played it today:
Its a straight improvisation I warmed up with a short blues below.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Friday, August 26, 2011
Bitcoin fear and Gold, trade in a post central bank world
As we continue to watch the worlds financial system implode, everyone is running their wealth back to gold. The good old fashioned way of storing your value.
Here is a good summary of things with gold, so i dont have to say any more on the subject. And this one is even better, but long.
Those who agree that the financial Ponzi scheme we use for commerce is ending, can know we are headed for a world where everyone who owns any value is sitting with these piles of gold or controls commodities.
And this is just too easy:
Here is a good summary of things with gold, so i dont have to say any more on the subject. And this one is even better, but long.
Those who agree that the financial Ponzi scheme we use for commerce is ending, can know we are headed for a world where everyone who owns any value is sitting with these piles of gold or controls commodities.
Just like the good old days.
But as we are not in the good old days any more, we have a need to trade things globally, Gold just wont work for that, it is 'physical'.
So if you dont trust a bank or a FIAT currency to deal with your gold what will you do when you want to pay someone across the world for something ?
In days of yore, one would go to a bank and get a note for the gold you had in storage with them, then you could exchange that note with other banks across the ocean, this worked as the banks colluded to make this system work globally.
But as we are not in the good old days any more, we have a need to trade things globally, Gold just wont work for that, it is 'physical'.
So if you dont trust a bank or a FIAT currency to deal with your gold what will you do when you want to pay someone across the world for something ?
In days of yore, one would go to a bank and get a note for the gold you had in storage with them, then you could exchange that note with other banks across the ocean, this worked as the banks colluded to make this system work globally.
It is massively in the interest of banking that everyone store their gold in their vaults, then banks could take continuously more of all wealth as a tax on all transactions through interest and fees. This forms the basis of world trade, and makes banking is the most profitable business of them all.
Luckily for us, the banks have abused their power in the infrastructure provision role and functionally have been superseded by a technology that makes them irrelevant. (who could blame them, that sort of power corrupts anyone but the most enlightened)
This is a good article where someone suggests people build there own economy from the ground up. But he misses to point out that the some core required systems are already here.
The Bitcoin technology has clearly proven that you dont need a third party intermediary to perform a transfer of value. The ramifications of this fact seem to offer a shock to our present world, the reality is not yet sinking in because of some fear of change and attachment/investment in the present system.
As this is the first time in human history this has been possible, the concept offers something so new and astounding it has people acting very strange around it.
Bitcoin today functions as a divisive issue, people either love it or hate and deride it. In fact most of the press I see about Bitcoin seems to be aiming to find an angle to slam it, sadly side-lining any intelligent debate about what it really represents for humanity.
Luckily for us, the banks have abused their power in the infrastructure provision role and functionally have been superseded by a technology that makes them irrelevant. (who could blame them, that sort of power corrupts anyone but the most enlightened)
This is a good article where someone suggests people build there own economy from the ground up. But he misses to point out that the some core required systems are already here.
The Bitcoin technology has clearly proven that you dont need a third party intermediary to perform a transfer of value. The ramifications of this fact seem to offer a shock to our present world, the reality is not yet sinking in because of some fear of change and attachment/investment in the present system.
As this is the first time in human history this has been possible, the concept offers something so new and astounding it has people acting very strange around it.
Bitcoin today functions as a divisive issue, people either love it or hate and deride it. In fact most of the press I see about Bitcoin seems to be aiming to find an angle to slam it, sadly side-lining any intelligent debate about what it really represents for humanity.
I think one who has any issue with bitcoin is simply one with a high level of investment in the old. The harder they come, the harder they fall or so they say. Why else would you have any emotional investment in Bitcoin being some bad thing (There are plenty worse things in the world to fuss about than yes another system of virtual cash)
Well its just a technology, bitcoin is simply a messenger, a bearer of news of what is possible. Dont shoot the messenger, the news is simply that you have more freedom than you thought, you can trade and a 3rd party is not required, no bank, no legal system, no government. You only need to figure out whether to trust the person you are dealing with, no one else needs to be in the chain and this is radical. (you also actually need to know about how your computer works so you can keep it secure, but the concept of 'personal' data and security is another whole fun subject)
So you don't need daddy any more. Ok I know there is some of that old Stockholm Syndrome kicking in, scared to be free of slave masters, but I like freedom.
So here is how we can trade in the future as the financial system gets even more ropey or collapses. (china is having a good go at replacing the dollar as the reserve currency, so alternatively we may just move over to them being the bankers of the world)
Say you have some gold or silver and you want to do a trade with someone, as long as they have a local way to exchange btc to gold, you agree a trade price in ounces of gold. Then using the current exchange rate of gold to bitcoin, make a bitcoin transfer and you are done. Local trading systems are already being set-up to make this easier.
Well its just a technology, bitcoin is simply a messenger, a bearer of news of what is possible. Dont shoot the messenger, the news is simply that you have more freedom than you thought, you can trade and a 3rd party is not required, no bank, no legal system, no government. You only need to figure out whether to trust the person you are dealing with, no one else needs to be in the chain and this is radical. (you also actually need to know about how your computer works so you can keep it secure, but the concept of 'personal' data and security is another whole fun subject)
So you don't need daddy any more. Ok I know there is some of that old Stockholm Syndrome kicking in, scared to be free of slave masters, but I like freedom.
So here is how we can trade in the future as the financial system gets even more ropey or collapses. (china is having a good go at replacing the dollar as the reserve currency, so alternatively we may just move over to them being the bankers of the world)
Say you have some gold or silver and you want to do a trade with someone, as long as they have a local way to exchange btc to gold, you agree a trade price in ounces of gold. Then using the current exchange rate of gold to bitcoin, make a bitcoin transfer and you are done. Local trading systems are already being set-up to make this easier.
Its fun to watch this story and see how close to reality it pans out. Over the coming years, you will be able to correlate the value bitcoins simply to the number of people who agree with the sentiment of this post. *If true free trade is what people as a whole want*, as I covered in Bitcoin subject and the Infostate, precious metals are simply a transition, but an important stabilising one, if the bitcoin network can stay up, it will only be a matter of transition time for precious metals to be replaced by bitcoin or its successor technology.
(lcovered in other posts on the global free democracy and the infostate model, i see successor digital currencies backed by social networks of skills unions emerging at some point)
This De Gaulle vid is fun, showing how even when there was a gold standard things were on the way to messed up.
(lcovered in other posts on the global free democracy and the infostate model, i see successor digital currencies backed by social networks of skills unions emerging at some point)
This De Gaulle vid is fun, showing how even when there was a gold standard things were on the way to messed up.
And this is just too easy:
Thursday, August 25, 2011
more chickens
pink chickens are in the air, pink chickens are in the air
we all stare
and why do we care
because they are in the air, just flying there
Saturday, May 28, 2011
The Infostate And The Colour Of Money
In my post last year The State Is Dead, Roll On the Global Free Democracy I laid out a view of how I saw the end of the state and how states of the future are really simply social networks, each with their own 'local currency' or digital currency (dc).
I'll call these future 'Information States' infostates. The total value any infostate is instantly measurable as the value of its total dc in circulation.
In my other post The Media Continuum I also think about software based social networks as multi user online games.
Hence one way of thinking about infostates is as online games defined by a set of game rules or 'constitution' of interaction. The minimum constitution an open (one anyone can join and augment) infostate could have, would be defined simply by the operational protocol of the dc in use.
I realised one of these infostates already exists in the form of the bitcoin community itself. What is particularly exciting to me is that as i had thought, a state defined and operated in this way is highly evolutionary i.e. it is setup as a community or game system that encourages development and adaptation in a massive way, it makes traditional states look retarded in comparison.
Traditional states get their value in a combination of three basic ways:
1. Steal it from others through the use of warfare (or financial warfare eg international banking) Kleptocratic State
2. Sell natural resources found within their borders, that others value. Self Destructive State (as it is not replenish able, its gone for ever)
3. Create new value through 'entrepreneurship'. ie come up with something useful that others value. Creative State
1 and 2 are the stone age ways to go about things. 3. is where its at for any state to build a lasting future on. Though traditionally the problem with 3 is that when any state gets ahead with it, the other stone age states use some formulation of 1. to take it. And so goes the argument for armies.
So the bitcoin infostate has got 3. in spades, the community itself is setup on a more enlightened evolutionary game system by virtue of the constitution passed on to the community through the consensual use of the bitcoin system of value trade. (All i mean by evolutionary is a game system that sponsors and sets the stage for creation of functional new value. Or in more traditional speak encourages entrepreneurial spirit.)
It is exciting to watch the bitcoin community dynamically work, people who in effect, like the constitution (the game rules) just get on board (join the state) and start to put their skills to into it and get on and build cool things. All this then builds the value of the infostate as reflected in the dc value. I watched the bitcoin economy exchange value to dollars go from $1 Million to over $50 Million in a short time.
Enlightened rules bring enlightened players. Its a good model for a an infostate that wants to create.
The system is hot because it runs a virtuous cycle of positive creativity feedback, or what i like to call a positive equilibrium evolutionary system model. (I use 'positive equilibrium thermodynamics' as an understanding basis what life is, and life without evolution is mostly dead, or will be soon ;)
I like bitcoin because it reflects an enlightened mind-set around interaction within a social group of people. It represents a great opportunity for more enlightened/evolved society.
The real question is weather society is ready for the freedom offered by it.
Money is a rule system for value exchange. In more game design language, it is the fundamental interaction model for the game. In society, the money system is a reflection of how people treat each other at a core level (interaction model) and hence how they see themselves (you can only ever really reference an external entity against yourself, hence what you do to others you do to your internal self image/self.)
In short the financial system is the primary reflection of a society interaction model. As money is exchanged for human time or life force, analysis of the operational systems around money of any society will tell you how primitive the state is and show you where the social pathologies lie. The systems that govern money current or 'currency' are literally the core energy systems that breath the life of that society.
People like to say gold is real money. Why ?
Gold has no serious industrial uses, its a good conductor but silver is even better. Gold has no real value in its use for anything other than as money. Unless you can exchange gold for something else, it will do nothing for you at all (other than cosmetic value).
So gold works as money because, a) it is scarce (there is not much of it about and you cant make it. You have to spend time finding it and digging it up b) It is distinctive. Its easy to know what it is and it can be easily identified for what it is. c) it does not corrode easily and deteriorate
Gold is simply an accounting system, price is set by demand for its use as a system of storing and exchanging value. Gold is the accounting system from the stone age that we use on Earth.
OK so gold is the real money, on top of gold we have created these things called FIAT money systems that are basically tools for how you steal assets (like gold and physical resources) en mass. Its why I like the term 'willing kleptocracy' for main stream society. FIAT money and warfare are pretty synonymous but that's another article. (War in various forms is what you would expect of a kleptocracy as a kleptocratic state would be value based on my 1. option. War is the way of the stone age state, especially one that has exhausted option 2. of self destruction.)
All the accounting features of gold are matched by bitcoins, (its scarce, hard to create out of thin air, easy to know what it is). Added to that you can send bitcoins to anyone over a wire and you can manage them easily in ways that you cant do with gold, eg break them into smaller pieces and not need to get out some scales to agree with someone else how much you have.
As an accounting system bitcoin is way better than gold. If gold is real money bitcoin is better real money. And if gold has value simply because of its technical features as an accounting system then obviously bitcoin will simply replace gold as a store of value over time. Why keep gold around with its weight and storage cost if you can have a useful alternative. The only value remaining for gold would be its cosmetic and small scale industrial value.
But bitcoin has value based on two things. 1. As the digital currency of a new infostate (reflects the core value of that state in relation to everything else). 2. As a real money system (accounting system that is better than gold that anyone can start using to store their value in). Over time you would expect the value of the bitcoin economy to tend to at least the value of all the gold.
So with the new ship infostate bitcoin floating on Earth we are left with the ancient issue of stone age war. What to do when you have all this good stuff and someone else doesn't like that.
Bitcoin has a defensive wall of the combined crypto computing power of all bitcoin miners, it is going to be tested. If someone can build a more powerful computer than the joint efforts of all bitcoin miners they can affect and mess with bitcoins transaction trail. So there is an arms race in this cyber world but its a race of compute power.
I'll call these future 'Information States' infostates. The total value any infostate is instantly measurable as the value of its total dc in circulation.
In my other post The Media Continuum I also think about software based social networks as multi user online games.
Hence one way of thinking about infostates is as online games defined by a set of game rules or 'constitution' of interaction. The minimum constitution an open (one anyone can join and augment) infostate could have, would be defined simply by the operational protocol of the dc in use.
I realised one of these infostates already exists in the form of the bitcoin community itself. What is particularly exciting to me is that as i had thought, a state defined and operated in this way is highly evolutionary i.e. it is setup as a community or game system that encourages development and adaptation in a massive way, it makes traditional states look retarded in comparison.
Traditional states get their value in a combination of three basic ways:
1. Steal it from others through the use of warfare (or financial warfare eg international banking) Kleptocratic State
2. Sell natural resources found within their borders, that others value. Self Destructive State (as it is not replenish able, its gone for ever)
3. Create new value through 'entrepreneurship'. ie come up with something useful that others value. Creative State
1 and 2 are the stone age ways to go about things. 3. is where its at for any state to build a lasting future on. Though traditionally the problem with 3 is that when any state gets ahead with it, the other stone age states use some formulation of 1. to take it. And so goes the argument for armies.
So the bitcoin infostate has got 3. in spades, the community itself is setup on a more enlightened evolutionary game system by virtue of the constitution passed on to the community through the consensual use of the bitcoin system of value trade. (All i mean by evolutionary is a game system that sponsors and sets the stage for creation of functional new value. Or in more traditional speak encourages entrepreneurial spirit.)
It is exciting to watch the bitcoin community dynamically work, people who in effect, like the constitution (the game rules) just get on board (join the state) and start to put their skills to into it and get on and build cool things. All this then builds the value of the infostate as reflected in the dc value. I watched the bitcoin economy exchange value to dollars go from $1 Million to over $50 Million in a short time.
Enlightened rules bring enlightened players. Its a good model for a an infostate that wants to create.
The system is hot because it runs a virtuous cycle of positive creativity feedback, or what i like to call a positive equilibrium evolutionary system model. (I use 'positive equilibrium thermodynamics' as an understanding basis what life is, and life without evolution is mostly dead, or will be soon ;)
I like bitcoin because it reflects an enlightened mind-set around interaction within a social group of people. It represents a great opportunity for more enlightened/evolved society.
