / collective action / tipping points – because we are all part of this matrix. But what do I do about it all? I was once an academic, I’m now a film-maker, a creative of sorts. Someone who thinks about things and turns that into tv programmes. Inside I guess I’m a philosopher, who really just wants to understand the way of things. But who also wants to work it out and present the world with some new theory, some new way of looking at things.

Though I’m sure someone else has had these feelings and thoughts, has actually been trained to articulate them and has. I’d like to find those thoughts. So this is the start.

Someone Else’s Plan

More frequently than we realise, we are part of someone else’s plan.

I’m sitting watching the third India Jones movie. It’s obviously showing as part of the pre-publicity for the last one, which is about to be / showing at the cinema.

There is a whole marketing plan around this film. Now I’m part of it. I’m part of a schematic, a system not of my making.

Unfortunately for them, I’ll slip through the net, not be infected by the marketing-virus. But others will, they’ll go see the movie or buy the video. Dunno what merchandise there’ll be. But many of them will buy.

This is just one of numerous plans / webs I am a part of. Most of it via the media, some via my bank, my insurance company, my business, organisations that we do business with. I’m communicated with as part of their plans. Sometimes I’ll fit in with them. Most often I won’t, though others will.

Marketing is about lassoing groups of people that may be susceptible to infection by their virus/meme, then releasing money from them in exchange for a change of state.

Is this right? A change of state. If we are to abstract ourselves totally – what happens when we buy something? We get something. We have more stuff / knowledge / something than before. That must change us. Though often it’s just temporary, the changed state slides away, we revert to our original state. The more temporary it is, the better for most businesses – that means more selling.

People have become so clever at selling. It’s no longer always a straight exchange. It’s an ongoing relationship, the exchange continuing for as long as possible, smaller amounts over a longer period of time. Don’t just sell the book, sell chapters of the book and get people to pay a monthly subscription. Is this because there are just so many people? We have to construct society in order to keep the largest possible number of people occupied.

This is the curse of the modern world. The really great products of course induce a permanent change of state. But that doesn’t facilitate the flow of cash in the same way that useless stuff does. The definition and scale of wealth has changed – it has changed because of this phenomenon. Now there’s all this virtual cash sloshing around – mostly in the form of debts to banks / other lending institutions. And we are slowly being sucked dry.

This is why infographics / visualisation could be so important. People are completely out of touch with the meaning of money and the value of things. (What a phenomenal trick! To distance people from this.) It’s the only way to remind them of what the true picture is. What’s really going on.

And I guess that’s why I’m so interested in the idea of creating animations / works of art that show what’s truly going on. To search for and then represent underlying patterns via both info graphics and film.

Replicators

One of the first topics we had to consider when I first started to study genetics was whether viruses were living things or not.

They have some of the “qualities of living things” but not all. Yet they persist. They replicate, they continue to impact upon the living world. What does that make them?

Today, sitting here, having copied for the millionth time the Install package for Avid DV Express Pro editing software, I’m thinking that this is perhaps the wrong question.

It’s actually all about replicators.

We are evolved from the first class of replicators. The pre-cursors to DNA. All this other stuff has come about as a means of ensuring their replication, if you believe Richard Dawkins et al. (Me, I go along with it). And from all that has given rise to other forms of replication. Memes. Our ideas. Replicators that pass through the spirit-world of mind / consciousness.

Both are prone to errors in the copying. Mutation.

But it depends upon the substrate. Chemicals are more faithful. Consciousness is fluid, unpredictable and gives rise to new replicators in unexpected ways.

Through the spread of ideas / memes we have invented hard-wired minds. Computers. The ultimate replicators. These are less mutation-prone.

Jesus, I finally understand what Donna Haraway was on about in Cyborg Manifesto.

Right now we’re operating in three replication worlds – the physical world, the mental / consciousness world (one rising from the other) and the computer world (rising from the previous). These three are busy communicating, inventing, evolving in a fuck-fest that is taking us who-knows-where.

Sleek

I am bare

bones picked clean

by your many sharp

teeth licked clean

by your many pointed

tongues you all

carried away with you

your pound of flesh and flung

it back into my face oh

I know I gave willingly dug

my fingers in and ripped

to offer the dripping mess

as a sacrifice a gift

whatever and now I am left

a skeleton streamlined I am

sleek shining ivory my

own deadly weapon.