Disruptive Innovation

This Owl — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 02:19:14 +0000

Now that a networked self is no longer the onus of anonymous amoebae, microbial magistrates are on the rise, inter-mingling publicly (not just internally) with once individualized humanoids in the conquest of time and space. Contends K.Varnelis in a recent revelation: “we are made up of multiple micro-publics, inhabiting simultaneously overlapping telecocoons.” Call it disruptive innovation, if you will, primordial ooze has returned to claim its rightful throne in the networked cosmos. Schizogeographic positioning systems, indeed, are afoot as urban planners down size design overhead by querying glorified bags of cytoplasm! In one instance, network engineers puzzling out rail systems in Tokyo exploited the economy of brainless slime mold that “first creates a fine mesh network that goes everywhere, and then continuously refines the network so that the tubes carrying the most cargo grow more robust and redundant tubes are pruned.” Not so long ago, gelatinous agents were marked as shills for Communism, today their amorphous agility and socialistic experience is lauded.

But not all microneers are so willing to be entangled in the advances of the wired-up humanoid regime. Hardcore microbial Luddites inhabiting a massive glacial safe house in the Antarctic yonder have remained content in cold darkness without oxygen, let alone wi-fi access, for millenia! Cosmically indifferent about appearances, these old school extremophiles travel in blood red torrents, a fashion statement at once hideous and care-free. Such isolated populations constitute obliterariums au naturale and they are gaining new respect–or at least temporary trackbacks–from portent deprived apocalypticists! In a world where continuous partial attention holds sway, nostalgic impulses travel laterally groping for google trends, such anomalous geologic phenomena achieve sublime temporality, temporarily. Unfathomable and feared at least as long as a passing comet’s visibility spans thru the sky , or news of such events is sustained in a bout of tweets (which ever comes first)

WEIRD FICTION » microbes

Disruptive Innovation