The real question is weather society is ready for the freedom offered by it.
So what is money ?
Money is a rule system for value exchange. In more game design language, it is the fundamental interaction model for the game. In society, the money system is a reflection of how people treat each other at a core level (interaction model) and hence how they see themselves (you can only ever really reference an external entity against yourself, hence what you do to others you do to your internal self image/self.)
In short the financial system is the primary reflection of a society interaction model. As money is exchanged for human time or life force, analysis of the operational systems around money of any society will tell you how primitive the state is and show you where the social pathologies lie. The systems that govern money current or 'currency' are literally the core energy systems that breath the life of that society.
People like to say gold is real money. Why ?
Gold has no serious industrial uses, its a good conductor but silver is even better. Gold has no real value in its use for anything other than as money. Unless you can exchange gold for something else, it will do nothing for you at all (other than cosmetic value).
So gold works as money because, a) it is scarce (there is not much of it about and you cant make it. You have to spend time finding it and digging it up b) It is distinctive. Its easy to know what it is and it can be easily identified for what it is. c) it does not corrode easily and deteriorate
Gold is simply an accounting system, price is set by demand for its use as a system of storing and exchanging value. Gold is the accounting system from the stone age that we use on Earth.
OK so gold is the real money, on top of gold we have created these things called FIAT money systems that are basically tools for how you steal assets (like gold and physical resources) en mass. Its why I like the term 'willing kleptocracy' for main stream society. FIAT money and warfare are pretty synonymous but that's another article. (War in various forms is what you would expect of a kleptocracy as a kleptocratic state would be value based on my 1. option. War is the way of the stone age state, especially one that has exhausted option 2. of self destruction.)
All the accounting features of gold are matched by bitcoins, (its scarce, hard to create out of thin air, easy to know what it is). Added to that you can send bitcoins to anyone over a wire and you can manage them easily in ways that you cant do with gold, eg break them into smaller pieces and not need to get out some scales to agree with someone else how much you have.
As an accounting system bitcoin is way better than gold. If gold is real money bitcoin is better real money. And if gold has value simply because of its technical features as an accounting system then obviously bitcoin will simply replace gold as a store of value over time. Why keep gold around with its weight and storage cost if you can have a useful alternative. The only value remaining for gold would be its cosmetic and small scale industrial value.
But bitcoin has value based on two things. 1. As the digital currency of a new infostate (reflects the core value of that state in relation to everything else). 2. As a real money system (accounting system that is better than gold that anyone can start using to store their value in). Over time you would expect the value of the bitcoin economy to tend to at least the value of all the gold.
So with the new ship infostate bitcoin floating on Earth we are left with the ancient issue of stone age war. What to do when you have all this good stuff and someone else doesn't like that.
Bitcoin has a defensive wall of the combined crypto computing power of all bitcoin miners, it is going to be tested. If someone can build a more powerful computer than the joint efforts of all bitcoin miners they can affect and mess with bitcoins transaction trail. So there is an arms race in this cyber world but its a race of compute power.
But the bitcoin network is already the worlds fastest crypto computer and growing. Its a pretty strong wall already but its going to need to be way stronger if bitcoin is going to last. The US spends trillions on war to help keep the dollar the worlds reserve currency. Bitcoin will become a threat to that game if it continues growing at its present rate.
If the wall stays up, war is a stone age thing. I prefer a defensive army that I can pay voluntarily. It is certainly better than traditional war.
I'm ok with with the concept of spending energy and CPU resources on bitcoin mining, you could call miners the defenders of the evolutionary infostate. They are the replacement for an army that traditionally would defend trade routes from robbers and other enemy countries wanting to plunder the trade.
Miners form the defensive wall around all trade in bitcoin with their CPU/GPU mining power. As bitcoin transaction fees are collected by miners who encode the transactions. A bitcoin transaction fee is a tip to the army of a new global republic.
If the wall stays up, war is a stone age thing. I prefer a defensive army that I can pay voluntarily. It is certainly better than traditional war.
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Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Sunday, May 08, 2011
Friday, January 28, 2011
Saturday, January 08, 2011
Reality Is About to Explode
I thought I would write a fun article about subjective reality, even though groups of us sort of agree on just enough to be thinking reality is 'objective'... its just a temporal agreement.
============
Up until very recently our view of reality was defined by others, so others got to say and define what we look at as 'real'. I think this could be about to explode into many pieces.
Today this 'reality' is presented to us via the main stream media (MSM).
The interesting thing about the MSMis that it is consistent (this not what you would expect from a true accurate but diverse information source), MSM provides a 'consensus' view that pretty much agrees with itself. So even if objective reality were real, a true communications media would and should not operate in consensus mode.
The MSM 'news' as a consensus presentation fits into a doctrine, it presents a painted picture of the reality we reside in. These days in the west that doctrine is built around the ideal of a liberal consumerist world. This doctrine has an invisible deity I like to call consumer God or Con God. As most of the major media organizations report to owners within the same financial establishment, the Con God mantra is based around constant GDP growth based on 'Keep borrowing, Keep buying, everything will be ok'.
It just so happens that this doctrine and its associated behavior pattern destroys the ecosystem we live in. It increases consumer reliance on centralized power to provide food and shelter as the ecosystem degrades. Look at the financial drivers of health-care to better understand this process closeup.
For a few thousand years we had the Judeao Christian 'One God' or JC God as the arbiter of consensus. The JC God media establishment was run by churches. If you challenged this you were taken out. Some did and it was nasty, but we managed to get as far as expanding our thought to realizing that the earth was round and it was not in the center of the universe.
Since the two great world wars we have been in a mythology transition from the JC God to Con God.
With the rise of the western system of democracy, the thinkers of the day working for the owning class of society realized that a system of managing these 'free thinking democratic populations' was required otherwise 'who knows what the plebs would vote for'.
(a more recent term for this used by Noam Chomsky is 'The engineering of consent')
The solution to this was designed in the form of the consumer society, to make that work a dogma was devised to make the worker who delivered components into the machine a willing participant.
It was realized that both the media and educational establishments were required to be reformed to effectively support this new consensus dogma and both the funds and execution teams for this were put in place early in the 19th century. (to better understand how this was done, this is an enlightening interview with the man who was chosen by congress to explore a part of this process)
The religion of Con God worked, it was superior to JC god and JC God now takes a small back seat in the mainstream reality that people live within. (I wrote a post 'Why Consumerism wins' to play with why Con God works so well as superior viral myth to JC God).
Many today worship Con God. They operate as minions and components of the establishment that pays those that created and manage this system today, whilst the MSM plays the front man whose job it is to keep the myth intact and making sense.
It lynches on this thing 'consensus'.
One God, or monotheism is a powerful idea and I hope I can convey the impact it has on our present views, in respect to 'reality'.
One God is essentially the same idea as saying 'one world view' or 'reality is only this way', just said in different words. It is also the same concept as 'consensus'
The idea of consensus then links in with 'this is how things are' or 'our way is right'.
The concept of anything at all 'being right' stems from this.
When you have many many myths/religions existing at once or you would realize that reality can not be 'consensus' the concept of 'being right' itself dissolves, right and wrong are simply relative concepts. But live in a world where everyone agrees with you and you may drop back into the thinking of being 'right' when you see something that challenges you.
I hope its obvious that nothing can truly be right or wrong in the abstract, only relativism's like 'Is this the *right* way to the chemist?'. can be answered truly in that 'yes that is the right way to the chemist'.
Nothing else is right or wrong, its just there, it just exists. And because it exists it is. Of course you can try to pretend its wrong in the absolute sense, but the moment you do this, you have entered a delusional state about reality. This is very common, especially around things we disagree with or that disturb us.
When one is right, another has to be wrong and a new entity is created, the one who decides.
Traditionally the one who decides was the priest in the church. You could go and ask them and get their opinion. Today in the Con God system, this process operates via the MSM, supported by the State, which in turn is validated and enabled by the noble establishment we call Science.
Science is a product of our one god religions. Science and the scientific method itself could not exist with out the backdrop of one god.
How so ?
Our concept of Science relies on 'objective reality' to work, it is a fundamental requirement of the scientific method. Objective reality is the belief that everything 'out there' is consistent and the same for all beings that can experience it. Only then can an experiment reveal a result that can be tested and verified.
Science is built on consensus, that consensus can only form if there is already a consensus that objective reality is what forms the world we exist in.
Science has a pre supposition built in.
The scientific method (the way you take measurements and replicate these measurements to prove or disprove any given theory) could only emerge after a few thousand years of one god consensus being drilled into our collective brains. Only once there was enough bedrock of collective agreement on the nature of external reality (being the same for all under god) could something like Science take root.
If different parts of society believed in different realities then forget the scientific method, at least in terms of one based on an objective reality.
So contrary to what many believe, Science itself is another belief system. It has its own dogmatic requirements for it to hold. It just so happens that many years of religious indoctrination prepared society appropriately for a method of though like Science to work.
It is the inability of a person or scientist to see this obvious fact that makes science itself a dogma.
These ideas are all really the same style of mythology. I will call that mythology the 'dyadic myth' its based on duals (relations of twos) :
- One God: One God creates the world: I experience it
- Science: One Reality exists: the Observer measures it
- Objective Reality: One Reality exists: observers of Reality experience it
- Being Right: Reality exists: My explanation of reality is correct.
(In my early blog posts, i called this dyadic myth 'the great divide')
Once you understand how all these facets are really the same core dyadic mythology. You can move to the next step of understanding how this dyadic myth is inherently violent.
Within any dyadic world view, be it Science, Politics or Religion. Who gets to decide who is right ?
Often it is the more powerful, who is the 'right', then 'rightness' is inflicted upon another who doesn't agree...
The journey to the one God was a bloody and violent affair at every step, from its inception to where we are today. The bible charts some of the early days of the dyadic story in its gory detail, tribes had to be mashed together by bloodshed to force one god 'consensus' view upon them. It then took the military might of Rome to force this 'rightness' or what was becoming called 'righteousness' on the entire empire under Rome.
There is only one way out of dyadic violence and that is to understand and accept reality as it is. As I said earlier, the moment you try to make anything that exists wrong in anything other than a true relative sense, you have entered a delusional state.
Since much of politics and Science is presented in this way. You can now better understand these all as forms of collective delusion. They have little to do with anything that is real.
Instead the dyadic myth whether you call it 'us and them' or 'might is right' or 'I know and you don’t' is simply an effective way to impose ones will upon another.
Dyadic mythology, any facet of it, is a justification for violence.
Our present Con God religio, administered by the State via government, operates very much under a dyadic delusion.
Dyadic myths are inherently violent and our state is no different. One of the legal definitions of the State is 'The Monopoly On Violence'
This violence will always need a forum to play out in. Often this will take the from of wars, racism or more small scale family relational violence.
To see the delusion you just look it in the face. The religion of the state is thought of as if its some free choice, but there is no choice at all. Voting systems provide a unrealistic sense of freedom. There is no freedom, you can't say no to the state itself, whichever 'party act' is voted in and playing its game in government. If you don't pay taxes you get treated violently, and everyone involved will support this violence.
The claim we are a secular state (ie the state doesn’t care what religion you follow) is a lie. You are forced into state religion from birth and its illegal not to pay the religious donations in the form taxes. You can't in truth follow another mythology within the state, there is no secularism in this model. You can only follow religions that clearly are no threat to the State religio.
But State and dyadic dogmas aside, I want to get onto the matter at hand, namely the explosion of reality.
We have been living blind within a dyadic mythology for a long time now and the myth has been taken as real along with all its ramifications about there being one solid 'objective reality'.
As we are stretching and blinking in new sunlight, I want to touch on some ideas about what this could mean.
It all starts with meaninglessness, of the main stream media, and actually of everything else too.
We are hooked on a dyadic world view of a solid external reality. There is comfort in one right thing to believe in 'out there'. Consensus gives a very cosy sense of security. But this is an avoidance of our own inner fears. In order to maintain this feeling of security, any contrary view has to be looked at as a joke, a 'conspiracy theory'. Otherwise the solid and secure 'objective' 'one' reality msm doctrine explodes and takes the believer with it.
Well it is all exploding, and I think the only sane way to go is inward. Look at the violence inside and then it no longer needs to be projected via some dyadic myth onto another group, person or thing.
Reaching out into the mutiverse holding onto Con God will shatter you into fragments of other peoples ideas... Given enough time, at least you would find out you are not anyone else’s ideas.
Reality is a subjective experience, there is nothing 'out there'. You can decide what 'it' or anything means for you and it can work, because there is nothing out there except what you say is there.
"The only reality is that there is no reality".
I would say that anyone who 'tells' you 'its' something else is trying to have you.
So, am I ?
As the connectivity between individuals across the planet increases exponentially, the dyadic control structures fall away, drowned by other facets of reality that minify ancient centralized one god objectivity into the multi-verse.
A huge amount of psychic and physical energy is being released that normally would move to a violent projection onto the 'other' in the dyad.
Ride the explosion inwards, I wonder if I will meet you there one day.
============
Up until very recently our view of reality was defined by others, so others got to say and define what we look at as 'real'. I think this could be about to explode into many pieces.
Today this 'reality' is presented to us via the main stream media (MSM).
The interesting thing about the MSMis that it is consistent (this not what you would expect from a true accurate but diverse information source), MSM provides a 'consensus' view that pretty much agrees with itself. So even if objective reality were real, a true communications media would and should not operate in consensus mode.
The MSM 'news' as a consensus presentation fits into a doctrine, it presents a painted picture of the reality we reside in. These days in the west that doctrine is built around the ideal of a liberal consumerist world. This doctrine has an invisible deity I like to call consumer God or Con God. As most of the major media organizations report to owners within the same financial establishment, the Con God mantra is based around constant GDP growth based on 'Keep borrowing, Keep buying, everything will be ok'.
It just so happens that this doctrine and its associated behavior pattern destroys the ecosystem we live in. It increases consumer reliance on centralized power to provide food and shelter as the ecosystem degrades. Look at the financial drivers of health-care to better understand this process closeup.
Our Gods
Since the two great world wars we have been in a mythology transition from the JC God to Con God.
With the rise of the western system of democracy, the thinkers of the day working for the owning class of society realized that a system of managing these 'free thinking democratic populations' was required otherwise 'who knows what the plebs would vote for'.
(a more recent term for this used by Noam Chomsky is 'The engineering of consent')
The solution to this was designed in the form of the consumer society, to make that work a dogma was devised to make the worker who delivered components into the machine a willing participant.
