Dada. DooDoo. Gaga. These are those that chose to burst through the difference that makes a difference into the flatworld of undifferentiated drone. The degree of freedom from each monosyllabic doubling is the same as what came before. “First verse second as the first” wasn’t a bonehead strategy of downtown-nihilism, it was a recipe for attention through ubiquity, preceding the official launch date of the networked attention economy.  In the aesthetics of trolling repetition is the zero point.

NSFW originally meant Not Safe For Words, but the data-driven need-to-know-everything that powers the network of networks translates everything into language, whether mundane, sublime or inexplicable.

There is not much hope for haptic, embodied, intelligence unless humans can generate novel experiences that are untranslatable and unrepeatable in language.

Conspiracies tend to flip when they pass a tipping point, and drone as a form of resilience may have fully leaked into the dark side. Even transparency advocates have to learn how to selectively shine their sunlight, else they get caught in the slipstream of always-on-ness just like the conspiracies they seek to undermine. Not surprisingly there is usually a backbone cabal that keeps a network alive.  We are in the age of the aesthetics of trolling because response, even repeat, is what sends signals through the networks keeping structures intact. But I am about to burst with datasaturation. What are the options? Life is a verb and time will keep pushing it along.

When in Doubt, Repeat. Polly want a cracker?

YOU CAN NEVER MAKE ENOUGH MONEY TO DISAPPEAR

Attempting to take yourself off the grid is harder than ever. If you leave any footprints, DNA or comments behind, the Open Source Intelligence Engine will suck them up. M00t, Heath Bunting and Konrad Becker are still pulling the strings without revealing their hands, but it is getting increasingly difficult to be wild in the mental environment without the authorities naming you feral and sending in the headhunters to search and destroy.

THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH EYEBALLS ON THE PLANET
The Obliterati know Fifteen-Minutes-of-Fame-Theory but actually DID THE CALCULATIONS: 15 minutes of fame x 6 Billion Humans on Earth / 525,600 minutes per year = 17,124 YEARS of Fame, just to cycle through every human once. There are not enough eyeballs on the planet! On the other hand there are all kinds of electronic eyeballs now with no human brains attached. The Obliterati understand that if Warhol’s electronic wet dream is to become a reality there would have to be cameras on every street corner, and reality shows with a 1:1 relationship to reality.

The map is not the terrain, but there sure is a lot of negative space in network culture one can get trapped inside of. Suburbanizing the mental environment has been easier and quicker than putting up gated communities in the built environment.

EVERYHUMANEVER: OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE ON EVERYONE

But leave it up to the military-intellegence-complex to create an even more disastrous scenario plan to work towards: a info-authoritarian database of every human that has ever lived, created with free labor of course! It’s being birthed in number of locations such as the mountains in Utah: EveryHumanEver, opensource intellegence with genetic verification. Think Total Information Awareness + Echelon x AllSpecies (or Encyclopedia of Life ) and you are starting to generate an image of this monster. The dataset is larger by a factor of at least 200, but the information has been collected by the specimen themselves. (High estimates of all species on the planet is 30 million, and there are currently nearing 7 Billion humans alive on planet earth, with that many humans already have lived and died on the planet). Hyperlinking these pages will only require genetic back-tracking and real-time datascraping from the public pages that human specimens are self-publishing.

CULTURAL EPIDEMIOLOGY: CURING DIVERSITY!

Early indications are that the militarized capital draining downhill towards the space of network analysis is generating some seriously interesting results for those-that-matter and need-to-know. You might not believe that CIA front-companies provided seed money for socialnetworking startups and analysis, but all it takes is crawling and scraping, and you have a pretty good idea of who has had their heart broken by who, and where important exchanges of anomalous information took place (genetic, academic, poetic or otherwise).

((Image from a .pdf from the Command And Control Research Program))

It is obvious what a boon social networking website has been for the forces of authority and sameness. Most militaries are hoping that mapping and managing Web 2.0 clusters helps them prevent WWIII, but unmanagable and isolated monocultures minus stochasticity heading towards self-destruction is the likely unexpected outcome. Known unknowns are to be expected when nodes are removed in highly leveraged non-linear networks.

