NanoTexts Final

2. Plurk: Without it the class would not be the class. Using the texts we have read in class explain how plurk fits in with the issues of technology and the human body that we have discussed thus far.

Our physical bodies can no longer keep up with the amount of communication that is required to solve the complex problems we endeavor. Technology bridges the gap between what is possible and what is desired by increasing the quantity of communication and number of communication vehicles and inputs available.
The number of communication vehicles has been increasing rapidly since the advent of printing in the 15th Unfortunately, the speed with which we are able to use these mediums has lagged far behind. The improvements in the accessibility and rapidity of print media afforded by the industrial revolution brought the ability to disseminate information and ideas a first very large step closer. We were still far removed. Video was only possible with a production house—mass print communication only possible by a print shop. Today the Internet making that next great step for all media formats. Rapidly we are beginning to bring the ability to communicate instantly in multiple mediums inside ourselves. At the moment, the ability lies at the end of our fingertips in our laptops or in the palm of our hand on our smartphones. The texts we have read in class show the ultimate destination of this steady progression—instant and seamless externalization of our internal dialogue. By bringing minds together, information sharing is increasing the processing time of the collective human consciousness, into a unified super-colony. From January 6th to March 11th 66 students proffered their computational cycles to the Nanotexts superorganism. This distributed consciousness manifested itself on the social networking platform known as Plurk.
Plurk’s primary functionality was to assemble and disseminate opportunities for relevant inspiration. By posting links on Plurk, we were able to share real world instances of the fantastic situations related to the novels, and work toward a larger conceptualization. Communication using the human body is stifled by the physical proximity constraints of sight and sound. We are not able to truly experience the same things at the same time. Instant dissemination of multi-media over the Internet is unconstrained by physical proximity.
Through Plurk our class was better able to concurrently process the same issues feeding more quickly off a larger amount of input than otherwise possible. What was the supreme purpose? The end result? Postsingular’s Orphid Net and Ribofunk’s parallel processing networks controlled and directed the collective processing power of many, with a central entity drawing on the processed information to reach an objective. The corporations, the Urb, the Big Pig feed off the minds of many to achieve their goals. We draw similar parallels in our class. The Kiqqies received the benefit of expanded consciousness for a time only to forget immediately it after unplugging. This Kiqqie intends to unplug March 17th at 3:00pm. The Big Pig remains, learning, and assembling with grand machinations of controlling everything. Our Big Pig is Tony Prichard and he is already Plurking my replacement.


3. Animals and Machines: our texts have been filled with both of these things. Working with Ronell & Kac’s text Life Extreme, make a case for the difference between animals and machines. Is there such a difference? And where do humans fit in all of this?
Ronnell & Kac’s Life Extreme cites Heidegger when proposing that humans are different from animals because they have biography. They are destined to die and “not merely perish” as an animal does. Humans live conscious of their own mortality. Humans find the reduction of animals to industrial inputs abhorrent when they assign human qualities of biography and consciousness of destiny to those inputs. “I allow myself to read a moment in my own most biography through the “featherless biped,” my companion species” “I recognize someone I know in the haggard expression of shorn being”. Chickens bred for efficiency of consumption remind us of the ways humans are raised to fit into the societal machine.
Society as a machine has been reflected in metaphor and popular culture since the industrial revolution. Humans have viewed themselves as part of clockwork, an assembly line, and more recently a computer system. Examples: Welcome to the Machine, another cog in the wheel, Rage Against the Machine. We say it explicitly and devote departments to it. The Human Resources department manage inputs of a process the same as our “featherless biped” companions. Ronnell & Kac cite the case of the cyborg “replicants” of Blade Runner with respect to the difference between humans and machines. The tests replicants must pass in order to be determined human is a recollection of a mother, an origin. Ronnel and Kac propose that humans view themselves as different because machines are not conscious of their origin and animals are not conscious of their mortality. But this is a “so called supremacy”. Humans who are bullied by the societal machine of their creation genetically bully the organisms beneath them. The Life Extreme exposes our treatment of animals as creating inputs of a machine, but reminds us we do not fair much better. We are machines making machines in a machine.

4.Filth/Censorship/Mores/Sexuality and Technology: There have been interesting reactions to both The Ticket that Exploded and The Filth. In each instance the resistance to these texts has been given voice in a variety of forms (on plurk, blog entries, and in classroom discussions). How does each of these formats allow for anonymity or not? And then consider for example the consumption of porn in red states: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/27/red-states-consume-m.html. How then do the positions put forward by Burroughs and Morrison allow one to read the real world phenomena of porn consumption: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16680-porn-in-the-usa-conservatives-are-biggest-consumers.html. Again another question that one might consider in this question is: why does pornography work?