It was realized that both the media and educational establishments were required to be reformed to effectively support this new consensus dogma and both the funds and execution teams for this were put in place early in the 19th century. (to better understand how this was done, this is an enlightening interview with the man who was chosen by congress to explore a part of this process)
The religion of Con God worked, it was superior to JC god and JC God now takes a small back seat in the mainstream reality that people live within. (I wrote a post 'Why Consumerism wins' to play with why Con God works so well as superior viral myth to JC God).
Many today worship Con God. They operate as minions and components of the establishment that pays those that created and manage this system today, whilst the MSM plays the front man whose job it is to keep the myth intact and making sense.
One God
A few thousand years of JC God administration did a great job of fixing the ideas of a one god world into our collective brains.It lynches on this thing 'consensus'.
One God, or monotheism is a powerful idea and I hope I can convey the impact it has on our present views, in respect to 'reality'.
One God is essentially the same idea as saying 'one world view' or 'reality is only this way', just said in different words. It is also the same concept as 'consensus'
The idea of consensus then links in with 'this is how things are' or 'our way is right'.
The concept of anything at all 'being right' stems from this.
When you have many many myths/religions existing at once or you would realize that reality can not be 'consensus' the concept of 'being right' itself dissolves, right and wrong are simply relative concepts. But live in a world where everyone agrees with you and you may drop back into the thinking of being 'right' when you see something that challenges you.
I hope its obvious that nothing can truly be right or wrong in the abstract, only relativism's like 'Is this the *right* way to the chemist?'. can be answered truly in that 'yes that is the right way to the chemist'.
Nothing else is right or wrong, its just there, it just exists. And because it exists it is. Of course you can try to pretend its wrong in the absolute sense, but the moment you do this, you have entered a delusional state about reality. This is very common, especially around things we disagree with or that disturb us.
When one is right, another has to be wrong and a new entity is created, the one who decides.
Traditionally the one who decides was the priest in the church. You could go and ask them and get their opinion. Today in the Con God system, this process operates via the MSM, supported by the State, which in turn is validated and enabled by the noble establishment we call Science.
Science, Objective Reality and One God
Science is a product of our one god religions. Science and the scientific method itself could not exist with out the backdrop of one god.
How so ?
Our concept of Science relies on 'objective reality' to work, it is a fundamental requirement of the scientific method. Objective reality is the belief that everything 'out there' is consistent and the same for all beings that can experience it. Only then can an experiment reveal a result that can be tested and verified.
Science is built on consensus, that consensus can only form if there is already a consensus that objective reality is what forms the world we exist in.
Science has a pre supposition built in.
The scientific method (the way you take measurements and replicate these measurements to prove or disprove any given theory) could only emerge after a few thousand years of one god consensus being drilled into our collective brains. Only once there was enough bedrock of collective agreement on the nature of external reality (being the same for all under god) could something like Science take root.
If different parts of society believed in different realities then forget the scientific method, at least in terms of one based on an objective reality.
So contrary to what many believe, Science itself is another belief system. It has its own dogmatic requirements for it to hold. It just so happens that many years of religious indoctrination prepared society appropriately for a method of though like Science to work.
It is the inability of a person or scientist to see this obvious fact that makes science itself a dogma.
The Dogma of Science
The dogmatic root of science is the belief in objective reality. We must stress the world 'belief' here as this is all that it is. It forms a religious view that is so deep that many have a hard time going there and challenging it in their minds. Just like the heresies against JC God, even the consideration that objective reality is a fantasy concept is a heresy to the dogmatic view in science.
In a very practical example this the issue of has been glaring scientists in the face for nearly 100 years and most are still too scared to call a spade a spade.
Quantum Mechanics (QM), well known as the most successful scientific theory ever, makes a complete mess of the notion of objective reality. Simply put, QM maps out reality as a statistical time function, Ie what happens at any point in space-time is a probability. There are a few options for theories to get scientists out of this mess. Simplifying the debate somewhat, one is called 'wave function collapse' the other is called 'many worlds'. Wave function collapse says that the world is made real when the observer looks at it, while many worlds says that every world that can be created will be created.
Neither of these really work to make our results of QM fit what we have pre programmed our minds for regarding the existence of an objective reality.
It is not my understanding of true science to try and come up with something that fits a pre determined idea, this is normally called massaging the data. The true scientist is one who challenges the old consensus and comes up with something that better describes what is being seen.
Right Wrong and The Dyadic Myth
So the concepts of One God, Science, Objective Reality and what I will call 'being right' are simply all different facets of the same thing.
These ideas are all really the same style of mythology. I will call that mythology the 'dyadic myth' its based on duals (relations of twos) :
- One God: One God creates the world: I experience it
- Science: One Reality exists: the Observer measures it
- Objective Reality: One Reality exists: observers of Reality experience it
- Being Right: Reality exists: My explanation of reality is correct.
(In my early blog posts, i called this dyadic myth 'the great divide')
The Dyadic Myth and Violence
Once you understand how all these facets are really the same core dyadic mythology. You can move to the next step of understanding how this dyadic myth is inherently violent.
Within any dyadic world view, be it Science, Politics or Religion. Who gets to decide who is right ?
Often it is the more powerful, who is the 'right', then 'rightness' is inflicted upon another who doesn't agree...
The journey to the one God was a bloody and violent affair at every step, from its inception to where we are today. The bible charts some of the early days of the dyadic story in its gory detail, tribes had to be mashed together by bloodshed to force one god 'consensus' view upon them. It then took the military might of Rome to force this 'rightness' or what was becoming called 'righteousness' on the entire empire under Rome.
There is only one way out of dyadic violence and that is to understand and accept reality as it is. As I said earlier, the moment you try to make anything that exists wrong in anything other than a true relative sense, you have entered a delusional state.
Since much of politics and Science is presented in this way. You can now better understand these all as forms of collective delusion. They have little to do with anything that is real.
Instead the dyadic myth whether you call it 'us and them' or 'might is right' or 'I know and you don’t' is simply an effective way to impose ones will upon another.
Dyadic mythology, any facet of it, is a justification for violence.
Where we are today
Dyadic myths are inherently violent and our state is no different. One of the legal definitions of the State is 'The Monopoly On Violence'
To see the delusion you just look it in the face. The religion of the state is thought of as if its some free choice, but there is no choice at all. Voting systems provide a unrealistic sense of freedom. There is no freedom, you can't say no to the state itself, whichever 'party act' is voted in and playing its game in government. If you don't pay taxes you get treated violently, and everyone involved will support this violence.
The claim we are a secular state (ie the state doesn’t care what religion you follow) is a lie. You are forced into state religion from birth and its illegal not to pay the religious donations in the form taxes. You can't in truth follow another mythology within the state, there is no secularism in this model. You can only follow religions that clearly are no threat to the State religio.
Reality Explodes
But State and dyadic dogmas aside, I want to get onto the matter at hand, namely the explosion of reality.
We have been living blind within a dyadic mythology for a long time now and the myth has been taken as real along with all its ramifications about there being one solid 'objective reality'.
As we are stretching and blinking in new sunlight, I want to touch on some ideas about what this could mean.
It all starts with meaninglessness, of the main stream media, and actually of everything else too.
- As the one reality Con God and MSM doctrine crumble, the MSM will dissolve and be relegated to its rightful place within the the media multi verse of Internet information (see media continuum article).
- The lines of everything will continue to get more and more blurred and I seriously expect some sort of psychological shock to hit us all. The truth of no objective reality and that of multiversal reality sinking home could be difficult for some to integrate themselves with.
- Those that still trust the MSM and think it somehow 'forms the world' will be the most challenged. What happens when this MSM view is repeatedly proven false ? This is well on the way. Those that have engaged and found multiple info sources on the net to discover their Mistrust the MSM are safe (luckily Mistrust in the MSM is now at record high). Those that do still trust the MSM will become more and more divorced from reality, at the same time they will still need to project the violence of their dyadic views somewhere. There will be a lot of desperate attempts to blame other groups and much devision for these people.
We are hooked on a dyadic world view of a solid external reality. There is comfort in one right thing to believe in 'out there'. Consensus gives a very cosy sense of security. But this is an avoidance of our own inner fears. In order to maintain this feeling of security, any contrary view has to be looked at as a joke, a 'conspiracy theory'. Otherwise the solid and secure 'objective' 'one' reality msm doctrine explodes and takes the believer with it.
Well it is all exploding, and I think the only sane way to go is inward. Look at the violence inside and then it no longer needs to be projected via some dyadic myth onto another group, person or thing.
Reaching out into the mutiverse holding onto Con God will shatter you into fragments of other peoples ideas... Given enough time, at least you would find out you are not anyone else’s ideas.
Reality is a subjective experience, there is nothing 'out there'. You can decide what 'it' or anything means for you and it can work, because there is nothing out there except what you say is there.
"The only reality is that there is no reality".
So, am I ?
As the connectivity between individuals across the planet increases exponentially, the dyadic control structures fall away, drowned by other facets of reality that minify ancient centralized one god objectivity into the multi-verse.
A huge amount of psychic and physical energy is being released that normally would move to a violent projection onto the 'other' in the dyad.
Ride the explosion inwards, I wonder if I will meet you there one day.
The Media Continuum
(this is from an article i wrote for 2009 GDC (Games Developers Conference) in the gamesindustry.biz journal, I will be updating it further when I get round to it)
I have always been fascinated by games, not just because they can be engaging, exciting and even beautiful, but also because they are simply the deepest form of computer-human interaction.
I spent the last 25 years building technology to support games. Along the way my contributions have included RenderMorphics' Reality Lab and the first few versions of Direct3D. I continue to find the space fascinating, and I believe our understanding and mastery of games will continue to give them an ever-larger role in media as a whole.
In this article I intend to show how all media types sit on a single continuum. This will let us view the media scene as one complete whole, and consider the game industry in relation to it. By providing some definitions and covering some of the key issues we can do a quick survey of where the wider media is today as well as considering some of the interesting changes that we will be dealing with in the near future.
A number of issues I touch on warrant articles in their own right but my aim here is to give an overview and so I have to touch on many things briefly and leave it to you to extrapolate some of the ideas. But the following few lines are the central concepts that I hope the rest of the article helps uncover
As more media distribution moves to the internet our 'concepts of different media' forms - and 'how we access them' - will continue to converge.
This ongoing merger of distribution, leaving us with one dominant network, will drive more integrated forms of content. This, along with the accessibility of further content is when the network then becomes the media itself.
(Content and Access become linked: This is traditionally very much the realm of games.)
In a game, the control system (how you navigate the content) defines a large part of how the content in that game is crafted. Remember we are talking about content that is interactive, we are not just talking about a video, we are considering functionality and behaviour as content too (a control system that is part of an object that you 'intuitively' understand how to operate, a puzzle that needs solving to enter, someone to talk to who will allow access, a plane that you fly you somewhere, are all examples of interactive content that have specific control paradigms). So when you are talking about content with interactivity, the access to the content and the content itself are linked. It is this link between interaction and content that traditional media people struggle to understand, but it is what makes the experience of a game deep and engaging when done well.
A channel is understood as a content library delivered to a defined demographic over the internet. A channel can be a website, a casual game portal, an online movie library or an MMO. The more exclusive content that addresses the channel demographic well, the more users will stay with a channel. The media continuum is then simply the complete set of channels delivered to consumers over the Internet.
In terms of technology, games for many years have required a combination of all media types: 2D and 3D animation, movies, music and real-time interaction. So technologically-speaking, games have already unified all content forms. Only the game development community really understands the complexities of how to design for and use technology to build quality interactive content.
Because games are superset of all media, you can view all traditional media as games with the some of the features cut out. Hence to really view all channels as part of a continuum we have to think about all channels as games, at least in technology and design terms, even if they don't look like typical games to most people.
What breaks up the continuum today is the client-side software, tuner or box that receives the content. This 'continuum breaking' is not in the interest of consumers or content creators; hence my personal view that it is a matter of time, and standard-setting, before the receiver is unified, just as HTML unifies the web.
TV and film have both a standard linear form and linear playback; this makes it very easy for content to be developed. The form is now over 100 years old and it has become so well understood that all innovations are pushed into the nuances of the content itself. The game industry conversely is still evolving; the big drag factors on the industry are the lack of a standard for game content creation, and the lack of a standard playback format for creators to deliver to.
These challenges are due to the complex interactive nature of games and the rapid advances in 3D and CPU technology; but they are not insurmountable, especially as the hardware changes are now beginning to settle and are much better understood by developers. Over time more standardisation both in game development and in playback format will remove many of those drag factors that the game industry currently struggles against, freeing up more cash and creativity for the content itself.
Today many channels are 'closed', meaning that consumers can't add content. Open channels are where third parties can add or augment content on the channel. LittleBigPlanet, Second Life and YouTube are examples of open channels. Further support for business models for content creators in open channels will be another key step in the evolution of interactive content. The way open channels can work and are managed both in editorial and design terms is a critical space for further innovation and one that I can only touch on in this article. Sony's PlayStation Home is perhaps the first major foray into a managed open channel.
I anticipate that the game consoles will simply become content channels on the continuum; you will have Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft game channels just as you have the BBC, CNN and National Geographic. Console-exclusive content is like channel-exclusive TV. Each console defines a channel and within each 'console channel' we will see further channels. Channels within channels will be something we will see a lot more of, too. (eg lovefilm on PS3)
As innovation in chip hardware continues we are arriving at a standardised high-end 3D-capable CPU. We see this trend with the present generation of consoles, where the chip parts are bought from PC chip vendors. We are not far off a single multi-core, multi-GPU chip that lives in all boxes and delivers all the power we need.
(AMD Fusion is a great example but and all major CPU vendors are following, its going to get bloody for the chip vendors as prices for these chips drops fast due to competition. You wont be able to buy a screen that does not have this 3D and CPU power built into it in a few years.)
The box from each console vendor will simply be the 'key' or the 'tuner' for the online content directory.
The control system a console offers has become the only way to differentiate one box from its rivals, as the Wii controller does today. In the end the controller will be the only physical device required, as the processing power will already be embedded in devices such as TVs.
As we are talking 'game' and as 'the interaction and content are linked', the long view for any console channel is to become a bespoke controller connected with its respective bespoke online content library.
The console channels will go on to support more video, demonstrated by Microsoft and Sony already supporting film distribution. So apart from exclusive interactive content, there is every likelihood games consoles will supplant other set-top boxes, provided they have access to the content catalogue. Game boxes can run the very highest quality games and they can run video but set-top boxes can only run video and very limited games. The console will consume the set-top box.
