Eating is really getting to me. I feel more coerced by my nutritional choices than almost anything else. At least I can reject mass media.
stuffwhitepeoplelike
I find this interesting as most of the comments are white people saying "well, only liberal white richies from the cities really". And WP saying "That SO true!".
There is this....thing happening for which there is no name. We rush towards it every day. It's called, short hand, The Singularity, and it's here now, but it's moving too quickly, so we don't realize we are inside it yet, because it's arrived ahead of our ability to perceive it evolving.
It's about the death of history I think.
Data storage, data transmission.
First there were stories, sorry I know this is remedial, then we had books, books were pretty good for a long time, the basic format, and then we have mass production of books, distribution via railways, and then virtual books.
It's hard to talk about the spread of data this way. Do you remember when Napster started up? I would see terabytes of data online at times and think "shit fuck jesus that's a lot of music". And Napster was pretty terrible lets remember.Song fragments.Bad search.No file ver. Stuff like that.
It was prior to this a thing static. You printed a book, indelible ink on vellum. And that was it. I wrote before (in the old blog) about this thing I read, regarding reading, about saccades, eye movements, such that you could monitor them and change the text of a page being read between saccades and the reader would not notice. In fact they might be unable TO notice.
It all becomes so tangled so quickly. Which, really is the issue, you can't tease out the parts anymore. I mean I'm trying to talk about stuffwhitepeoplelike and I have to go back to talking about printing presses, pre-printing-press printing even? In order to do it? I have to break syntax and grammar and punctuation like
You know what you know, but how do you know that? How do you know you know them? You remember them. Studies show we don't really remember what we remember remembering. We remember other things and construct a memory from those parts. "Studies". Look at me, just like other people.
I always mention the Precession of Simulacra, because I think it's a really good idea, I mean, obviously right? Why would I mention it otherwise? Unless it was a really bad idea, in which case I'd be mentioning it to talk about that, which would make it a good idea, because it would still serve as an example of what I want to complain about.
3rd order simulacra are the important ones. Hyperreal Baudie calls them.
This, quickly, is the idea that a copy of a thing replaces the actual thing. A falsehood that masks the absence of underlying truth.
Hold it together! I'm sure I can do this! Deep breaths!
I contend of course that all things are those things in the current era. Like inter-saccade text masking.
If your iPod was replaced by my Ipod in the night by stealth, and, additionally, I replaced your iPod's HDD with your HDD (that is, I take your ipod, but take out the drive, put it in to my ipod, return that ipod (now yours, but, once, mine) to you) then you'd never know right? Besides the stickers I put on mine and the lack of stereo on the earphones. I don't actually own an ipod, or, rather, I do, but I don't use it.
And then with the memory thing. Would you notice or would you begin to create false memories regarding what has changed. Like Hilary in Bosnia (topical! +2 points).
Or would it be neo-po-mo?
Follow along: Modernism was the idea of rejecting the old shit, for the new shit, which was based in objectivity and ideas that things are a way, and that that way is true, followed by pomo, the idea that subjectivity replaces objectivity, FUNCTIONALLY (I cap it because some folks seem to miss this "subtle" point), and then because we engage based on that, it becomes nearly objective. In that we all react as if it was so.
It's like 1984 shit you know?
For example WTC7 collapsed. It "looks like" a controlled demo. We've seen those on TV. If it looks like that, then it must be that, because that is known, so this becomes that, even if it's not true. Put another way, how many buildings with the design of WTC7 have you seen debris dropped on, fires on, and then collapse? Or, even, how many other buildings do you know of that are designed in the method of WTC7? I don't know of any. I think it was a pretty unique building. The circumstances of it's destruction, also unique. Because what else you got? A fire isn't a fire plus debris, and a fire would be addressed, where as the WTC1&2 shit was taking up the time and water that would have addressed the WTC7 issue in other scenarios. An earthquake isn't debris, even if it results in a fire. Of course they don't really have earthquakes in NYC, so maybe indeed an earthquake would produce a pancake. We'll never know of course, that's the point. We ain't going to build a new one and then drop shit on it and set fire to it, to see if it goes down like it did, and if we did, it wouldn't, because, despite "identical" construction it would not, in fact, be identical, so we'd get a different result. So then we have only after the fact "it must have been a controlled demo, because it looks like a demo" or "computer models which we've bent to explain what happened, because, well, we saw it happen so clearly that's what went down".
