-
glitch
It’s been over a century since cubism and relativity shattered our mechanical assumptions about space, time and reality.
Today we live in a cubist web of instant information
that crisscrosses the entire planet at the speed of light.
And yet there are still industrial age culture critics
that believe truth should be built like a machine:
“McLuhan’s attempts to account for the general landscape of media are fragmentary and inconsistent.”
— Why Bother with Marshall McLuhan? (via @Wildcat2030)It’s a 19th century, typographic mind
that demands that truth be written in straight lines.
McLuhan was prepping us for the 21st century.
He was an English professor, but his books were written in the grammar of electricity
… which has always befuddled critics stuck in the logic of the printed page.
To criticize McLuhan’s work for being disjointed or contradictory is as absurd as
dismissing Picasso for not painting like Rembrant
or Einstein for straying too far from Newton.
Our entire electronic environment is fragmentary and inconsistent.
Truth is no longer a chain of facts
but a collision of contradictions and co-incidences in constant motion.
Glitch is the lullaby of the 21st century techno teenager. -
peer party
A global political party written in code.
A direct democracy engine for its members.
No platform or ideology.
A trojan horse injected into our broken politik.
An alternative to “None of the above.”
A rebirth of citizen.
Are you ready to vote for the hive? -
The revolution will not be centralized
There will be no petition to sign, no manifesto to read
no flag to wave, no anthem to sing.
There will be no soundtrack for our nostalgia
because the revolution will not be centralized.
There will be no leaders or followers
no winners or losers
There will be no beginning, middle or end
because the revolution will not be centralized.
If you can respond, you are response-able.
If you are a passenger, you are the crew.
If you want to be a spectator, you have to be part of the spectacle
because the revolution will not be centralized.
We will not have to agree
we will not have to conspire
we will not even have to fully understand
because the revolution will not be centralized.“Quietly and sanely this new encyclopaedia will, not so much overcome these archaic discords, as deprive them, steadily but imperceptibly, of their present reality.” - World Brain, H.G. Wells, 1937
The revolution can not be built, designed, or engineered …
The revolution can only grow.
You are the seed, you are the soil, and you are the buzzing of the bee. -
Cooperation vs Collaboration
We often use these words interchangeably, but they represent fundamentally different ways of contributing to a group and each comes with its own dynamics and power structures that shape groups in different ways …
-
The New Constitution
Stowe Boyd is imagining a New Constitution that would transcend borders and unite the internet generation around the world … an Eighth Continent that we could all defect to.
But the truth is, the internet that I want to be a citizen of doesn’t exist yet. Not in places like Egypt where a flick of a switch can disconnect everyone; not in the remote corners of Africa where the infrastructure doesn’t exist, but even more so, not at home.
“Behind every information architecture a power structure lies hidden.”
Our corporately owned internet comes with its own hidden constitution that’s completely out of tune with the spirit of our emerging networked culture. It’s a constitution that supports censorship, concentrates power, and leaves us just as vulnerable to an internet blackout as Egypt.
In fact, the places that lack any modern communication infrastructure are probably better prepared to write the new constitution than we are: They aren’t carrying the political or technical baggage of 20th century broadcast era networks and they don’t have to wrestle with a growing addiction to the HiDef future that the telcos own. They”re ready to embrace a truly free and open network … even if it can’t stream 1080p.
In the 21st century, the network is the law.
Code trumps legislature.
And whoever controls the shape of the network controls the shape of our culture.When a free and open internet finally emerges it won’t be bound together with words. It’s constitution will be written in code, a universal manifesto woven into the DNA of the network itself.
-
a shift from nouns to verbs
Yihong,
… enjoying your meditation on the geography of thought.
Our language acts as a kind of lens or perceptual organ through which we make sense of the world … and english distorts and defies the logic of hyperconnectivity. We’re trained unconsciously to see processes as things, and to pluck objects out of their vital web of relationship and interdependence.
But the dominant metaphors that we use to describe the web are shifting: pages are giving way to streams and flows, and over time this is going to shift our common understanding of what the internet is. A network is nothing but relationship.
“In the logic of the net, there is a shift from nouns to verbs” - kk
In the meantime, we fumble to make sense of living at the speed of light with a language that’s out of tune with our electronic environment. We are searching for a language of ecology, a language that encourages us to re-cognize the objects around us as patterns of relationship.
And yet ironically, the Western world continues to export it’s 19th century perceptual lens to asian and native cultures whose languages are much better equipped to probe and make sense of 21st century connectivity. Doubly ironic, since westerners have been exploring eastern religion and arts for decades in an effort to realign their sensibilities with electric technology; and yet we haven’t been able to assimilate these new modes of awareness into our language. Yet.
-
the flood
Bruces …
Your flickr stream is a curious thing. A strange mix of intimacy and detachment … like looking at curated photos of Google Street View. I wonder how often you go back and visit your old photographs to trigger old memories.
Our parents took photos to remember the past.
Today, we take photos to be part of the present.We rely on the web as a kind of extended sense making, and a moment that hasn’t been digitized and shared in one form or another is in danger of never happening.
“if only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes.”
A few years ago, my online identity felt tightly bound up in my archives. Today, not so much. As the web has made the shift from pages to streams, from objects to flows, our digital identities have become unhinged from our records of the past. Our archives are being buried under a flood of Nowness and our sense of self is once again beginning to flow from our interconnectedness and social bonds.
On the surface there may seem to be a kind of pointlessness to electronically sharing the micromoments of our lives. But it’s fascinating that we’re beginning to rely on the neurons of strangers on the other side of the globe to make sense of even the most trivial, every day experiences like eating a meal, or people watching on a busy street.
-