In the 2d presentation space, such as the web, money is made from advertising. 3D presentation adds one more level of 'immersion' to an experience, an advert has no place in that experience (This has been proven through experiences in the game industry where advertising in 3space has been tried and died)
In 3space the monetisation model is functionality, you have to deliver something of 'function' to get paid for it, like the real world. Basic examples of this working are items you pay to upgrade in games or the trading economy for items say in second life. But this is just the beginning of what is possible, the growth of app stores is an example of this direction. The full step I am talking about is apps that deliver concrete and abstract function in 3space worlds.
Competing with the 'console channels' we have casual game channels. It is going to be interesting to watch how the battle between these develops, especially as console channels can easily support casual game channels within them.
The difference may well come down to the revenue model as, like TV, casual channels are mostly driven by revenue from advertising. Once you apply my above rule re 3space monetisation you realise the innovation here for the future of these would be a 3D casual MMO as an apps ecosystem. (second life skimmed past this absent a game model) (so if anyone wants to build one, get in touch)
If you accept for a moment that the channel changer is TV's interactive device, then you can think of the TV experience in game terms; ie you watch until you get bored, then you switch between a fixed set of linear channels. The game element here is the channel surfing itself.
With digital distribution you get TV on-demand; again the interaction model is the thing to watch. The interaction is all about navigating content: with access to near infinite content, how do you find what you really want and how engaging is the process? You can't effectively Google an image or a video unless you know a name upfront. YouTube is the current leader when it comes to presenting a menu for a massive open channel archive, but there is plenty of space to innovate.
What the games industry is uniquely well placed to do is to use its command of interactivity to transform the interface with content - bringing the best of gameplay technology to content surfing.
Each online world is a channel in the continuum. Facebook and other social networks are online worlds with most game elements stripped away to leave the game solely about social interaction; social networks can 'score' you by social kudos and presentation alone eg how many 'friends' you collect or how well you present yourself to them.
Fantasy Online Worlds (FOWs) like World of Warcraft and Eve offer contexts for social experience by providing themes and story goals for the interaction.
Facebook's innovation is in referencing the real person rather than using a name handle. In this sense Facebook is more the real Second Life than Second Life is itself, which is arguably more a highly configurable chat and conferencing system rather than a game experience.
There is massive space for innovation in the 2d worlds such as facebook, infact facebook is open to being virally taken out by the first competitor that matches its present functional and adds a key innovation, of which there are many options, from privacy to configurable social hubs (managed by sub social groups) to financial incentives for users to join.
An exciting development will be the arrival of open channel 3space FOWs that allow third party developers to build components and add-ons. Facebook is doing this now with its apps but imagine these in 3space worlds, the critical issue is how these are regulated or commissioned by the channel owner (but its all really part of the game design in the world).
A tax on trading items within a world, or an equivalent economic engine, would enable a revenue stream for building new content so that a studio could pitch fully-featured items to an FOW owner. I believe this direction to be one of the most important avenues to the future of on line worlds and social networks.
As a FOW creates a context for social interaction, traditional TV series, news programmes and even reality TV are ready to emerge from within the bigger FOWs. One could imagine a drama series covering the real story of a guild clan from the history of the game world. There is a guaranteed audience within that FOW community for that content while licensing that content more widely would offer the chance to win over both viewers and new users.
Serious games don't sound like much fun. To me the term feels like an oxymoron. What we are talking about is games that have a serious purpose such as training and learning, but if they stop being fun they stop being games, and if they stop being fun users simply stop learning as fast.
I have an axiom when I think about games and that is: the more fun you are having in any game, the more information you are absorbing.
So I believe games can and will have a much bigger role as a learning tool in mainstream society provided we get over the mental barrier of thinking that having fun can't be about learning. Even games for training, like simulators, fit in this category. If they were more fun they would help the trainee learn more quickly.
Our education systems are struggling to engage kids today. Building fun games around what we want our kids to learn will not only be the education system of the future, but also form a key part of adult training and learning systems in all disciplines. Whenever it is purely about absorbing information or developing specific operational skills, game experiences are an ideal way to load up the information. As there is plenty of space to innovate in this space I set up Earthsim to create an online learning world and experiment with some of these ideas.
Film will always have a place both in the cinema and because of the cinema. Cinema is both a social experience and an immersive experience that's almost impossible to recreate in your home. But as consoles and set-top boxes access their content online more, the video rental store is likely to disappear.
TV game shows like X-Factor are more game than traditional TV: their interaction is all about voting and managing community expectations over time. It's effectively a massively concurrent game experience. They can be seen as worlds with minimal interaction, just the vote. Combining this managed expectation voting experience with FOWs is also an open space for the future and one that has very interesting implications for the way that other aspects of life, such as democracy, work etc just connect a social network to this and off you go... but that again is another whole article.
As distribution moves to the internet we can be increasingly sure where everyone will be accessing their content.
For games to realise their full potential as a major or even a defining part of this continuum we must address the issues of how to reduce the hidden costs or drag factors in their development and how to get this content playing in a more standardised format. Only then can the interaction deployed as content into the future worlds complete on equal terms with linear TV and Film content.
With this in mind, having delivered the first few versions of Direct3D at Microsoft I left to set up Qube Software with the purpose of investigating these drag factors and look into a possible solution. We believe we have come up with an answer in the form of our Q Technology platform. Ultimately it will be for the industry to judge whether Q does indeed address these challenges.
As a content consumer I would certainly like the have a single receiver that allows me to channel hop between all online worlds, social nets and libraries of games just like a viewer going through TV channels. I believe that this is not only possible but it is where we are heading with the media continuum.
Finally, looking at all media forms as games can inform us about what can be added and what can be merged. Distribution over the internet makes access to all media an interactive experience. And over the longest term this means the content and the accessibility of further content actually become the media itself.
I have always been fascinated by games, not just because they can be engaging, exciting and even beautiful, but also because they are simply the deepest form of computer-human interaction.
I spent the last 25 years building technology to support games. Along the way my contributions have included RenderMorphics' Reality Lab and the first few versions of Direct3D. I continue to find the space fascinating, and I believe our understanding and mastery of games will continue to give them an ever-larger role in media as a whole.
In this article I intend to show how all media types sit on a single continuum. This will let us view the media scene as one complete whole, and consider the game industry in relation to it. By providing some definitions and covering some of the key issues we can do a quick survey of where the wider media is today as well as considering some of the interesting changes that we will be dealing with in the near future.
A number of issues I touch on warrant articles in their own right but my aim here is to give an overview and so I have to touch on many things briefly and leave it to you to extrapolate some of the ideas. But the following few lines are the central concepts that I hope the rest of the article helps uncover
As more media distribution moves to the internet our 'concepts of different media' forms - and 'how we access them' - will continue to converge.
This ongoing merger of distribution, leaving us with one dominant network, will drive more integrated forms of content. This, along with the accessibility of further content is when the network then becomes the media itself.
(Content and Access become linked: This is traditionally very much the realm of games.)
Games, Content and Access are Linked
In a game, the control system (how you navigate the content) defines a large part of how the content in that game is crafted. Remember we are talking about content that is interactive, we are not just talking about a video, we are considering functionality and behaviour as content too (a control system that is part of an object that you 'intuitively' understand how to operate, a puzzle that needs solving to enter, someone to talk to who will allow access, a plane that you fly you somewhere, are all examples of interactive content that have specific control paradigms). So when you are talking about content with interactivity, the access to the content and the content itself are linked. It is this link between interaction and content that traditional media people struggle to understand, but it is what makes the experience of a game deep and engaging when done well.
The Media Continuum
A channel is understood as a content library delivered to a defined demographic over the internet. A channel can be a website, a casual game portal, an online movie library or an MMO. The more exclusive content that addresses the channel demographic well, the more users will stay with a channel. The media continuum is then simply the complete set of channels delivered to consumers over the Internet.
It's All a Game
In terms of technology, games for many years have required a combination of all media types: 2D and 3D animation, movies, music and real-time interaction. So technologically-speaking, games have already unified all content forms. Only the game development community really understands the complexities of how to design for and use technology to build quality interactive content.
Because games are superset of all media, you can view all traditional media as games with the some of the features cut out. Hence to really view all channels as part of a continuum we have to think about all channels as games, at least in technology and design terms, even if they don't look like typical games to most people.
A Standard Player
What breaks up the continuum today is the client-side software, tuner or box that receives the content. This 'continuum breaking' is not in the interest of consumers or content creators; hence my personal view that it is a matter of time, and standard-setting, before the receiver is unified, just as HTML unifies the web.
TV and film have both a standard linear form and linear playback; this makes it very easy for content to be developed. The form is now over 100 years old and it has become so well understood that all innovations are pushed into the nuances of the content itself. The game industry conversely is still evolving; the big drag factors on the industry are the lack of a standard for game content creation, and the lack of a standard playback format for creators to deliver to.
These challenges are due to the complex interactive nature of games and the rapid advances in 3D and CPU technology; but they are not insurmountable, especially as the hardware changes are now beginning to settle and are much better understood by developers. Over time more standardisation both in game development and in playback format will remove many of those drag factors that the game industry currently struggles against, freeing up more cash and creativity for the content itself.
Open and Closed Channels
Today many channels are 'closed', meaning that consumers can't add content. Open channels are where third parties can add or augment content on the channel. LittleBigPlanet, Second Life and YouTube are examples of open channels. Further support for business models for content creators in open channels will be another key step in the evolution of interactive content. The way open channels can work and are managed both in editorial and design terms is a critical space for further innovation and one that I can only touch on in this article. Sony's PlayStation Home is perhaps the first major foray into a managed open channel.
Game Consoles are Controllers
I anticipate that the game consoles will simply become content channels on the continuum; you will have Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft game channels just as you have the BBC, CNN and National Geographic. Console-exclusive content is like channel-exclusive TV. Each console defines a channel and within each 'console channel' we will see further channels. Channels within channels will be something we will see a lot more of, too. (eg lovefilm on PS3)
As innovation in chip hardware continues we are arriving at a standardised high-end 3D-capable CPU. We see this trend with the present generation of consoles, where the chip parts are bought from PC chip vendors. We are not far off a single multi-core, multi-GPU chip that lives in all boxes and delivers all the power we need.
(AMD Fusion is a great example but and all major CPU vendors are following, its going to get bloody for the chip vendors as prices for these chips drops fast due to competition. You wont be able to buy a screen that does not have this 3D and CPU power built into it in a few years.)
The box from each console vendor will simply be the 'key' or the 'tuner' for the online content directory.
The control system a console offers has become the only way to differentiate one box from its rivals, as the Wii controller does today. In the end the controller will be the only physical device required, as the processing power will already be embedded in devices such as TVs.
As we are talking 'game' and as 'the interaction and content are linked', the long view for any console channel is to become a bespoke controller connected with its respective bespoke online content library.
Consoles and Linear Video
The console channels will go on to support more video, demonstrated by Microsoft and Sony already supporting film distribution. So apart from exclusive interactive content, there is every likelihood games consoles will supplant other set-top boxes, provided they have access to the content catalogue. Game boxes can run the very highest quality games and they can run video but set-top boxes can only run video and very limited games. The console will consume the set-top box.
2D and 3D biz models
In the 2d presentation space, such as the web, money is made from advertising. 3D presentation adds one more level of 'immersion' to an experience, an advert has no place in that experience (This has been proven through experiences in the game industry where advertising in 3space has been tried and died)
In 3space the monetisation model is functionality, you have to deliver something of 'function' to get paid for it, like the real world. Basic examples of this working are items you pay to upgrade in games or the trading economy for items say in second life. But this is just the beginning of what is possible, the growth of app stores is an example of this direction. The full step I am talking about is apps that deliver concrete and abstract function in 3space worlds.
Casual Game Channels
Competing with the 'console channels' we have casual game channels. It is going to be interesting to watch how the battle between these develops, especially as console channels can easily support casual game channels within them.
The difference may well come down to the revenue model as, like TV, casual channels are mostly driven by revenue from advertising. Once you apply my above rule re 3space monetisation you realise the innovation here for the future of these would be a 3D casual MMO as an apps ecosystem. (second life skimmed past this absent a game model) (so if anyone wants to build one, get in touch)
Traditional Linear TV
If you accept for a moment that the channel changer is TV's interactive device, then you can think of the TV experience in game terms; ie you watch until you get bored, then you switch between a fixed set of linear channels. The game element here is the channel surfing itself.
With digital distribution you get TV on-demand; again the interaction model is the thing to watch. The interaction is all about navigating content: with access to near infinite content, how do you find what you really want and how engaging is the process? You can't effectively Google an image or a video unless you know a name upfront. YouTube is the current leader when it comes to presenting a menu for a massive open channel archive, but there is plenty of space to innovate.
What the games industry is uniquely well placed to do is to use its command of interactivity to transform the interface with content - bringing the best of gameplay technology to content surfing.
Online Worlds are Social Networks
Each online world is a channel in the continuum. Facebook and other social networks are online worlds with most game elements stripped away to leave the game solely about social interaction; social networks can 'score' you by social kudos and presentation alone eg how many 'friends' you collect or how well you present yourself to them.
Fantasy Online Worlds (FOWs) like World of Warcraft and Eve offer contexts for social experience by providing themes and story goals for the interaction.
Facebook's innovation is in referencing the real person rather than using a name handle. In this sense Facebook is more the real Second Life than Second Life is itself, which is arguably more a highly configurable chat and conferencing system rather than a game experience.
There is massive space for innovation in the 2d worlds such as facebook, infact facebook is open to being virally taken out by the first competitor that matches its present functional and adds a key innovation, of which there are many options, from privacy to configurable social hubs (managed by sub social groups) to financial incentives for users to join.
An exciting development will be the arrival of open channel 3space FOWs that allow third party developers to build components and add-ons. Facebook is doing this now with its apps but imagine these in 3space worlds, the critical issue is how these are regulated or commissioned by the channel owner (but its all really part of the game design in the world).
A tax on trading items within a world, or an equivalent economic engine, would enable a revenue stream for building new content so that a studio could pitch fully-featured items to an FOW owner. I believe this direction to be one of the most important avenues to the future of on line worlds and social networks.
Fantasy Online Worlds with embedded Linear TV
As a FOW creates a context for social interaction, traditional TV series, news programmes and even reality TV are ready to emerge from within the bigger FOWs. One could imagine a drama series covering the real story of a guild clan from the history of the game world. There is a guaranteed audience within that FOW community for that content while licensing that content more widely would offer the chance to win over both viewers and new users.