Newton’s Third Law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Base human desires are universal, but the degree of repression fluctuates. Burroughs and Morrision create worlds that represent human desires reacting to extreme repression. One is a world with a supreme force mandated to wipe out derivations from a grand plot. The other is a plot tearing itself apart in order to continue in it’s own way. The harder censoring forces push populations to restrict freedoms, the harder those same populations will push back. Recent examples of populations reacting to censorship are the Chinese Mud-Grass Horse Internet phenomenon and the consumption of Internet porn in red states.
The Chinese phenomenon follows a recent communist crackdown on democratic intellectuals under the guise of regulating Chinese Internet porn providers and. The red state porn link follows two decades of marrying political and religious affiliation in America. In the Chinese case, dissent was able to express itself by detaching word from meaning in the form of vulgar puns. Creative media content with innocuous word combinations with vulgar pronunciations spread virally over the internet. Fictional narratives with characters bearing vulgar puns of censorship issues for names spread like wild fire. The Chinese reaction circumvented computer-censoring equipment. The only course of action to stop the spread of the vulgar pun would be to also censor the innocuous language as well—and action that would begin and endless pursuit of meaning and word. As word get detached from its meaning, it risks a convoluted scenario not unlike The Ticket that Exploded.
A conservative legal restriction in American red states banning the sale of pornographic materials receives its own reaction. The Internet does not grant complete anonymity, but gives a semblance. And in light of social pressure not to view these materials, a population finds its outlet. There is no viral porn backlash because freedom finds another route. The equal and opposite reaction reveals itself in anonymous credit card transaction 10% above the national average every day but Sunday.
In Nanotexts, the problem is different. Plurk, blog entries, and a disembodied voice from the back of a classroom insert a degree of separation, which falls short of anonymity. Our names are available but not obvious. This is a similarity to the case of internet porn consumption. However, the anonymity is not needed in Nanotexts because vulgar expression is often necessary and encouraged. In this case, the equal and opposite reaction manifests in self-censoring. Are students who are told to push back less likely or more likely to do so? The reaction will also likely be a less definitive reaction because grades are also on the line. Students want to be recognized and receive credit for their contributions, but positive feedback to a pseudonym is not the same as positive feedback to the actual self. Here we reach another paradox—the things, which we are rewarded for in one dimension, will not necessarily bring rewards in the other. We are Greg Feelys being rewarded for the work of Ned Slade. Instead of a clear direction for the reaction as shown in Red States and Mud-Horses, Nanotext class is pulled by the factors: social grading, academic grading, and encouraged uninhibition. Anonyminity encourages output in terms of being graded socially by our peers who may consider us perverts, the rewards we get academically may lose emotional value, and being encouraged to discuss rectal parasite sex in class…will end this discussion.

Emails and She-males

The old man drills the college teen during class,
Acai WeightLoss drops pounds from Oprah's ass.
Young lesbians try sex with a man,
Send out as many as you can.
Sildenafil citrate to make you long,
Doesn't matter if they respond.
You've inherited 10 milliion,
Send them out by the billion.

Ribofunk Ending: The God Particle-Urb Connection

"Not puppets. Beloved components, say rather. Were you never grateful and kind to your own cells? Eventually, I believe I'll withdraw, grant you free will-- almost without limits. Allow you all to forget I even exist. Modify myself so that no trace of me can be detected even on the submolecular level. Be content to dwell beneath the surface of things. ."
~Ribofunk p.295~
And why not? This could very well be reality. This is not science fiction. Scientists around the word are now trying to discover if there is in fact a grand Urb lurking beneath the surface. In National Geographic's March 2008 article, "The God Particle", the recently completed European Large Hadron Collider is described as doing nearly the same thing in a hunt for the ultimate nano. "The standard model can't explain several towering mysteries about the universe that have their roots in the minuscule world of particles and forces. If there's one truly extraordinary concept to emerge from the past century of inquiry, it's that the cosmos we see was once smaller than an atom. This is why particle physicists talk about cosmology and cosmologists talk about particle physics: Our existence, our entire universe, emerged from things that happened at the smallest imaginable scale." "Most physicists believe that there must be a Higgs field that pervades all space; the Higgs particle(God Particle) would be the carrier of the field and would interact with other particles, sort of the way a Jedi knight in Star Wars is the carrier of the 'force.'"
This similarity between what scientist are trying to discover and what the Urb was revealing to Greenlaw was the ultimate shock for me. Greenlaw's grand finale of unifying truth could be my own. The Higgs Particle, or God Particle, may be the urb "dwelling beneath the surface of things". I think it is awesome. I am all about being a collection of Urb spore. In a way, it is an improvement upon a random disassociated existence. Aren't we even now in this class striving to become one whole Plurk Organism? This is the ideal of our species. "The Urb gently and sincerely kissed itself". Isn't sincerity all that we can ask for?