So, clearly WTC7 was a controlled demo. Never mind the impossibility of it actually being that. "What else could it be? I mean....just *look* at it!"
So what comes after that?
First we have to get rid of the idea inherent in the 3rd order stuff. As there is no underlying reality then it's not masking anything. It is what it is again. So it's back to objectivity.
stuffwhitepeoplelike is a hot viral meme. it's also nothing at all. stupid, frivolous. by whites for whites about whites. Which we know because it's white people saying that. it's also a dialog on race. and a book deal.
Rather than One Truth, which can be looked at, and acted upon, many ways, there are many truths, each of which is acted upon at the same time.
They used to be able to lie because we could not know.
Remember those AP pix from Iraq that featured doctored smoke trails? And doctored Red Cross vans?
If we didn't have Internets we would not know this was so. If we didn't have awesome digital computers we wouldn't have the doctored photos (which are digital themselves most likely, certainly by the time they are edited and distributed they are not really real photographs but instead simulacra of them, digital copies of the information values of the original photo (if indeed such a thing was ever really real)) so then....what does it mean?
There is no meaning. It just is.
Where is this going you are asking?
There is no going. Implies destination. Destination is not real. There is no this either.
You buy computer. It's yours. But it is the same as many others. But it's not, since yours does not work. But they replace that, with working part, but that part is not the same as prior part, so then is it still same computer and is it still the same as other peoples same computers?
Or is it just what it is? The idea of relationally linking backwards is the thing that has died. It's in the next apt over, but the stink has not permeated yet to the hallways, so we don't realize it.
This is the same idea. It's here, but we can't know it yet, so we don't know it. The cancer is tumor now, but you don't die until it's bigger, later.
Now we have itunes or rhapsody or whatever. No need for Napster. But there is still limewire and kazaa and torrents.
there is too much data, so our old abilities are no good here, they just don't work. But it's not that they just don't work, like we've gone blind or something, but they produce artifacts, but unlike the artifacts which apply to the term I'm using, which are things you can see are not right, these are the other kind, the kind, like mis-memories, which we don't know about. So how do you know you know what you know?
I read that study about saccades. I could even, if I wanted, go find it, and really read it. Because you know when I said I read about the study, I mean that I read something about the study, not the real study. Does the study even really exist? Let's assume so, and assume I find it, read it, and educate myself enough about what I read there to understand it, or, at least enough so that I think I understand it, but then....it just turns out to be wrong.
Like String Theory or Relativity or Newtonian motion.
I can't know all of that. We can't know all that we know. The average American (this is an in joke, I don't really mean average American) doesn't understand enough about the complex financial system to understand the subprime crisis. I've read many things about it now, across different sites, backgrounds, that stuff. And I don't know if any of that is true. Assertions that it is true *because* are the thing.
Napster was bad, sued to death, never alive. It's reborn now, Christ like Napster, new clothes, Barbie Napster, retro-nostalgia marketing. Itunes is good, makes billions, people are happy about a thing that takes billions of dollars away from them and they get tinny sound from tinny speakers in their ears.
Even people who know can't know all they know. Clemens did steroids, but, unknown to him, unknown to his trainer, it wasn't what they thought it was, it was something else. Maybe it wasn't even a steroid. Maybe it was....?
So we know, he knows, his trainer confirms, we are all wrong. How do you know what you know?
It's beyond the absence of an underlying truth and it's beyond an immaculate underlying True Truth. Those require post-facto justifiers. There is only the now now.
I do nothing, but I am productive. I do a lot, but not enough, I am not productive. Though I do more than nothing, because it is not enough, it is nothing.
Computers didn't used to work this way. Work didn't used to work this way. We do work to make others work, to make the computers work takes work, and the computers are then used to play Solitaire. Which is not work. Get back to work!
It's inexpressible! It is beyond human ability so I can't say it, I can only try to allude to it.