Serious games
Serious games don't sound like much fun. To me the term feels like an oxymoron. What we are talking about is games that have a serious purpose such as training and learning, but if they stop being fun they stop being games, and if they stop being fun users simply stop learning as fast.
I have an axiom when I think about games and that is: the more fun you are having in any game, the more information you are absorbing.
So I believe games can and will have a much bigger role as a learning tool in mainstream society provided we get over the mental barrier of thinking that having fun can't be about learning. Even games for training, like simulators, fit in this category. If they were more fun they would help the trainee learn more quickly.
Our education systems are struggling to engage kids today. Building fun games around what we want our kids to learn will not only be the education system of the future, but also form a key part of adult training and learning systems in all disciplines. Whenever it is purely about absorbing information or developing specific operational skills, game experiences are an ideal way to load up the information. As there is plenty of space to innovate in this space I set up Earthsim to create an online learning world and experiment with some of these ideas.
Film
Film will always have a place both in the cinema and because of the cinema. Cinema is both a social experience and an immersive experience that's almost impossible to recreate in your home. But as consoles and set-top boxes access their content online more, the video rental store is likely to disappear.
Clearly its a multi user closed game channel, but people think its TV
TV game shows like X-Factor are more game than traditional TV: their interaction is all about voting and managing community expectations over time. It's effectively a massively concurrent game experience. They can be seen as worlds with minimal interaction, just the vote. Combining this managed expectation voting experience with FOWs is also an open space for the future and one that has very interesting implications for the way that other aspects of life, such as democracy, work etc just connect a social network to this and off you go... but that again is another whole article.
To sum it all up -
As distribution moves to the internet we can be increasingly sure where everyone will be accessing their content.
For games to realise their full potential as a major or even a defining part of this continuum we must address the issues of how to reduce the hidden costs or drag factors in their development and how to get this content playing in a more standardised format. Only then can the interaction deployed as content into the future worlds complete on equal terms with linear TV and Film content.
With this in mind, having delivered the first few versions of Direct3D at Microsoft I left to set up Qube Software with the purpose of investigating these drag factors and look into a possible solution. We believe we have come up with an answer in the form of our Q Technology platform. Ultimately it will be for the industry to judge whether Q does indeed address these challenges.
As a content consumer I would certainly like the have a single receiver that allows me to channel hop between all online worlds, social nets and libraries of games just like a viewer going through TV channels. I believe that this is not only possible but it is where we are heading with the media continuum.
Finally, looking at all media forms as games can inform us about what can be added and what can be merged. Distribution over the internet makes access to all media an interactive experience. And over the longest term this means the content and the accessibility of further content actually become the media itself.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
The State Is Dead, Roll On the Global Free Republic
After my last article 'a time to die' people kept asking me 'so what's next'. So here is my go at an answer.
To me the financial system of our world seems to be bankrupt. The governments that prop it up seem to be bankrupt too. I don't believe we need either of them and the sooner they finish collapsing the sooner we can get on with living a better life on this planet.
I think the present conception of the State is dead* as a viable future entity, in fact the body has become bloated and is beginning to rot from the inside out. It will take years for the general public to realize it, but the smell is growing by the months and its coming out of multiple orifices.
*(the part of the State that will go first is the financial system of bank debt issued money by government FIAT)
The closest thing to states in the future are social networks, examples are 'World of Warcraft', 'eBay' and 'Facebook'. They don't need government but they do need a form of exchange or money.
The rotting bodies of the States we live in are going to continue to produce gas for a while. We will see this gas continue in the form of more money being printed. I think its a good idea to slowly get out of fiat currencies, or at least start to seriously consider the alternatives.
The great thing is we don't actually need states and governments as they are constructed today, we only think we do. We are conditioned to depend on it as a strange sort of parent figure, its a weird relationship. We think ‘they’ will look after us when its really the last thing on any politician's mind.
What we need is the ability to trade and travel, and we certainly don't need a massively inefficient financial system that leaches off everyone's trade. The collapse of both our present financial system and the governments that are hooked up to it is a great thing. It is going to allow some far more efficient and exciting alternatives to take their place.
As the system collapses, trade will continue but its going to move to using what works. There will be a big financial move back into precious metals, the historical fall back position of real value. You only need to look at gold prices over the fifteen years to see that most people in the know jumped this way long ago. But gold is hard to trade with except as coin, even then, you cant send it long distance without a chariot.
The second exciting option opening up is the move to digital currencies. You may think you have this already in the form of digital bank transfers, but that is only a digital version of current fiat currency.
Anyone can start a digital currency if they a) know how to build the secure compute infrastructure b) know how to build trust in the service. e-gold is a good example of one that started taking off but was blown out by the US courts, i believe it was becoming too big a threat to the status quo at the time.
Three things you need to understand about digital currencies (dc's) these are all about 'responsibility' when you understand that a true dc is really just like coin. You need to be responsible for your coins and what you do with them. The coins or the coin manufacturer are not responsible and should not be held accountable for your screw-up as is the case with real money (but its not the case with our present 'financial system').
1. you can't blame the dc (or coins) if people do fraud with it. There is tonnes of fraud daily on the net, especially with credit card and internet banking, you just don't hear about it because its so common its not very news worthy. The dc is simply the form of exchange. Just because bank robbers like stealing gold from a bank you don't blame the gold for being a compact and easy to move store of wealth. Dc's are much easier to move about than gold, they will likely be blamed for it.
2. you have to be responsible for your dc (coins), nobody is going to look after it for you if you send it to the wrong place. A dc must be non refundable as it has to behave like real coins. It would be no good if you went to a shop to buy something and then at a later date you could just cancel and pull back your coins. If a shop has a refund policy, that is a completely different issue, its between you and the vendor.
3. Security is up to you. Modern online banking is a joke security wise, the security questions commonly used are an example of this joke. Your account is much less secure the moment you have any security questions. The reason for the questions is to reduce support problems, when you lose your password. In the real world of true security, if you loose your password its the same as forgetting where you left your wallet. Or another example is if you make simple two letter password, the analogy would be then of keeping your wallet on the table outside the house. Its up to you.
I don't expect dc's to become widely used while our present financial system still has a semblance of 'working' and dc’s pose too big a threat to the status quo. But as the system collapses we will have a rapid move toward them. (Its going to be very hard to establish a global 'regulated' alternative. But I'am sure we will see centrally controlled global fiat options presented as the 'solution' to the crisis. Actually I think its here already in the from of the IMFs SDR)
I reckon its a good idea to be prepared and figure out the lay of the land with dc's.
I think that we will see is a future of many competing digital currencies each with their own specific cool features. There will be many digital exchanges where you can convert between these dc's and fiat currencies or other local currencies. Each currency system will embody a set of values that are encoded into the algorithms it uses. These values will be transparent rather than covert, as it is the values that will keep the users using that currency as opposed to another.
Current states are tax farms. Ie they farm the people within the borders for taxes. The reason states work so badly is that they do this against the will of the people. This is a redundant non-evolutionary (ie closes down opportunity for evolution within the state) way to operate.
This redundant approach requires government, the two party dialectic operates as a system of ‘disinformation management’ for citizens so the tax farm can continue to operate.
You see there are many things the citizens would not do if they were not ‘coerced into it’ through disinformation management, the best example is paying taxes. (Government often does disinformation management by pitting social groups against each other, the two party 'democratic' system is the primary example of this, simply the classic 'divide and rule' paradigm. If government was not about ‘disinformation’, sites like wiki leaks would be a non issue)
Imagine what a state could do if it simply worked 'with' the citizens not against them, and provided them the information they wanted and needed. All the redundant lobbying and disinformation management infrastructure would just be blown away leaving an efficient machine that could serve a clear and simple goal, 'like a company with a vision statement'. Everyone in a society could start to point in a unified direction. Its very radical.
You may say 'this will never happen' but consider a world where people exchange skills and info over the internet in exchange for a crypto untraceable dc. This is a non taxable situation and its very doable today, there are many open source projects building forms of what I am talking about.
Tax will have to become voluntary in our future. And to be voluntary the organisation that is running the dc will have to do exactly what its users desire.
I think the future is very simple.
The borders of the future state will simply be the membership of a social network. The difference to our states today simply being of user consent. Citizens become voluntary ‘users’
I think a real global republic is based on the freedom to choose whatever social networks you want to be a user of, along with the allowance of competitive dc exchange without interference or 'regulation'.
(competitive dc exchange will be strongly discouraged by the status quo, noone wants to loose their money monopoly, but there is nothing that can be done about it other than shutting down the internet, so I doubt it will happen)
The freedom to travel and freedom to exchange.
You won't need to vote for government, but you will decide what networks you are a user of and you will decide which dc's you like. All of this will in turn have a large effect on the world you are living in.
This future holds a complete 100% turnaround. Right now states as we know them try to keep people or 'users' out because the states are so incredibly inefficient, they cant handle more users. That's dumb, and it makes no sense, because if a state is a tax farm, surely it wants more people to tax.
A well operated Social Network is just the opposite, more users mean more revenue for the network, period.
Ok, if this is too big leap for you, here is one example. Facebook makes money by the fact it has users. The actual code to build a site like Facebook is trivial, a company like Microsoft could have a functional competitor up in under six months. The trick is how to get the 'network-effect' to build a critical mass of users. Facebook got there first, picked the 'social kudos' high ground of the academic institutions and built a massive user base from there. You would think it is unassailable. But imagine if a competitor social network started offering a large portion of revenue, back to the users via its dc. This for example could serve as a 'Minimum Basic Income' for being a user. Getting paid just to be a member, now that's an incentive to move to a new network.
And what if that network owned some real farms, or managed forest, The possibilities for the world are just massive.
(a. yes, i am saying that that unless face book starts to pay people a minimum basic income in some dc they are at risk of loosing out to the first decent alternative that does. I use the term 'minimum basic income' mbi. The general point is a default pay to all members. It avoids all the issues you get with both minimum wages and citizens getting stuck on social benefits scared to get a job again.
b. workers unions can have so much more power, they simply need to understood the value of their workforce and reflect this into a social network. Ie social networks can start to represent groups of skilled workers that could then grow value in a dc because of their recognition and articulation of what they are. Then the union (as represented by the social network) can agree any pay agreement through say exchange of their dc value for man hours at a given team quality level.)
Remember, its all a game, it always was and it always will be. The games we play create our world. Good 'network game design' is the future evolution. A healthy competitive market network model is the way to evolve the best most useful games for us as a global society to create our world with. Keep the dc's free and keep allowing truly open internet access.
I believe the inevitable result of those two freedoms (or even just the one of true open access) is the continuing decline of the state and the emergence of a truly free global republic based on an opt in next generation social network model.
Luckily I think the states are managing to kill themselves as their own financial model and redundant system chokes them to death. Be ready to jump to a nice dc and you can be business as usual. (social networks will jump to this function as soon as the threat of government is diminished)
I am looking forward to joining a cool social network that encourages the growth and learning of its users and gives everyone a minimum basic income if they join.
=================================================
- Bitcoin looks great as a P2P crypto currency.
- Metacurrency Defining currency as simply a set of game rules
=================================================
Doug Says it very well in this short interview
Summary of the redundant State Model from Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio:
=================================================
This is a good summary about how existing fiat money works. (The new model I am describing is completely the opposite of this. Because dc's 'can be' based on a non debt based 'Real Money' model. Enable free non regulated dc competition and the dc users will naturally move to the most 'efficient' dc for exchange)
=================================================
Eve online is a space fantasy on line world with about 300,000 users. Users navigate space and can both trade and take part in space battles. To succeed you have to be a) organised b) become part of an organisation of other players that is highly organised. Its about the best example of a social network that shows the way to what is possible. Ie An enabling infrastructure for organisation of very complex tasks by diverse social groups. Eve has highly organised corporations and even stock markets within the world. Real companies hire CEO's from eve because they know anyone who can organise and focus a corporation in eve can do the same in the real world. Its not hard to imagine how everything in this game could be transplanted to driving real corporations and teams in the real world and connecting it all with a digital currency to pay everyone with.
This video is about the online portal that lets corporation members (within eve) get at all the info they need. Its an example of the social net provider supporting information access for the tools the 'users' need and education about it. Why don't traditional workers unions do this ? And supply workforces via their 'nets' to corps. It would support de-construction a traditional corporation into an entirely new model decentralised model that is far more competitive and streamlined.
This next video is an example of just one interaction in eve. Planetary resource gathering. It almost looks too complex and tedious, dare i say, 'like work'. But that's exactly the point, and thousands of kids are learning more about management and trading in 'games' than at school.
To me the financial system of our world seems to be bankrupt. The governments that prop it up seem to be bankrupt too. I don't believe we need either of them and the sooner they finish collapsing the sooner we can get on with living a better life on this planet.
I think the present conception of the State is dead* as a viable future entity, in fact the body has become bloated and is beginning to rot from the inside out. It will take years for the general public to realize it, but the smell is growing by the months and its coming out of multiple orifices.
*(the part of the State that will go first is the financial system of bank debt issued money by government FIAT)
The closest thing to states in the future are social networks, examples are 'World of Warcraft', 'eBay' and 'Facebook'. They don't need government but they do need a form of exchange or money.
The rotting bodies of the States we live in are going to continue to produce gas for a while. We will see this gas continue in the form of more money being printed. I think its a good idea to slowly get out of fiat currencies, or at least start to seriously consider the alternatives.
The great thing is we don't actually need states and governments as they are constructed today, we only think we do. We are conditioned to depend on it as a strange sort of parent figure, its a weird relationship. We think ‘they’ will look after us when its really the last thing on any politician's mind.
What we need is the ability to trade and travel, and we certainly don't need a massively inefficient financial system that leaches off everyone's trade. The collapse of both our present financial system and the governments that are hooked up to it is a great thing. It is going to allow some far more efficient and exciting alternatives to take their place.
As the system collapses, trade will continue but its going to move to using what works. There will be a big financial move back into precious metals, the historical fall back position of real value. You only need to look at gold prices over the fifteen years to see that most people in the know jumped this way long ago. But gold is hard to trade with except as coin, even then, you cant send it long distance without a chariot.
The second exciting option opening up is the move to digital currencies. You may think you have this already in the form of digital bank transfers, but that is only a digital version of current fiat currency.
