within this fathom long body is the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world and the path leading to the cessation of the world

so lately i have began to feel like there is no reality outside of my own brain. this is an age-old philosophy but recently, it has felt very real to me. i half expect to fall through the floors or for some insane apparition to appear from nothing. i have had acute realizations of the passage of time and at times it is very frightening to not be able to live within a single moment.

sometimes i wonder how people living in modern society can even cope with this sensation. when you are not faced with the importance of your immediate survival on a daily basis, you are left to contemplate things like this. i know not everyone does this kind of thing but i'm sure it comes up more and more as people get more materially comfortable.

the idea that nothing exists outside of my brain but everything really is my brain or a construct of it really raises the issue of masochism. yikes.

i think there is a reemergence of solipsism lately. phenomenon like "the secret" kind of taps into the "you are the master of your own reality" mentality. i've always scoffed at this sort of spectacle.. for a while my stepmom watched a DVD copy of "the secret" every.. single.. night. it made me kind of sad.. mostly because it was kind of materialistic.. but now that i think about it, it does kind of fall in line with a lot of philosophic principles that i've been reading about lately.

is everything a construct of my brain or is everything, including my brain, part of a greater larger collective consciousness? i think both statements could be true.

i know this entry is all over the place.. i guess i've just been digesting a lot of these thoughts lately. . i'm not really sure what i'm trying to communicate exactly but just wanted to get the general vibe of my thought processes out.

STRESS

modern stress is a haunting phenomenon. it's ethereal.. unreal.. intangible.. but it creeps over your muscles and internal organs and before you know it, you are seized in its otherwordly clutches.

back when humans were a slave strictly to basic biological survival, stress was something concrete.. a predator chasing them across a prarie. now - stress is comprised of invisible villains: deadlines, debt, the economy. none of these things seem very real.. perhaps that is why human beings have such problems coping with modern stress.. the stressors are self contrived.. self imposed by the design of our way of life.. is this what we secretly desire?

even with all the advances of modern technology, will man still invent imaginary antagonists to complicate our lives because we cannot be without stress?

what would happen to civilization if stress was substantially decreased or eliminated? would the human race implode?

future it's a time to think

millions of years later, here i am. i really am going to try and MAINTAIN. promise!

ginny has proposed that we start more of an anonymous "female perspective" type blog. i have no qualms with this and think it could be kind of interesting. i wonder how many half-started blogs there are on the internets. many many. will they be studied some day as cultural artifacts? how will our digital remnants be preserved? i know a blu-ray disc lasts about 40 years.. back ups upon back ups would be required to allow this data to survive eons. i had a daydream thought the other day of sorting through a closet 20 years from now and finding an old external hard-drive and wanting to show the old pictures, songs, files to my children. would the data be corrupt?

how are we preserving this important era? is the library of congress backing up and re-backing up the primordial internet soup? i've seen some archived websites from the early 90's.. animated GIFs, etc. it's fascinating. the older i grow, the more i see the humanity in everything. or rather the imperfection. everything seems so fragile. the websites of huge multinational corporations from the 90's are so cute. i just did a search on archive.org to try and find some examples and i got an error (not a good sign).

i had an oasis fan site in the 90's.. it was extremely basic.. but i taught myself HTML and wrote the whole thing out in notepad. i was really proud of it, as cheesy as it was. it had some union jack animated gifs, a champagne supernova MIDI playing in the background and a blinking night sky background. i had a lyrics page and a photo page. i really wish i had archived that site or at least taken some screenshots. it's lost forever.

i also had a "internet diary" before blogs came about. again, it was very basic.. but my friends read it and commented in my guest book. i remember i took pictures with my webcam and uploaded it to the site.. all before myspace, before friendster, before makeoutclub automated the process. this also, is totally gone.

i'm not trying to brag here that i was so advanced when i was 13-15 years old.. i'm just sad that i'm not able to look back. that i can't archive these feeble attempts and share them with future generations. are people going to be interested in the first attempts at websites? i think so. it may be a small, hyper nerdy group.. but i'd like to think that this is an extremely important time. it's a crux and we are the first of a generation to have our lives intimately entwined with online space. it's important to remember all that we can.