Retaining the robustness of the mental environment is quite difficult in the face of the homogenizing effects of tele-communication. Taking out the few nodes that still provide hubs for dangerous data could isolate actors until they only see what they believe. And then spaceship earth and its human passengers are really in for a nose dive. Here is the story: Scale Free Networks can resist random attacks, but when we intentionally target the nodes that provide dangerous data, we kil robustness and conncectdness and the whole thing falls apart.

MESSAGE TO THE MILITARY

Dear warrior class: be careful who you (character) assassinate! Mental monocultures may seem safer in the short term but if your brain still has the capacity to engage in long term thinking its obviously a recipe for ragnarok. Humans: You have been Warned!

Lord Quagczar here, groggy, soggy and as grumpy as Gaia during the 6th extinction.

I spent yesterday evening below ground, percolating with the souls of pedestrians past.

An abandoned underground corridor was activated electronically and collective memories reawakened.

As this vestigial organ of the urban apparatus was re-animated with industrial strength images and sounds both diegetic and non-, I was reminded of just how foolish you humans are. The site of one rat is cause for alarm and shrieking, while you all wander quite contently in the smog that gets passed off as breathing-air here, once called India’s garden city.

Let this be a lesson you can’t learn: rat’s don’t kill; air pollution does. Too bad your puny human brains are not wired to understand this simple fact. You are always looking for faces in clouds rather than looking for clouds in faces. If you had any sense you’d all be running around shrieking in fear until the air was cleared and the non-linear climate dynamics of spaceship earth were brought back from the edge of chaos.

I guess you humans had a pretty good run with rationality and the scientific method, but you are gonna get blindsided by the limits of this line of inquiry. As my minion Gregory Bateson pointed out long ago: the usefulness of a map is not necessarily a matter of its literal truthfulness.

To be honest I am looking forward to the completion of your tale, for then I will be released from my duties protecting the fecundity of your information ecosystem, and I can get on to more interesting work in other, nicer, galaxies.

Well….I guess I have to return to my duties of churning your data smog and info-toxins into anomalous ideas. Try to open your third eye every once in a while, or at least try to see your head without a mirror, it might open pathways out of the local optima of rational processes and linear and into unexplored areas of the problem space your collective mind needs to survive another generation or two.

Or not. The faster you die-off, the faster I can move on to galaxies that are a little more hospitable to beings of wisdom such as myself.

Hello weary home-bodies. It is I, lord Quagczar.

I have taken form here in the swamp lands south of the Indus river, overflowing with water, rot, waste and rebirth during this season of monsoons. I spend my days busily collecting glitch, and my nights roaming the nala, but pause to give you this prophecy and warning.

As an assigned protector of your cognitive diversity I am always on the lookout for future human situations caused by new speciations in the information ecosystem. What are these emergent bifurcations that set you apart, send you ahead or backwards and set you against each other?

Ruptures in the space time continuum are always an impetus for new forms of knowing, new ways of living, and, often with you humans, new forms of violence. You could minimize the damage-done in the quest for an extended sensing apparatus by using livingry, not weaponry as a driver. True, this would be slower, but it would allow you to practice the precautionary principle and would hurt less in the long run. Your body might be your temple, but not if you keep you crushing it with the weight of the commercially co-opted detritus from the military industrial complex. I find you humans a most violent and ignorant lot, and would be tempted to leave this planet or wipe you out completely if I wasn’t assigned your protectorate!

Now for my latest cautionary transmission: be careful what you look at. Learning to see can open up new doorways or damn you to blindness. Not everyone needs to see everything all the time, in fact this is a guaranteed recipe for electronic-snow-blindness, but drilling too far down in any one direction of the information ecosystem promises to end in skulls filled with poison gas and bleeding eyeballs. I find your burnt-brain meandrathal‘s a tasty treat and humorous diversion, but too many casualties in the quest for knowledge means the end of both of us, so heed this telling with action.