Anyone can start a digital currency if they a) know how to build the secure compute infrastructure b) know how to build trust in the service. e-gold is a good example of one that started taking off but was blown out by the US courts, i believe it was becoming too big a threat to the status quo at the time.
Three things you need to understand about digital currencies (dc's) these are all about 'responsibility' when you understand that a true dc is really just like coin. You need to be responsible for your coins and what you do with them. The coins or the coin manufacturer are not responsible and should not be held accountable for your screw-up as is the case with real money (but its not the case with our present 'financial system').
1. you can't blame the dc (or coins) if people do fraud with it. There is tonnes of fraud daily on the net, especially with credit card and internet banking, you just don't hear about it because its so common its not very news worthy. The dc is simply the form of exchange. Just because bank robbers like stealing gold from a bank you don't blame the gold for being a compact and easy to move store of wealth. Dc's are much easier to move about than gold, they will likely be blamed for it.
2. you have to be responsible for your dc (coins), nobody is going to look after it for you if you send it to the wrong place. A dc must be non refundable as it has to behave like real coins. It would be no good if you went to a shop to buy something and then at a later date you could just cancel and pull back your coins. If a shop has a refund policy, that is a completely different issue, its between you and the vendor.
3. Security is up to you. Modern online banking is a joke security wise, the security questions commonly used are an example of this joke. Your account is much less secure the moment you have any security questions. The reason for the questions is to reduce support problems, when you lose your password. In the real world of true security, if you loose your password its the same as forgetting where you left your wallet. Or another example is if you make simple two letter password, the analogy would be then of keeping your wallet on the table outside the house. Its up to you.
I don't expect dc's to become widely used while our present financial system still has a semblance of 'working' and dc’s pose too big a threat to the status quo. But as the system collapses we will have a rapid move toward them. (Its going to be very hard to establish a global 'regulated' alternative. But I'am sure we will see centrally controlled global fiat options presented as the 'solution' to the crisis. Actually I think its here already in the from of the IMFs SDR)
I reckon its a good idea to be prepared and figure out the lay of the land with dc's.
I think that we will see is a future of many competing digital currencies each with their own specific cool features. There will be many digital exchanges where you can convert between these dc's and fiat currencies or other local currencies. Each currency system will embody a set of values that are encoded into the algorithms it uses. These values will be transparent rather than covert, as it is the values that will keep the users using that currency as opposed to another.
Where we are going next ?
One exciting development or what i believe will be the 'killer app' for dc's is when social networks such as World of Warcraft (WoW) or Facebook use either an existing dc or create their own for trading within their network. For example WoW could completely replace their monthly fees with a basic tax on the dc's traded in the world. Facebook has been experimenting with its own credits, but so far has backed away from running a real independent dc from the state Fiat system. When will social networks 'come out' and challenge the present State system ? when they do, this is when the the State as we know it is truly dead, Why ?Current states are tax farms. Ie they farm the people within the borders for taxes. The reason states work so badly is that they do this against the will of the people. This is a redundant non-evolutionary (ie closes down opportunity for evolution within the state) way to operate.
This redundant approach requires government, the two party dialectic operates as a system of ‘disinformation management’ for citizens so the tax farm can continue to operate.
You see there are many things the citizens would not do if they were not ‘coerced into it’ through disinformation management, the best example is paying taxes. (Government often does disinformation management by pitting social groups against each other, the two party 'democratic' system is the primary example of this, simply the classic 'divide and rule' paradigm. If government was not about ‘disinformation’, sites like wiki leaks would be a non issue)
Imagine what a state could do if it simply worked 'with' the citizens not against them, and provided them the information they wanted and needed. All the redundant lobbying and disinformation management infrastructure would just be blown away leaving an efficient machine that could serve a clear and simple goal, 'like a company with a vision statement'. Everyone in a society could start to point in a unified direction. Its very radical.
You may say 'this will never happen' but consider a world where people exchange skills and info over the internet in exchange for a crypto untraceable dc. This is a non taxable situation and its very doable today, there are many open source projects building forms of what I am talking about.
Tax will have to become voluntary in our future. And to be voluntary the organisation that is running the dc will have to do exactly what its users desire.
I think the future is very simple.
The borders of the future state will simply be the membership of a social network. The difference to our states today simply being of user consent. Citizens become voluntary ‘users’
I think a real global republic is based on the freedom to choose whatever social networks you want to be a user of, along with the allowance of competitive dc exchange without interference or 'regulation'.
(competitive dc exchange will be strongly discouraged by the status quo, noone wants to loose their money monopoly, but there is nothing that can be done about it other than shutting down the internet, so I doubt it will happen)
The freedom to travel and freedom to exchange.
You won't need to vote for government, but you will decide what networks you are a user of and you will decide which dc's you like. All of this will in turn have a large effect on the world you are living in.
This future holds a complete 100% turnaround. Right now states as we know them try to keep people or 'users' out because the states are so incredibly inefficient, they cant handle more users. That's dumb, and it makes no sense, because if a state is a tax farm, surely it wants more people to tax.
A well operated Social Network is just the opposite, more users mean more revenue for the network, period.
Ok, if this is too big leap for you, here is one example. Facebook makes money by the fact it has users. The actual code to build a site like Facebook is trivial, a company like Microsoft could have a functional competitor up in under six months. The trick is how to get the 'network-effect' to build a critical mass of users. Facebook got there first, picked the 'social kudos' high ground of the academic institutions and built a massive user base from there. You would think it is unassailable. But imagine if a competitor social network started offering a large portion of revenue, back to the users via its dc. This for example could serve as a 'Minimum Basic Income' for being a user. Getting paid just to be a member, now that's an incentive to move to a new network.
And what if that network owned some real farms, or managed forest, The possibilities for the world are just massive.
(a. yes, i am saying that that unless face book starts to pay people a minimum basic income in some dc they are at risk of loosing out to the first decent alternative that does. I use the term 'minimum basic income' mbi. The general point is a default pay to all members. It avoids all the issues you get with both minimum wages and citizens getting stuck on social benefits scared to get a job again.
b. workers unions can have so much more power, they simply need to understood the value of their workforce and reflect this into a social network. Ie social networks can start to represent groups of skilled workers that could then grow value in a dc because of their recognition and articulation of what they are. Then the union (as represented by the social network) can agree any pay agreement through say exchange of their dc value for man hours at a given team quality level.)
Remember, its all a game, it always was and it always will be. The games we play create our world. Good 'network game design' is the future evolution. A healthy competitive market network model is the way to evolve the best most useful games for us as a global society to create our world with. Keep the dc's free and keep allowing truly open internet access.
I believe the inevitable result of those two freedoms (or even just the one of true open access) is the continuing decline of the state and the emergence of a truly free global republic based on an opt in next generation social network model.
Luckily I think the states are managing to kill themselves as their own financial model and redundant system chokes them to death. Be ready to jump to a nice dc and you can be business as usual. (social networks will jump to this function as soon as the threat of government is diminished)
I am looking forward to joining a cool social network that encourages the growth and learning of its users and gives everyone a minimum basic income if they join.
=================================================
Where it can all go: Next Gen DC's
For the more technically Minded- Bitcoin looks great as a P2P crypto currency.
- Metacurrency Defining currency as simply a set of game rules
=================================================
The Defunct State Model
Doug Says it very well in this short interview
Summary of the redundant State Model from Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio:
=================================================
The Defunct Fiat Money Model Explained
This is a good summary about how existing fiat money works. (The new model I am describing is completely the opposite of this. Because dc's 'can be' based on a non debt based 'Real Money' model. Enable free non regulated dc competition and the dc users will naturally move to the most 'efficient' dc for exchange)
=================================================
Components of a New Model: Eve Online
Eve online is a space fantasy on line world with about 300,000 users. Users navigate space and can both trade and take part in space battles. To succeed you have to be a) organised b) become part of an organisation of other players that is highly organised. Its about the best example of a social network that shows the way to what is possible. Ie An enabling infrastructure for organisation of very complex tasks by diverse social groups. Eve has highly organised corporations and even stock markets within the world. Real companies hire CEO's from eve because they know anyone who can organise and focus a corporation in eve can do the same in the real world. Its not hard to imagine how everything in this game could be transplanted to driving real corporations and teams in the real world and connecting it all with a digital currency to pay everyone with.
This video is about the online portal that lets corporation members (within eve) get at all the info they need. Its an example of the social net provider supporting information access for the tools the 'users' need and education about it. Why don't traditional workers unions do this ? And supply workforces via their 'nets' to corps. It would support de-construction a traditional corporation into an entirely new model decentralised model that is far more competitive and streamlined.
This next video is an example of just one interaction in eve. Planetary resource gathering. It almost looks too complex and tedious, dare i say, 'like work'. But that's exactly the point, and thousands of kids are learning more about management and trading in 'games' than at school.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
A hidden case of Stockholm Syndrome
For most of known history women have been a slave cast in our society. I believe the psychological effects of this historical slavery are still in our world today. Understanding them and acknowledging how they still effect all of us, is I believe, the route to leave the paradigm it helps support behind us and move on to a more balanced relational world. As the story mirrors in the yin yang balance of everything we relate to, male or female.
A Slave is someones property, a slave is owned by its master and does the masters bidding.
Some examples:
- In law, for example in marriage, women are called a 'chattel' which means 'movable property' a girls father hands over his movable property or 'daughter' to the new movable property owner, the husband.
- Women have only had the right to vote for around a century and much less in most places. Many countries still treat women as second class citizens.
- In religion, for example in christianity a faith based on the doctrine of 'original sin' the Woman Eve is credited with being the first sinner, then being the 'temptress' who brought adam into the crime. Both Islam and Judaisim prescribe to the same story. Its a big deal to blame one sex for all the world's problems ie original sin.
- Women or 'movable property' are 'cast out' when they don't have an 'owner' or husband/father. In many countries they still are. The only other traditional owners a woman could go to were a 'pimp', by becoming a whore, or staying officaily still a daughter ie 'a daughter of christ' to be 'managed' by a new mother the 'mother superior' in a convent.
The only exceptions where women could actually 'own themselves', were by becoming either a 'widow' or a 'witch'. Historically society had quite a bit of trouble distinguishing these two. Witch trials were a sham, but basically the real difference is simply the widow does not have sex again and the witch did have sex again. The trial and the issue is really about the sexual freedom of women.
A free sexual woman was a dangerous woman and should be threatened in the most horrible way possible ie to be burned alive. Just like slaves are when they away from their owners. They are burned alive in a lynching. Fear is the psychological tool for cheap slavery maintenance. You dont need an army when you have Guilt and Fear at your disposal, already programmed in to the slaves.
I believe women are afraid to fully explore their sexual freedom for these reasons buried in the unconscious. I have not met a woman who does not seem to be a slave-in-recovery on some level, there is a very particular flavour to this fear. I also think this has an equivalent counter effect on men, where men feel unconsciously guilty of being the 'slave owner' even though on the conscious side they feel good about the power women 'naturally' give away to them as 'superior' men. So in a way, men are slaves to women being slaves to men. I just think of it as a victim of a victim, who starts the a merry dance.
In this context, taking a view of common women's magazines can look like seeing manuals on how to be a good slave, with material on tips and tricks on 'how to please your man' that to me reads like a manual on 'how do I keep my slave master happy so I get more treats' and stuff all about 'other peoples lives' that can read like 'don't think about your own life, you're a slave, so that would be painful, here is a better alternative to believe in' But so a lot of this applies to men too but that story is more about 'who you are by what you do out there'
Women still seem to buy into a slavery story on many levels and it seems to help support a conflicted love/hate relationship with men in general. And then I think the men get even more confused, or maybe just I do.
This morning I realised that what we had was a hidden case of Stockholm Syndrome in the unconscious dance. Stockholm Syndrome is the term used to describe a paradoxical psychological phenomenon wherein hostages express adulation and have positive feelings towards their captors, that appear irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims.
The most well-known (if infrequently acknowledged) victim of this syndrome is the female protagonist in the story of Beauty and the Beast. In the original version of the tale, the girl is captured by the beast and asked daily at dinner-time whether or not she loves him.
Its like this story is told in preparation for the slavery to come for a young girl.
"Stockholm syndrome is named after the Norrmalmstorg robbery of Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg in Stockholm, in which the bank robbers held bank employees hostage from August 23 to August 28, 1973. In this case, the victims became emotionally attached to their captors, and even defended them after they were freed from their six-day ordeal."
"Psychiatrist Frank Ochberg, widely credited with Stockholm Syndrome's psychiatric definition, describes it as 'a primitive gratitude for the gift of life,' not unlike that felt by an infant"
In a world where its not OK to not have an owner, I can understand how it could feel scary to become free of one. And at the same time be desperate for the security an owner could provide. The double whammy for women is that the 'owner' is then mixed with the psychological feelings of a father figure that adds a powerful emotional drive into the mix.
"According to the psychoanalytic view of the syndrome, this tendency might be the result of employing the strategy evolved by newborn babies to form an emotional attachment to the nearest powerful adult in order to maximize the probability that this adult will enable—at the very least—the survival of the child, if not also prove to be a good parental figure."
"An inverse of Stockholm syndrome called "Lima syndrome" has been proposed, in which abductors develop sympathy for their hostages." I wonder if this happens for men in some unconscious way.
Is your relationship a Lima-Stockholm thing ?
What I'm talking about how this is sitting there in the unconscious mind playing out all the time but through the cultural patterns that have been established around making it OK to be that way. Could do with a good clean out I think.
Yin a slave of Yang. There are two ways out for Yin.
1. Be more Yang than Yang and over power. But then your not Yin any more.
2. Be more Yin and let it all flow through.
Which is true and what does it look like ?
A Slave is someones property, a slave is owned by its master and does the masters bidding.
Some examples:
- In law, for example in marriage, women are called a 'chattel' which means 'movable property' a girls father hands over his movable property or 'daughter' to the new movable property owner, the husband.
- Women have only had the right to vote for around a century and much less in most places. Many countries still treat women as second class citizens.
- In religion, for example in christianity a faith based on the doctrine of 'original sin' the Woman Eve is credited with being the first sinner, then being the 'temptress' who brought adam into the crime. Both Islam and Judaisim prescribe to the same story. Its a big deal to blame one sex for all the world's problems ie original sin.
- Women or 'movable property' are 'cast out' when they don't have an 'owner' or husband/father. In many countries they still are. The only other traditional owners a woman could go to were a 'pimp', by becoming a whore, or staying officaily still a daughter ie 'a daughter of christ' to be 'managed' by a new mother the 'mother superior' in a convent.