circle survive

creation could be tagged as the ultimate goal in any human's life. many spend their whole lives with the dream of creation, whether the desired result is another human life, a work of art, or meaningful relationships with other sentient beings. in the future - what sort of objects will be created? physicality is something that is drenched in antiquity - the creation of virtual environments, skins for your own skin, and ethereal sonic waves all gently hugging your neurons will be the crowning achievement of tomorrow's creator.

how do you create something truly beautiful? whether the creation is a human being or a novel, attention to details and continually reassessing your method is a good start. communal creation is the best way to achieve the most from this process. the internet is already formed around this methodology.. who knows what could be possible when we see the true potential of the power of reassessment and a continual rebirth of ideas.

virtual reality will allow us the ultimate creation.. like in mormonism, we will become gods of a world.. (unless you happen to be black) isn't that already the intent of games like spore? what will 20 years and 20 million collaborators create? just beauty or a solution to the universe's lovely mysteries?

i want to find out.

only one

last night i read this article.

i highly suggest you read it. a lot of things rang true - and i couldn't help but imagine a future 20 years from now in which all of these modern social phenomena were amplified far beyond their current levels. i will be totally honest here - my life is described fairly accurately in the article. i do not have many close friends anymore.. i never had a ton but i certainly have less today than i did 5 years ago. i always chalked that up to growing up, getting a full time job and moving around quite a bit. now i wonder if it is because the internet has allowed me to have a watered down social experience at my fingertips - without all of the annoyances and the threat of rejection.

it is not only the availability of the internet as a social replacement that has effected our human networks - the media and the government's exploitation of fear, urban centers and subsequent immense populations of people, and lack of a national identity have all played their part.

little is being done to reverse this trend - and americans now have less close friends than ever before. are we slowly drifting towards a future filled with hundreds of acquaintances - but no close confidants? will we even need these types of intimate relationships in a future in which you will be a speck in an ocean of interconnected minds?

i also find myself more and more easily annoyed by people. in my opinion, this is a dynamic phenomenon in which people disregard those around them (due to the sheer number of other human beings in their community) and in which people have the option of tuning out these "others" through the internet, television, etc and are therefore less tolerant when going out into public. the bottom line is that our brain simply cannot handle the amount of people that we encounter on a day to day basis.. and in order to combat this we view the "others" more as objects than people.

i don't know how to fix this.. i don't want to be so annoyed by people but the bottom line is that billions of people out there barely view me as a person.. so they are not going to treat me all that well and they WILL annoy me. and i will annoy them too. i can continue to try and escape this by retreating into technology and forming vapid online "relationships" as a replacement or i can .. do what exactly? move to a small town with no more than 150 people so that my brain does not a'splode?

[on a side note: i also think that people who have an unhealthy obsession with celebrity gossip are also doing the same thing in terms of retreating from society into these pseudo relationships.]

this is an old problem.. and really is nothing new. what is new is our methods of escaping this dilemma that has been plaguing man since the fertile crescent. 15 years ago you had to go to Blockbuster to rent a movie.. now we have Netflix. 15 years ago you had to go to the grocery store to buy some mik.. now we have Fresh Direct (well in NYC). Commerce has been transplanted onto your laptop and let's face it - we are required to leave our apartments less and less. Entertainment, social interaction, material goods can all be obtained without leaving your home - and why should you want to leave when you are bound to be annoyed by someone out there?

so cute i want to die

so far wrong

I mistakenly referenced a book, “Robot Love,” in a few entries back. I was confused on several levels. First of all I was kind of thinking of the book Geek Love which is a totally different animal. The book I tried to refer to is called Love + Sex with Robots, which I picked up at Book People on Saturday. I am a few pages in and I’m already captivated. I can’t wait to claim a robot lover for my own. His name will be Theodore.

In other interesting news, I stumbled upon this website which sells vintage patterns. They have an entire section dedicated to jumpsuits and jumpers. If I had sewing skills I would totally create some of these.. but I am not that talented. Also, Josh spoke with the manager of the American Apparel store on the Drag and suggested that they start carrying jumpsuits. Thanks for passing along the good word Josh.

