And I’m here to report, unqualified lo that I am, the essential first steps the mind took into the digital world, into digital technology, which is clearly an evolutionary phenomenon, even more profound than any ‘age’ like bronze or iron or middle, because of its velocity, and the velocity it causes the mond to take. (dick points out that digital technology is causing the world and the mind.  The velocity digital technology causes the mind to take, to move through its iterations and inventions faster and faster.  We are going to have to let go of ideas of corporeal authority, of the permanent self, of singularity. Online avatars already represent as well as personal presence, despite the fact they don’t describe the same you’s).  We become observable as mass data, as an All One that dislocates aspects of the Self from the body, amalgamates them in The Internet.  What we say things are, how we name and call them, reflects and reiterates the shape of the mind that named it, of the Self.

How to be alone is going to become a lost art, as well, and sooner than apps get invented.

Since machine has become my memory, I can no longer tell what the calendar looks like just by blinking.  I don’t bother with a memory for it anymore. prittee trusting. Not enough attention is being paid to a social discussion about how to regard technology. For instance, people might think of The Internet as an object-based, established phenomenon, like all the other communication media of the past, Telephone, and Television, and Railroads. But The Internet is not a noun. The Internet is a set of possibilities, it’s a canvas of bodiless ones and zeros, established by and escaped from a world of organic matter.

Like Derrida pointed out, the word ‘reality’ is a noun.  Being a noun most certainly means being a thing, like a building, Derrida offered. Using a noun to name reality causes us to assume that reality is a thing, with certain defined thing-truths and ways of specific being that make it whatever it is. and worst of all, the smallizing of the possibilities for noun Reality, in that we do not usually think, sorely inaccurately, of ‘things’ as morphing or in process, but rather as staid and determined, segmented from all the doings around it that made it what it is. then we expect the Great and Cosmic Reality to fit snugly inside a word? a noun? and not even wiggle?

Machine’s like, Why? You have to tell them why – because we want, red flag style, not to miss opportunities, possibilities.  We are, for example, making The Internet proprietary.  I remember the light bulb going on when as a child I heard that Native Americans thought land ownership was an absurd idea. The idea that it wasn’t even possible to contain land with an act of ownership. The Internet is a form of connection, an energy.  In these earliest days of permanent evolutionary change, The Internet is being branded and law-ized and partitioned and mines and yoursed.  But The Internet is like electricity.  like, and as, and nothing without it.  The energy that makes the mind be and go keeps making for itself better and sleeker vehicles. It’s only today’s problem that Digital Communication needs live hosts, fleshly originators of the directives of being. And it doesn’t care what we think of The Internet because we’re just pretending its meaning, while it discovers itself and invents new skins that only partially involve us cyborgs.

This point about morality is a huge nexus of consideration about AI –  what can we instill in The Machine?  What kinds of perspective fit in the digital process?  Whether humans maintain moral decision making, do we teach the drone to swerve based on mass, or monetary value, or species, or medical viability based on statistical information our chips emit? We might struggle and fail to remain with the machines  We take a role in Machine, as the source of the moral factor as a way to maintain user relationship with the machine, because without morality, AI isn’t really serving us.  It’s just functioning.  Unfortunately, morality is so hotly contested among humans that a most likely moral instillation is none, the digital equivalent of agree to disagree.

there’s power in the gaze alone, and The Internet makes the world a panopticon to itself. Whether or not it is considered a responsibility, we are in these very few first years for establishing a basic shape of The Internet in society. I’m not just talking about wresting it from the claws of censors  – censorship crying ‘use less of the resources!’.  I’m talking about using it, inventing it, keeping on learning to navigate in new and free ways, finding ways of being with it. For example, these avatar selves are one day going to have an uprising, calling for the voices they have all along spoken to count as ‘reality’.  when money can be made in cyber transactions, is that not the very mark of ‘reality’ in babylon’s own terms.  and its participants functioning in it avatars as real as typists

It won’t be very long, if it hasn’t already become mostly the case, before devices can be shut down at the will of an authority that is necessarily, due entirely to the way we are presently fitting The Internet into Society, devices can be shut down at the will of an authority that is necessarily politically affiliated with your internet service provider. And so while we are so gleeful that solar chargers finally exist, what good will they do darkened machines?  When you buy a car with a television in it do you think that the tv isn’t a Trojan Horse with a mic and a camera trained on you, that is electronically married to your ignition and your fuel injectors, connected to your favorite life-giving noun, The Internet? And I’m not even radical. Not even stockpiling flip phones. If your response uses the word “password,” please hang up and dial 1-800-box-orox.

Your smart phone necessarily connects your life into The Internet. Don’t ‘password’ me.  you bank on there, write all your mails, take pictures, you are emitting a constant tracking signal. There is no such thing as the kind of “off” that your blender or your lamp have. Smart phone is never “off.’  But sometimes its battery dies. Though, it has to have been dead seven layers of neglected, geological uncharged time to not retrieve even the clock time. which is fed to it on an entirely different wetly system, in case you thought there was only one. These are just facts. No need to read in frantic Lewis Black delivery.

If your answer is to live outside this controlled Internet, is to not carry or use these devices, please hang up and dial 1-800-recognition software. Pretty soon it will be required that we register our irises and fingerprints to be able to pass through any airport security. Right now it’s optional not because it’s optional, but because it’s being tested before the dizzying volume of data has to be handled. Now I’m shaking my finger a little bit like Lewis Black. but after the airport security then it’s going to be we have to register this bio print, the iris the fingerprint, register them in order to bank.

So, the fact is, no matter what you think you deserve in terms of personal freedom to move around, make purchases, and interact with the world in almost every way, no matter what you damn well deserve, more than that, you better hope the entity that controls your internet is at least benign to you. Machine is so cute and dusty playing me Neil Young’s The Old Homestead, but homesteading the hidey hoarding way isn’t the same in a drone world, is it.

Finger wagging

Then Machine proposes to escape such ubiqui-veillance by living the slow life. But there is no “off the grid.” That went away with the size and scope of the new form of connection and communication, The Internet.

What kinds of information can be carried digitally? What can be created from ones and zeros? And what’s the desire, what’s the objective? We are One with Machine, we’ll be using it to our benefit, we say, in nearly full confidence that when we thank for what we desire, we create it.

At the top of my gratitude list are the people I love, scattered all over the planet, in various states of living, like Walter Benjamin’s manuscripts – poor Benjamin, sending his  manuscripts hither and yon in paper envelopes, at the mercy of the blustery world, to farther away friends and colleagues. I wonder what he hoped about which of his papers would survive. But it’s not just about survival of the writing, it’s about TLDR “Too Long Didn’t Read,”about  the Reader. (since when can an acronym contain a contraction? bring me my oxygen.)

Are there creative energies in digital technology? What is the energy that can be harnessed? Or is it a vehicle, a conduit, for an outside energy? There has to be a distinction between the message and the medium where this question resides – the energy potential lies in the meaning, in the thought behind the sign, the one or the zero in long, long, lines, that have to be abbreviated, symbolized – and how language remains gradual, analog, rheostatic, the best tuner for the energies, the most subtle – and as AI, sorry machine, fails to apprehend any kind of morality, (which we think is tragic but, tree falling in forest, if morality is never a concern then another navigable system develops, and nothing’s feelings get hurt) It’s not like morality served us all that well.  how peaceful has it been?

Do you got a map to the next joint?