The only exceptions where women could actually 'own themselves', were by becoming either a 'widow' or a 'witch'. Historically society had quite a bit of trouble distinguishing these two. Witch trials were a sham, but basically the real difference is simply the widow does not have sex again and the witch did have sex again. The trial and the issue is really about the sexual freedom of women.
A free sexual woman was a dangerous woman and should be threatened in the most horrible way possible ie to be burned alive. Just like slaves are when they away from their owners. They are burned alive in a lynching. Fear is the psychological tool for cheap slavery maintenance. You dont need an army when you have Guilt and Fear at your disposal, already programmed in to the slaves.
I believe women are afraid to fully explore their sexual freedom for these reasons buried in the unconscious. I have not met a woman who does not seem to be a slave-in-recovery on some level, there is a very particular flavour to this fear. I also think this has an equivalent counter effect on men, where men feel unconsciously guilty of being the 'slave owner' even though on the conscious side they feel good about the power women 'naturally' give away to them as 'superior' men. So in a way, men are slaves to women being slaves to men. I just think of it as a victim of a victim, who starts the a merry dance.
In this context, taking a view of common women's magazines can look like seeing manuals on how to be a good slave, with material on tips and tricks on 'how to please your man' that to me reads like a manual on 'how do I keep my slave master happy so I get more treats' and stuff all about 'other peoples lives' that can read like 'don't think about your own life, you're a slave, so that would be painful, here is a better alternative to believe in' But so a lot of this applies to men too but that story is more about 'who you are by what you do out there'
Women still seem to buy into a slavery story on many levels and it seems to help support a conflicted love/hate relationship with men in general. And then I think the men get even more confused, or maybe just I do.
This morning I realised that what we had was a hidden case of Stockholm Syndrome in the unconscious dance. Stockholm Syndrome is the term used to describe a paradoxical psychological phenomenon wherein hostages express adulation and have positive feelings towards their captors, that appear irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims.
The most well-known (if infrequently acknowledged) victim of this syndrome is the female protagonist in the story of Beauty and the Beast. In the original version of the tale, the girl is captured by the beast and asked daily at dinner-time whether or not she loves him.
Its like this story is told in preparation for the slavery to come for a young girl.
"Stockholm syndrome is named after the Norrmalmstorg robbery of Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg in Stockholm, in which the bank robbers held bank employees hostage from August 23 to August 28, 1973. In this case, the victims became emotionally attached to their captors, and even defended them after they were freed from their six-day ordeal."
"Psychiatrist Frank Ochberg, widely credited with Stockholm Syndrome's psychiatric definition, describes it as 'a primitive gratitude for the gift of life,' not unlike that felt by an infant"
In a world where its not OK to not have an owner, I can understand how it could feel scary to become free of one. And at the same time be desperate for the security an owner could provide. The double whammy for women is that the 'owner' is then mixed with the psychological feelings of a father figure that adds a powerful emotional drive into the mix.
"According to the psychoanalytic view of the syndrome, this tendency might be the result of employing the strategy evolved by newborn babies to form an emotional attachment to the nearest powerful adult in order to maximize the probability that this adult will enable—at the very least—the survival of the child, if not also prove to be a good parental figure."
"An inverse of Stockholm syndrome called "Lima syndrome" has been proposed, in which abductors develop sympathy for their hostages." I wonder if this happens for men in some unconscious way.
Is your relationship a Lima-Stockholm thing ?
What I'm talking about how this is sitting there in the unconscious mind playing out all the time but through the cultural patterns that have been established around making it OK to be that way. Could do with a good clean out I think.
Yin a slave of Yang. There are two ways out for Yin.
1. Be more Yang than Yang and over power. But then your not Yin any more.
2. Be more Yin and let it all flow through.
Which is true and what does it look like ?
Saturday, December 04, 2010
A Time to Die
I have not written for a while as my energies have been focussed around moving the Earthsim project forward. As things there come more and more into line I can raise my head and look around again to see the funny old world I stand in.
As winter closes in and the last few leaves dangle spinning in the wind, its a time to let go and prepare for a shut-down into and through the darkness.
I see metaphor of dangling leaves all around me in the mayastic world. I get excited watching the financial system, such an icon of yang imbalance, now left hobbling along as a bloated puss filled beast eating faster and faster, trying to survive the natural chaos of nature as it tickles and dances around ready to consume the debris of the inevitable.
It's fun to speculate how things will actually transpire. Here is my best guess from a brief look at the scene over the last day or so.
To delay a full systemic collapse I think the euro will become a scapegoat, a focus point if you like, to keep people's eye off the core issue (the dollar) for just that bit longer. It's an easy target and just as Latin America found, you can't have a half/half of pegged currencies + separate countries with their own markets. Its easy picking for speculators to milk that system. It will die with the weakest links being taken to the cleaners first, as Iceland, Greece, Ireland etc are discovering.
Excitingly over the last two years, all the world's major markets have come into synch, all joining the last waltz as the grand finale plays out. They all rise and fall together to the beat of the dollar's rhythm, as it goes down, they do too.
We have had paper or 'fiat' money systems many times on this planet, the experiment is tried, tested and super clear to anyone who would care to look. 'fiat' is a good word for fake money as it always collapses, the average time to collapse is 42 years. The dollar was moved fiat in 71, we have 2 years left to hit that historical midpoint.
Is it a good thing for our financial system to collapse ?
I would rather it did not, but only if there were people who cared to fix it. There are not, nor will there be. You see fiat money systems benefit only two groups of people. 1. Governments and 2. Banks. The employees of each rotate between each other in another sickly dance, there will be no fix except through collapse.
So I am for accelerating the collapse and getting on with the fix. Its a time for things to die.
Earlier this year another key scam in the system was exposed:
"Andrew Maguire & Adrian Douglas Discuss What Could Be the Largest Fraud in History - Andrew is an independent metals trader turned whistle blower at the center of a storm for exposing what could be the largest fraud in history involving countries, banks and government leaders."
The major precious metals markets are rigged (as are many other supposedly free markets) the prices of gold and silver are artificially kept down.
Why is this relevant ?
This is a way of keeping the fiat system alive.. it's actually the secret to how this fiat zombie has kept walking so long. why? If you can keep precious metals prices down, fiat money will live on for just that bit longer. The zombie is now eating countries through bogus 'austerity measures'.
The story is now getting out and what's even better is that there is a way to hit the system to help it collapse quicker, the zombie needs to go down before it eats you.
"Eric Cantona has taken it upon himself to promote a revolution against the banking oligarchy calling for everyone to take their money out of the banks"
Well the famous philosopher is half onto something.. Sure get your money out of banks but you need to do better than stash it under your mattress as monopoly notes, that may hurt a bank but it does you no good at all.
Buy silver and gold now and move your money into something physical and real.
Get Physical !
Here is the best thing I have come across yet..
"Buy Silver and Help Crash JP Morgan" is the google bomb search term if you want to investigate.
It is well explained here:
Watch this space 2011 is going to be a very exciting year !
===========================================
Note on Fiat Money.
Fiat or paper money is a way of stealing physical assets from society. Its a simple scam..
1. Get everyone to use paper money, ie get them to value and trade their 'physical assets' with this monopoly money.
2. Keep printing more monopoly money and lending it to people fulling the 'boom bust' cycle we all know and love.. (you hear this regularly on the news.. every 'bail out' is one of these.. ie the fed or bank of england 'injects' cash into the system.. they just made up more monopoly dollars) Constantly printing more money progressively makes everything that is actually valued in those notes less and less valuable or the prices have to keep inflating (you end-up with a half/half of each).
3. On every 'bust' of the cycle the banks take more possession of the physical assets as companies and mortgage payers are unable to repay the loans (which were of fake money 'created' money anyways).
4. Keep the cycle going as long as you can to regularly 'milk' the assets away from the people for as long as you can until the fiat system inevitably collapses.
Everyone in power (banks+govt) wants to keep this great system going for as long as possible, it pays great. The problem for them is how to delay the inevitable collapse.
As more and more money is printed, value drops, this is best seen in the prices of precious metals like gold and silver. The prices start rising as the paper money gets worth less and less. People with their ear to the ground start moving their savings to these 'fixed tangibles'
So a good way of delaying fiat collapse is to keep metals prices down. This has been discovered to be happening all over the place. One example is how people have been sold gold and silver (as contracts) but the don't have the physical stuff.. It is stored in bank vaults. When journalists go to the bank vaults they find it has been sold up to 100 times to 1. When everyone demands the real physical stuff it will blow up.
As winter closes in and the last few leaves dangle spinning in the wind, its a time to let go and prepare for a shut-down into and through the darkness.
I see metaphor of dangling leaves all around me in the mayastic world. I get excited watching the financial system, such an icon of yang imbalance, now left hobbling along as a bloated puss filled beast eating faster and faster, trying to survive the natural chaos of nature as it tickles and dances around ready to consume the debris of the inevitable.
It's fun to speculate how things will actually transpire. Here is my best guess from a brief look at the scene over the last day or so.
To delay a full systemic collapse I think the euro will become a scapegoat, a focus point if you like, to keep people's eye off the core issue (the dollar) for just that bit longer. It's an easy target and just as Latin America found, you can't have a half/half of pegged currencies + separate countries with their own markets. Its easy picking for speculators to milk that system. It will die with the weakest links being taken to the cleaners first, as Iceland, Greece, Ireland etc are discovering.
Excitingly over the last two years, all the world's major markets have come into synch, all joining the last waltz as the grand finale plays out. They all rise and fall together to the beat of the dollar's rhythm, as it goes down, they do too.
We have had paper or 'fiat' money systems many times on this planet, the experiment is tried, tested and super clear to anyone who would care to look. 'fiat' is a good word for fake money as it always collapses, the average time to collapse is 42 years. The dollar was moved fiat in 71, we have 2 years left to hit that historical midpoint.
Is it a good thing for our financial system to collapse ?
I would rather it did not, but only if there were people who cared to fix it. There are not, nor will there be. You see fiat money systems benefit only two groups of people. 1. Governments and 2. Banks. The employees of each rotate between each other in another sickly dance, there will be no fix except through collapse.
So I am for accelerating the collapse and getting on with the fix. Its a time for things to die.
Earlier this year another key scam in the system was exposed:
"Andrew Maguire & Adrian Douglas Discuss What Could Be the Largest Fraud in History - Andrew is an independent metals trader turned whistle blower at the center of a storm for exposing what could be the largest fraud in history involving countries, banks and government leaders."
The major precious metals markets are rigged (as are many other supposedly free markets) the prices of gold and silver are artificially kept down.
Why is this relevant ?
This is a way of keeping the fiat system alive.. it's actually the secret to how this fiat zombie has kept walking so long. why? If you can keep precious metals prices down, fiat money will live on for just that bit longer. The zombie is now eating countries through bogus 'austerity measures'.
The story is now getting out and what's even better is that there is a way to hit the system to help it collapse quicker, the zombie needs to go down before it eats you.
"Eric Cantona has taken it upon himself to promote a revolution against the banking oligarchy calling for everyone to take their money out of the banks"
Well the famous philosopher is half onto something.. Sure get your money out of banks but you need to do better than stash it under your mattress as monopoly notes, that may hurt a bank but it does you no good at all.
Buy silver and gold now and move your money into something physical and real.
Get Physical !
Here is the best thing I have come across yet..
"Buy Silver and Help Crash JP Morgan" is the google bomb search term if you want to investigate.
It is well explained here:
Watch this space 2011 is going to be a very exciting year !
===========================================
Note on Fiat Money.
Fiat or paper money is a way of stealing physical assets from society. Its a simple scam..
1. Get everyone to use paper money, ie get them to value and trade their 'physical assets' with this monopoly money.
2. Keep printing more monopoly money and lending it to people fulling the 'boom bust' cycle we all know and love.. (you hear this regularly on the news.. every 'bail out' is one of these.. ie the fed or bank of england 'injects' cash into the system.. they just made up more monopoly dollars) Constantly printing more money progressively makes everything that is actually valued in those notes less and less valuable or the prices have to keep inflating (you end-up with a half/half of each).
3. On every 'bust' of the cycle the banks take more possession of the physical assets as companies and mortgage payers are unable to repay the loans (which were of fake money 'created' money anyways).
4. Keep the cycle going as long as you can to regularly 'milk' the assets away from the people for as long as you can until the fiat system inevitably collapses.
Everyone in power (banks+govt) wants to keep this great system going for as long as possible, it pays great. The problem for them is how to delay the inevitable collapse.
As more and more money is printed, value drops, this is best seen in the prices of precious metals like gold and silver. The prices start rising as the paper money gets worth less and less. People with their ear to the ground start moving their savings to these 'fixed tangibles'
So a good way of delaying fiat collapse is to keep metals prices down. This has been discovered to be happening all over the place. One example is how people have been sold gold and silver (as contracts) but the don't have the physical stuff.. It is stored in bank vaults. When journalists go to the bank vaults they find it has been sold up to 100 times to 1. When everyone demands the real physical stuff it will blow up.
Friday, August 27, 2010
'science' of how the sun talks to us
Going to be brief on this one.. You can put the pieces together.
If you dont know about the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton, I think you should
The Noosphere Project
In summary its all about how global events are linked to random numbers. The 'significant' discovery is that when a major event happens, there are fluctuations in randomness that can be measured in random number generators spread around the world. Events can sometimes even be foreshadowed by these fluctuations. This implies there is some sort of field of consciousness that influences us and events. And that the perturbations in that consciousness are measurable in the flow of randomness away from a true statistical mean.
OK you got that.
The Strange Case of Solar Flares and Radioactive Elements
So now we find out that solar activity can affect the decay of radioactive elements. Nice.. Why, well because originally it was this decay that was used to measure true randomness for experiments like the noosphere project above (its not any more because they have found better random number generators).
So we have shown that the random numbers that affected global events are affected by solar activity. So the sun talks to us.
If it can be shown that all random number generators exhibit this effect then you are really on for a brain strain as you have the complete 'scientific' link right there.
So the sun communicates to the consciousness field of the earth. One of the ways we notice it expressing itself is through solar activity such as sunspots..
Now maybe you don't need that stodgy old science to catch-up with what you could feel already.
If you were interested in listening to what the sun was saying.. check out my other post on what it feels like. Now, would you say a brick didn't exist if you saw it land on your foot.