Okay – now lets get on to the good stuff. Politics and the future.. What is the destiny of democracy in our new technocentric society? Campaign viral videos, message boards, and chat rooms have been around for a while now, but the current primaries are even more entrenched in the interwebs. The YouTube debate (as maligned as it was) is a key example of the changing face of the political process in the face of emerging technologies. Candidates are supported through Facebook groups and channels on YouTube. Campaigns are created and destroyed through grassroots internet activities (ie Ron Paul).

The internet is arguably one of the most free and truly democratic “places” on earth. MSM is faltering – (See here and here). The diverse and unfiltered source of campaign coverage that the internet issues is truly exciting – and it offers a better chance for a truly informed electorate than the MSM which is riddled with corporate influences and slanted coverage (see here). I think technology and election coverage is an exciting thing. Of course we are not talking about eVoting or any Diebold debacles – yet – just the free flow of information from blogs and social news websites to citizens – which is so critical now.

"Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government;... whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights." -Thomas Jefferson

never in our dreams

leela: didn't you have ads in the twentieth century?
fry: well, sure, but not in our dreams. only on TV and radio... and in magazines... and movies, and at ballgames, and on buses, and milk cartons, and t-shirts, and bananas, and written in the sky. but not in dreams, no sirree.

marketing and advertising, along with services, are the preoccupation of our current economy. the public, inundated with messages in every space of their life, tunes out to a degree and so there is substantial pressure to find the latest, most innovative way to reach people.

currently, there is a fair amount of backlash against the preponderance of ads in our world. with services such as firefox's adblockplus, obnoxious internet advertising is no longer a problem for many. tivo, dvr and apple tv have effectively reduced or eliminated television commercials. advertising agencies are scrambling to figure out how to overcome these new obstacles and are turning to more direct methods.

there is another path though that is far more disturbing than a website portal targeted to your specific tastes or a telemarketer calling or emailing you to check on your supply of charmin, lucky charms, etc. imagine a world where marketing messages are transmitted directly to your brain. with the rapid advancement of biotechnology, this is not a huge stretch. another disturbing element is the continual pandering of our government to big business at the expense of our personal privacy. just today, i read this article which describes legislation recently passed in the senate to ensure telecom retroactive immunity from the domestic wiretapping debacle.

if we continue on this current path, we are approaching an obnoxious if not dangerous future. i am physically repulsed by the nexus of biotechnology and advertising. we have already seen monstrosities such as this. what is next?

fantastic voyage

this picture is seriously brilliant (from www.ironicsans.com). thanks for the link cam. i love carl sagan's sweet, flossy poetry about the universe:

"We embarked on our cosmic voyage with a question first framed in the childhood of our species and in each generation asked anew with undiminished wonder: What are the stars? Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars."

indeed, mr sagan. indeed.

deviations

i really don't have anything future-centric to relate currently, but i wanted to share some bands that i have been interested in lately. well lately as in tonight. some of these bands might sound like music a robot would compose (non-folk-obsessed variety), so i guess it kind of counts.

kraftwerk - this weekend at josh's i watched this kraftwerk live dvd. it was so enthralling. it really is futuremusic. and it's german which makes it cooler - and all the guys look like really severe, grim bill murrays.

chairlift - i have listened to the song "evident utensil" eight times tonight. it's all marimba, crispy pop and clearly influenced by the knife.

cassettes won't listen - i really don't know anything about this band but they have a free EP on their website and it's pretty great, bizarre synth pop. the song "f*** and run" is brilliant. i guess they have a new album coming out in march too. i will definitely check it out.

john vanderslice - i have heard this guys name thrown around for years and have even heard some of his songs in passing, but just never sat down and really listened. it's some nice, mellow couch-sitting tunes.

so that's all i've got for now. my electric viola is finally up and running. it sounds pretty good now that i put some nice strings on it.. next step is getting some sort of rig to plug it into my computer.. then i will let the robots take over. look forward to some interesting sounds to come.