PostMo was a linguistic set of ideas. Language was flawed. Godel's theory. Language exists only inside of language and thus is based on things, flawed things, so it is flawed, and thus anything using it is flawed.
If you could find a way to make a font "whither" with sarcasm (and this is my idea, so give me some of your million dollars when you do it) you would make a million dollars. It would go from normal to italics, the whithering. Million dollar idea.
But we are beyond language now. That's what makes it post pomo. Soon we will start to record everything. carbon will create the next gen WORM drives and we'll never erase, only update the version history pointer. And then we record it all, all the time. Your glasses contain your screen contain your camera your mic, because it's your cellphone too.
Anywhere you go you are recording broadcasting. This is the neo-modernism. We'll do things differently, based on a objective reality. But the truth will die because truth is subjective, so when we moved to neo-objectivism there will be no more truth.
Is cheating bad? Cheating on your SO I mean. I know two couples that got together because of cheating. Married, one of them, the couples. So...that is good right? It depends.
Saw a video. Dude walks away from the cops. Dude turns. Cop shoots the fuck outta him. What?!
Dude is out of camera frame, pulls gun, cops see gun, shoots perp. Oh!
Even when you see it you don't see it.
Even when everything is known there is no truth, in fact, there is less truth, because there is more to argue over.
If WTC7 had had streaming digital cameras in it, we'd know it wasn't a controlled demo. But they footage would be faked. But the footage (footage? no, no more foots) would be on WORM drives, so it could be faked? But what if the cameras were compromised? So it was still a cover up for a controlled demo. Even tho it's obvious that it wasn't one at all.
The more we know the less we know. The more we know the less we can have mythic truths of absolute character. Jesus did fuck Mary M, and she was a whore, but she didn't make him pay, because...he was poor too. Was he still The Jesus?
Jesus didn't ever really exist. It was Joshua.
We try to construct the meaning, because meaning it truth. Planes crash in to building = Government cover up. That makes sense. Planes crash in to building = proof of inferiority of Muslim culture and the failure of their mode of civilization. We all know that planes crashed in to the buildings. We saw it. Over and over we saw it. Real people saw it. News cameras. TVs. But we don't know what happened, what the truth was. The more we know, the less we know we know.
There's that old joke about a generalist knows less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything. This is that.
The corollary is the same. The specialist knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing. This is also possible.
Because the more you know about a thing the less it matters. To other people.
Truth is a form of meaning. Meaning only exists when people are around to put it on things.
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around....it doesn't mean anything. But if there is a person there....then it might a sign. An omen. A life changing event (particularly if it lands on you). It might be something you think about a lot and it might inform your life for years as you think back to it (I mean, really, have you ever seen a tree fall in a forest when nobody was around and there was no "reason" for it (clearly there was a reason, or would be, because...it happened.)?) It might become a story you tell people, whenever somebody says "if a tree falls in a..." and you'd interrupt them and say "i saw that once".
A moon runs in to a planet, no life on the planet. Doesn't mean anything. Our moon runs in to our planet? That's some seriously heavy shit man. Means everything in the whole world.
stuffwhitepeoplelike is talked about in news (not really news, but we call them news) articles and we say it's like this or like that, that it's indicative of trends, that it's indictive of trends, that it's new and it's not like it was before. but it's not. it's what we say it is. now.
The manufacture of meaning from old signs that are now meaningless means nothing. Unless it means something to you.
Many things don't actually mean anything. Even to us. We read in to them (read? really? no, not really)things, we put things on them, but many of them slide right by. I spilled some coffee from my cup this morning, on to my pants, didn't mean anything.
So not everything means something, but we make the meanings, and those meanings are what we regard as truths. But those truths are made of things we've made. Made meaningful.
Sure, sure buddy, you split an atom and there's a big BOOM! But...what does that mean? Yes, yes, fine! It's "true", it's "real", but....what does it MEAN?
Meaning is now fluid. Meaning is always reconfiguring.
Retro means what we say it means. There is no separation of the idea and the fact. There is no accuracy or perception of illusion because there is no illusion. And accuracy exists in the moment.
Anyway. More later. My head is cleared now.
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