Can I feel what the sun says
Part 1
If you dont know about the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton, I think you should
The Noosphere Project
In summary its all about how global events are linked to random numbers. The 'significant' discovery is that when a major event happens, there are fluctuations in randomness that can be measured in random number generators spread around the world. Events can sometimes even be foreshadowed by these fluctuations. This implies there is some sort of field of consciousness that influences us and events. And that the perturbations in that consciousness are measurable in the flow of randomness away from a true statistical mean.
OK you got that.
Part 2
The Strange Case of Solar Flares and Radioactive Elements
So now we find out that solar activity can affect the decay of radioactive elements. Nice.. Why, well because originally it was this decay that was used to measure true randomness for experiments like the noosphere project above (its not any more because they have found better random number generators).
So we have shown that the random numbers that affected global events are affected by solar activity. So the sun talks to us.
If it can be shown that all random number generators exhibit this effect then you are really on for a brain strain as you have the complete 'scientific' link right there.
So the sun communicates to the consciousness field of the earth. One of the ways we notice it expressing itself is through solar activity such as sunspots..
Now maybe you don't need that stodgy old science to catch-up with what you could feel already.
If you were interested in listening to what the sun was saying.. check out my other post on what it feels like. Now, would you say a brick didn't exist if you saw it land on your foot.
Can I feel what the sun says
Monday, August 16, 2010
Friday, August 13, 2010
Surfing the deep waves
I have started playing the piano again after quite a break.. I feel the emotions surge through me these days, stronger than ever, i have so much less shame in me about letting its all hang out so my playing just keeps opening up as I do, its great to let it all out through music and movement.
---
Its a land of extremes as I go deeper and deeper into my inner world.
I have to accept and enjoy my killer to enjoy my saint. It a paradox as everything is in there, sadness, joy, anger, hate, love, fear, attractions, repulsions, contractions and expansions. I have been surfing the deep waves and I like it there. You are here too.
Freedom and opening comes when I'm not judging but allowing myself to be whatever is there in the deep water, it wants to move in me. Sometimes that has felt pretty unpleasant. The hardest places to allow for me are the destructive forces there. Allowing myself to be seen as destructive and really feel that as a part of me is scary.
Uncompromising me means being with whatever is there and allow its impact on the world. No holding it in and no editing, scary and super exhilarational because actually, I have not the faintest clue what's going on or who I am.
So I keep opening, in the depths of me, i touch a raging fire, it wants to move, i feel my wanting to hold and control, a wanting me to be a certain way, an idea of me, it hurts to try to be an idea, so I let it free. It hurts someone else, or does it, i don't really know but i feel even more vulnerable as it moves out into the world.
I feel more life and my body softens, i sense more space inside and the life force in me grows as i release yet an other idea of who I was trying to be
Dropping into a unknowing deeper deep, I unfold to look around again, and I find you there with me. I lose the line between where I end and you start, or are you simply there in me ?
---
---
Its a land of extremes as I go deeper and deeper into my inner world.
I have to accept and enjoy my killer to enjoy my saint. It a paradox as everything is in there, sadness, joy, anger, hate, love, fear, attractions, repulsions, contractions and expansions. I have been surfing the deep waves and I like it there. You are here too.
Freedom and opening comes when I'm not judging but allowing myself to be whatever is there in the deep water, it wants to move in me. Sometimes that has felt pretty unpleasant. The hardest places to allow for me are the destructive forces there. Allowing myself to be seen as destructive and really feel that as a part of me is scary.
Uncompromising me means being with whatever is there and allow its impact on the world. No holding it in and no editing, scary and super exhilarational because actually, I have not the faintest clue what's going on or who I am.
So I keep opening, in the depths of me, i touch a raging fire, it wants to move, i feel my wanting to hold and control, a wanting me to be a certain way, an idea of me, it hurts to try to be an idea, so I let it free. It hurts someone else, or does it, i don't really know but i feel even more vulnerable as it moves out into the world.
I feel more life and my body softens, i sense more space inside and the life force in me grows as i release yet an other idea of who I was trying to be
Dropping into a unknowing deeper deep, I unfold to look around again, and I find you there with me. I lose the line between where I end and you start, or are you simply there in me ?
---
Monday, August 09, 2010
Solar Flares a go go
The Sun is waking up after a nearly 10-year sleep, there has been some major activity recently and the sun seems headed toward another period of pronounced activity, expected for 2013, the last of which occurred in 2001.
"On August 1st around 0855 UT, Earth orbiting satellites detected a C3-class solar flare. The origin of the blast was Earth-facing sunspot 1092. C-class solar flares are small (when compared to X and M-class flares) and usually have few noticeable consequences here on Earth besides aurorae. This one has spawned a coronal mass ejection heading in Earth’s direction."
“This eruption is directed right at us, and is expected to get here early in the day on August 4th,” according to astronomer Leon Golub. “It’s the first major Earth-directed eruption in quite some time.”
I felt this one hit and some aftershocks. Over the years I have been checking out how they affect me, I was aware of the activity last time around in 2000-2001. This time around I am getting much clearer on how they actually feel as they come in.
This was a biggie, a challenge to stay present right trough it. But also quite a treat to check out, I had to take the time out, take it really easy and stay tuned in. If I don't do that, I find them destabilising on my system, they can really push my field around. Its great to practice with as a sensitivity training.
If I stay locked into the earth's field, that where I find I can feel it. At the simplest level I feel it like a push forward, a shift or an acceleration of vibrational feeling.
I have noticed they take 3-4 days from the eruption to when I feel anything, which about matches the journey time for the solar particles to hit the earth's field, then there is about 1-2 days of wobble and rebalancing as the earth's field settles into a stable state again. The other thing that I notice is how it affects the people around me, that can take up to one more week before they seem affected.
I put this down to people levels of connection to the earth's field, as I normally see it hit people over period as they sort of 'soak up' the field shift. And the most disconnected, don't seem affected at all.
Here's the vid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thm6SCv-sj0
And on august 7 there was another big one that is just passing us by right now but its a glancer not a direct hitter.
"On August 7th (1825 UT), magnetic fields around sunspot 1093 became unstable and erupted, producing a strong M1-class solar flare. Several amateur astronomers caught the active region in mid-flare, while NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded an extreme ultraviolet movie of the entire event. The eruption hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space, just missing a direct sun-Earth line. Forecasters expect the cloud to deliver no more than a glancing blow to our planet's magnetic field when it billows by on August 9th or 10th--not a major space weather event."
"On August 1st around 0855 UT, Earth orbiting satellites detected a C3-class solar flare. The origin of the blast was Earth-facing sunspot 1092. C-class solar flares are small (when compared to X and M-class flares) and usually have few noticeable consequences here on Earth besides aurorae. This one has spawned a coronal mass ejection heading in Earth’s direction."
“This eruption is directed right at us, and is expected to get here early in the day on August 4th,” according to astronomer Leon Golub. “It’s the first major Earth-directed eruption in quite some time.”
I felt this one hit and some aftershocks. Over the years I have been checking out how they affect me, I was aware of the activity last time around in 2000-2001. This time around I am getting much clearer on how they actually feel as they come in.
This was a biggie, a challenge to stay present right trough it. But also quite a treat to check out, I had to take the time out, take it really easy and stay tuned in. If I don't do that, I find them destabilising on my system, they can really push my field around. Its great to practice with as a sensitivity training.
If I stay locked into the earth's field, that where I find I can feel it. At the simplest level I feel it like a push forward, a shift or an acceleration of vibrational feeling.
I have noticed they take 3-4 days from the eruption to when I feel anything, which about matches the journey time for the solar particles to hit the earth's field, then there is about 1-2 days of wobble and rebalancing as the earth's field settles into a stable state again. The other thing that I notice is how it affects the people around me, that can take up to one more week before they seem affected.
I put this down to people levels of connection to the earth's field, as I normally see it hit people over period as they sort of 'soak up' the field shift. And the most disconnected, don't seem affected at all.
Here's the vid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thm6SCv-sj0
And on august 7 there was another big one that is just passing us by right now but its a glancer not a direct hitter.
"On August 7th (1825 UT), magnetic fields around sunspot 1093 became unstable and erupted, producing a strong M1-class solar flare. Several amateur astronomers caught the active region in mid-flare, while NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded an extreme ultraviolet movie of the entire event. The eruption hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space, just missing a direct sun-Earth line. Forecasters expect the cloud to deliver no more than a glancing blow to our planet's magnetic field when it billows by on August 9th or 10th--not a major space weather event."
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
Empty
Is it lost to be empty or is it full of it all ?
A limbo state without debate but a perfect slate which can never be late.
I want to hold on but I am lost when I try. I dont know very much really and I certainly dont understand. But I know whatever I want when I let it in.
What a fusser about empty things.
And then I walk outside and see the most perfect complete rainbow I ever saw. It feels very happy to see it.
A limbo state without debate but a perfect slate which can never be late.
I want to hold on but I am lost when I try. I dont know very much really and I certainly dont understand. But I know whatever I want when I let it in.
What a fusser about empty things.
And then I walk outside and see the most perfect complete rainbow I ever saw. It feels very happy to see it.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Alive
I have never felt so open and alive, so vulnerable and so connected, so out of control and so OK. So soft and so sweet. But uncompromising all the same.
Why do I feel uncompromising ? When I feel truly OK, I seem to lose the feeling of any reason to compromise. In any way.
Its OK to be alive as every breath moves my blood from head to toe. My body an instant in the infinity. But it is my home for that fleet moment, I love my home.
I feel available to real choice, to doing anything, that feels good, for everyone involved, without compromise. That is my true body. But without my physical body how could I ever know that.
Changes move as I do. And so do you.
Why do I feel uncompromising ? When I feel truly OK, I seem to lose the feeling of any reason to compromise. In any way.
Its OK to be alive as every breath moves my blood from head to toe. My body an instant in the infinity. But it is my home for that fleet moment, I love my home.
I feel available to real choice, to doing anything, that feels good, for everyone involved, without compromise. That is my true body. But without my physical body how could I ever know that.
Changes move as I do. And so do you.
Multidimensional Imaginings
All i know is me. As all I can know is relation to that. Everything else can not be real, it is imaginary. But i know the reality in all imaginings as my relation to those imaginings.
Things change and I exist as the relational experience of change. It happens in me not too me. I change and so do you if you know me. I suspect you do even if you don't.
It seems a good idea to be practising an aware non-resistance to all experience, to smooth the way to expanding my experience of me.
If everything out there is an imagining I can cultivate the belief ‘If its happening now, that's what i needs to be happening or it would not be happening’ fully responsible and victimless.
Response able means to have the ability to validate what's happening now, present in it, if I don't like it, I can consciously change my response to it. (a habitual response is not response able. Stop, Maybe i want a new me.)
I change my universe on a penny when i stop to realise i can. The only thing that defines if i stay in any new universe is me. I validate the reality or invalidate it to choose again. It can be conscious or unconscious. I create my cage the moment I forget this. I need a cage to have the experience of growing out of a cage. Its all OK. The meaning I provide determines the effect in my experience and I step into that new reality.
I cultivate my imagining into a multidimensional expansion of i am. Its all ways me so why not add more to my all. why ? if its fun. So why not pick a fun imagining.
Its a choice in the play to see it my way. If its not my way and i see it as not my way, I have imagined myself a cage again, was that really fun. It can be, if I did it, I will let it be, to be less then more is still a cool door.
My imagination is the superhighway to all information flows to reach my conscious now experience. My portal to all dimensions and all existences, past, future, present and parallel. Multidimensional in nature, my nature, sensitive to non-ordinary and ordinary realities intertwined and experienced as me now. The more I allow this, the more I find my deeper expanded identity.
I move beyond conventional boundaries of experience and I move back again.
Its a cloudy day in London, I feel open and endless.
Be master of yourself-everywhere. And all you do proves true.
Zen saying
Things change and I exist as the relational experience of change. It happens in me not too me. I change and so do you if you know me. I suspect you do even if you don't.
It seems a good idea to be practising an aware non-resistance to all experience, to smooth the way to expanding my experience of me.
If everything out there is an imagining I can cultivate the belief ‘If its happening now, that's what i needs to be happening or it would not be happening’ fully responsible and victimless.
Response able means to have the ability to validate what's happening now, present in it, if I don't like it, I can consciously change my response to it. (a habitual response is not response able. Stop, Maybe i want a new me.)
I change my universe on a penny when i stop to realise i can. The only thing that defines if i stay in any new universe is me. I validate the reality or invalidate it to choose again. It can be conscious or unconscious. I create my cage the moment I forget this. I need a cage to have the experience of growing out of a cage. Its all OK. The meaning I provide determines the effect in my experience and I step into that new reality.
I cultivate my imagining into a multidimensional expansion of i am. Its all ways me so why not add more to my all. why ? if its fun. So why not pick a fun imagining.
Its a choice in the play to see it my way. If its not my way and i see it as not my way, I have imagined myself a cage again, was that really fun. It can be, if I did it, I will let it be, to be less then more is still a cool door.
My imagination is the superhighway to all information flows to reach my conscious now experience. My portal to all dimensions and all existences, past, future, present and parallel. Multidimensional in nature, my nature, sensitive to non-ordinary and ordinary realities intertwined and experienced as me now. The more I allow this, the more I find my deeper expanded identity.
I move beyond conventional boundaries of experience and I move back again.
Its a cloudy day in London, I feel open and endless.
Be master of yourself-everywhere. And all you do proves true.
Zen saying
Saturday, July 03, 2010
carry bag
Amazing how much stuff coming up and letting go. Put up a fight to hold on.
I stopped feeding and carrying a load of people over the last six months. Its taken the lid of a whole bunch of stuff. All bubbling up now, but I clearly see why I was doing it all as it moves on. Unworth and victim vamp, anger about it and a load of shame to hold it all in. Is it really me.
Nice to finally be letting go of that story. Its quite an identity. Without it I even more get to do what I want. But what is that ? scarily I have to do it moment to moment. Feel my way, cant plan much any-more as its too mental. Even more feeling. Its like there are no ends or edges in this place.
I stopped feeding and carrying a load of people over the last six months. Its taken the lid of a whole bunch of stuff. All bubbling up now, but I clearly see why I was doing it all as it moves on. Unworth and victim vamp, anger about it and a load of shame to hold it all in. Is it really me.
Nice to finally be letting go of that story. Its quite an identity. Without it I even more get to do what I want. But what is that ? scarily I have to do it moment to moment. Feel my way, cant plan much any-more as its too mental. Even more feeling. Its like there are no ends or edges in this place.
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