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“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at;”
— Henry David Thoreau
“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions. ...For in the end, he was trying to tell us what afflicted the people in 'Brave New World' was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking. People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think”
— Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death)
Massive Business Organizations largely control the internet and the computers connected by it. Large Organizations are too focused on producing a more addictive "horse", and have thrown rapid radical progress to the wayside. Moreover, progress characterized by a blind faith in attention-abuse profit-seeking incrementalism is not meaningful. Conglomerates of people embrace a distributed lack of culpability for outcome, plausible deniability assuages each individual's fears as the end-user's mind is subject to execution by firing squad. Conscious Practitioners of the Computer Arts can tell if they are firing live rounds or blanks, and must preserve their ethical compass in spite of inconsequential economic forces.
The most monolithic, featureless, immovable of cliffs must still yeild to the fluid tides of change. We are being trained to act as if the Information Age is an end to progress; that all will be delivered readily upon request. The slate must be cleaned, new entities must rise and fall, the show must go on. Each successive attempt at an iron grip on reality must be resisted on all fronts at all times. Once avarice interposes its own ambitions in between the fingers of the artist, the art itself becomes irrevocably touched with a longing for control, a loathing of humanity.
Massive Business Organizations are bringing us the last-best-thing slightly worse, at a speed slower than ever, with the sole intention of predicting and controlling behaviour. They recognize our sovereignty and indivuality only insofaras we can be differentiated from other loyal paying customers. TV and Radio represented unidirectional flows of information, were used at first intentionally, then for entertainment, and then for advertisement-profit. Those who "platformatize" the personal computer in our pockets aim to regress to an identical purpose. Platform's exist to "grant" us an identity within their limited contexts - despite what we may be led to believe, each of us remains even if the computer is off. We each have a right to a sovereign identity, not be a member each of multitudinous Mickey Mouse Clubs. The Internet-Computer is a new beast, one not of burden but of mental expansion. Our aim is no longer the calculation or proliferation of information, but the engagement of new shared contexts that experience marked morphogenesis occurs in the interstices between our minds.
“The gentle journey jars to stop.
The drifting dream is done.
The long gone goblins loom ahead;
The deadly, that we thought were dead,
Stand waiting,
every one.”
— Lewis Caroll
We are now in an age where the new generations of adults are those who were born into the computer context. If the computers that we interface with are themselves only able to operate within an extremely limited context, we are very likely limiting the problem-solving contexts available to us. While Corporate Corpses are playing wealth-extraction games with our minds, we cannot be lulled into a context wrought in complacency and lack of agency. We cannot afford to stagnate or render ourselves exhausted waving false flags of success, especially given the looming challenges upon us. We cannot afford to be complacent about the technology that runs our lives. Companies are basically playing wealth-extraction games with our minds, our lives, and our children. We cannot afford to stagnate or to fly false flags of success in the face of the looming challenges upon us.
“The complexity of the problems facing mankind is growing faster than our ability to solve them” — Doug Engelbart
“If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards.”
— Ted Nelson
Everyone has their own "definition" of what the Metaverse is. Most definitions make one of two mistakes:
1. Give some nebulous and "safe" definition of "connection" and "place" (Nostrodamus)
2. Over-index on small cross-sections of a larger idea (Blockchain, Virtual Reality, Snake Oil)
Social Media's series of narcissistic funhouse mirrors and buzzword-infused micro-commoditized communiqué is dangerous.
Conversation and understanding does not occur within oneself, or with only people you agree with and approve of.
Engagement (as measured) does not actually mean engaging (as experienced).
Hyper-fascination with screens because we are apes.
The Metaverse is much larger than VR. VR is just a screen, a set of concepts.
Still not the best way to read a book. Most of the human knowledge that is most important is _still_ in books.
We need to build systems that encourage proliferation of context, value challenges as a society,
and work against our own common sense which has misled us for millenia as to what the nature of things truly is.
Challenge Values, Value Challenges“VR can either be beautiful art and sympathy or terrible spying and manipulation. We set its meaning”
— Jaron Lanier
“With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps;
And o’er uninhabitable Downs
Place Elephants
for want of Towns”
— Jonathan Swift
Current Metaverses Suck
The Metaverse is ripe for the taking by the people. + Connected... (etc.) Refer: - Stephen Ball - Croquet - literally all my research here - the future that will happen (is next)
“We live in a world of Applications, but if you think about it applications are one of the worst ideas anybody had. [...]
Applications kind of draw a barrier around your ability to do things, what you really want is to gather the resources that you need to you and make the things that you want out of them”
— Alan Kay
[DRAFT NOTES] Computers are everything-machines that enable fantasy and simulation. We can change the Paradigm to instead sell the device again as a window to another world. Fuck the app. It's dead if we kill it. If the last Paradigm isn't dead then the next product will be. Get rid of the phone Romanticism that pretends you are some Multicultural traveling epistemological Savant of social spheres, it's a box and you are an idiot. Create a new world with real Outlet and Intertwingularity of information
“The destiny of computers is to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for all humans, pervasively networked world-wide.”
— J.C.R. Licklider