Some information environmentalists claim that knowledge equity is an issue of access, pointing to the digital divide, but that argument is tied up in the tired narrative of progress and Western hegemony. Is not the ability to identify and speak to bird species lacking in the digerati? Perhaps instead of sending the tech-enabled social entrepreneurs to these lands abundant in info diversity we need to reverse source tribals armed with ecological narratives most peculiar to the mental-model-scarce untied states of america. I fear that not taking into account these non-normative and arrational narratives is creating some serious mental monocultures in the information ecosystems of planet earth.

You have been warned. Wisdomversify or die!

Humans have always been GeoEngineers. Just as we have always been cyborgs. As one InformationEcology prophet understood: Technology is the most human thing about us. Or to put it another way, all technologies extend mankind’s abilities to manipulate their home: Spaceship Earth. The changes that humans make to the flows and networks that compose the operating systems of the planet can have positive or detrimental effects for humans and non-humans. Those tradeoffs are not well understood, except in a most rudimentary way.

Humans have always been GeoEngineers, we have just not been doing it very deliberately.

AGRICULTURE GEOHACKING
Some nomads make a new technology and become farmers.
Farmers pray to rain gods.
If farmers do not make sacrifices to the rain gods they may get mad and withhold the rain.

When human cultures transition from a nomadic to an agricultural economy there is an impact on climate due to a change in species mix, saying nothing of the increase in the number of humans that can be sustained overall. Clearcutting the eastern seaboard of the United States changes the ecological flows within those interconnected bioregions. The green revolution was a huge feat of GeoEngineering. The abundance and distribution of biomass on the surface of the planet was profoundly reshaped as a result of that set of agricultural technologies.

I find all the fear mongering over geoengineering sad, not because it is overblown because it is way too late. Someone should have been yelling at those first agrticulturalists to use the precautrionary principal and stop their geoengineering. They were certainly hacking the planet.

Now we need to get beyond the fear of geohacking, and utilize or build new public institutions that allow us to create a planet that is healthy, safe and sustainable for humans and non-humans alike. That may involve creating huge plankton farms as carbon sinks, or everyone giving up all forms transportation not powered by human energy, or moving to Mars, or voluntarily dying off until humans reach a population that is in line with the carrying capacity of the planet.

Complexity&Paralysis

What to do in the face complexity of which human minds can not begin to model or understand but doing nothing is not an option? We certainly shouldn’t kid ourselves into believing that previous humans were not geoengineering. They just weren’t deliberate about it. Now that we know that humans are by their very nature climatehackers how do we become ethical climate designers. “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” And hacking a pre-existing system provides better results than trying to initiate complexity starting from scratch.

H1N1 is a subtype of the species affluenza 21K virus. The “H” refers to humanity’s precarious position as a stable keystone species on Spaceship Earth, and the “N” refers to the network of non-human actors who have, up to now, supported our unsustainable lifestyle.

H1N1 has mutated into various strains including American EcoExceptionalism, Mildly Dystopic British Nanny state, and Full-On Fascism (largely extinct in the wild) and various strains found in the brains of most humans sleepwalking their way towards the singularity, ignoring our interdependence on other nation states, and the state of non-human actors.

A variant of H1N1 was responsible for the Easter Island collapse, the maladapted Greenland Norse, and the Polynesians of Pitcarian island’s impermanence.  Low pathogenic H1N1 still exist in the wild today, causing roughly half of all unsustainable lifestyles.  However, when the Bretton Woods institutions became operational in 1945, H1N1 became a normalized mental virus, and unmeasured flows of capital sloshed around the globe, creating non-linear effects with indeterminate fitness functions and selection mechanisms.

These changes in monetary policy spread into the realm of the non-material, and vectoral intellectual property regimes continue to try to hoard seeds, cures, and standards for the most powerful actors, damaging the prospects of a full return to health for the planet. In 2006 it was noticed by the President that the United States was addicted to oil, and this was identified as one of the major avoidable health risks that was exacerbating the spread of the virus.  So far, little has been done in the area of alternative energy, and zero emmision living, to bring the system back to balance.