Here a mildly utopic mind-dump, hijacked from that cranial quarters of that familiar Metaphortean snoop:
The brain is a data structure, a vessel waiting to be re/filled. Optimized for search and retrieval, suitable for dada-mining, too. Economalies of attention, erroneous trades, disruptive innovations —but for whom do these hidden logistics linger on?
Memory palaces boarded up, one suspects they’ve been condemned. Rather we have memory palisades, on the sly, but in lock down? Data-bodies have their own algorithmic itineraries, hidden designs on the database complex, implicitly explicit and in accordance with pop zombie-lore, aiming for the brain.
Over-sized crania in extra-terrestrials would be a good target, safe for the outward obsolescence of such a thing as an in-board brain. Presuming, as a Metaphortean Researcher would, that sci-fidelity concepts are tellingly attuned, upgrading these antiquated personifications of electronic brains, themselves personifications of giant computers was argued cinematically some time ago. From the antagonistic aliens of This Island Earth (1955) to the nodally nuanced and nomadically nimble (if also vicious) technologizations of our future selves in Fiend Without a Face (1958), cyborg variants grope towards a dearth of stasis and the spoils of this mobile sort of brain.
Fiends without faces, the brain before its time — the wi-fi readied floating brain–, returns today under the aegis of friends without faces, or the googlization of many things, the maniacs of storage, the feverish claims on archiving for its own sake, of friends accumulated like bottlecaps. So many computerized conquests festooned on one’s outward “skin” it’s all about brand identity. Be a meme and not an aura, hyperlink your soul, catch a whiff of your future technologized self. Retrograde remediation of the “Star-Child,” many facebookies are eclipsing their own online persona with that of their progeny. perhaps.
Architectures of dearth. The Emperor’s new digs. Algorithms trim down, go stealth, hidden in plain sight if sufficiently meshed in a thicket of networked databases. Stealth algorithms are not quite the algorithmic unconscious but may end up marooned there under the folly of unnamed engines and the pre-mature arrival of digital dark age(ncie)s