Lipogram: The Lord's Prayer without Cephalopodheat

Lipogram: The Lord's Prayer without Cephalopodheat
Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen.
.
.
.
r Fr, wr in vn,
w y Nm.
y kingm m.
y w b n,
n r i is in vn.
Giv us is y ur ily br.
n frgiv us ur rssss,
s w frgiv s w rsss gins us.
n us n n min,
But ivr us frm vi.
Fr in is kingm,
nwr, n gry,
fr vr n vr.
mn.]

It all boils down to "giv us gin, frgiv us sin"

Top 10 Yahoo Search, Feb 24th

Oscar Com
Maria Sansone
Academy Awards
Rihanna
NASCAR
Hi-5
Club Penguin
IRS
Cate Blanchett
Chris Brown.

Chris Brown beat up on Rihanna at an Oscar's after party at Club Penguin.
The soul sensation was spotted recently at a NASCAR event with Maria Sansone.
Insiders say he'd been taxing that ass. The IRS is investigating.
In other news Cate Blanchett had her Academy Award rescinded after a ill-placed Hi-5...

Snowball? SNOWSTORM!

I do not like going around writing creative snowballs.

The Singularity, the Futurists, and the Mayfly

My cellphone makes me live so much faster, and doesn't that mean longer? In the same way that the multi-lensed eyes of the common housefly increase the amount of images processed and therefore slowdown the acceleration of the falling hand, wouldn't the increased processing time afforded by bionic implant technology lengthen our lives. Not in physical time but in perceived time. It is worth mentioning that the life span of the longest living specie of Mayfly is only 1 day. The exponential doubling of Jeezus may not represent our lives speeding up, but actually that acceleration of information may be slowing our lives down. The increase in lifespan is already upon us. But it is not in physical time, but in perceived time as related to the amount experienced.
In the apocalyptic time of Singularity, where the Futurists are seen to be dying in what seems to be an alarmingly short period of time to the un-augmented eyes of the Biological Fundamentalists, the perceived lifespan afforded by the Futurists' technology may actually be quite long. In this situation who could be said to be living longer? Or perhaps the Futurists would be living what appeared to be a normal lifespan to the Biological Fundamentalists, but really a perceived amount of time approaching immortality.

It Cuts Deep like a Writing Technique: The Spiral

It was us in a car accident and our brain when the real spinning stops—our damage afterward. It was our special big spinny messes—neither of us were better. I reached out like the way a mind keeps spinning—always spinning together. One day some people said cured. They said I was better even though you still can see us now— spinning without me. I got better—I was brain damage that spun us in circles in my stationary world. I’m still there once every 360 degrees. I tried to stop you and clutching, left you wondering. Bodies and spooning, I would have held us together for a lifetime. But you had spun so our minds could stay to spin and eventually you spun away from me. I stopped spinning—wondering what to still.

The Spiral

It was us in a car accident and our brain damage afterward. It was our special brain damage that spun us in circles. Like the way a mind keeps spinning when the real spinning stops. But our bodies spun so our minds could stay still. We were big spinny messes, but always spinning together. One day I stopped spinning. Some people said I got better, that I was cured. They said I was better even though you were still spinning without me. I can see us now—together once every 360 degrees. Neither of us were better. I reached out to you. I tried to stop you and clutching and spooning I would have held us together for a lifetime. But you had to spin and eventually you spun away from me. You left me wondering what to do in my stationary world. I’m still there, still wondering.

Adapting to the Fantastic World - This is the Ultimate.

The Ticket that Exploded is an agonizingly difficult book to read or follow. That being said, it is full of inspiring ways to think about the world. The notion of virus and the levels of reality that theme operate on is astounding. "Infectious Laughter" is a post in response to that. It goes nowhere near the mental backflips required to understand the things Burroughs is trying to tell us. The "Word" and "Nova crimes" are still beyond my grasp. But, I was impressed by the assertion that sex is nothing more than "two bodies trying to occupy the same three dimensional space simultaneously". If not on a metaphysical realm then at least understandable in a literal sense. The erotic thrill of being deep inside someone is the core erotiscm of spicing bodies, image and sound, together. How much deeper can you get than occupying the same place. Yeah baby, it's in. Is it all the way in, baby?
But come on, Burroughs! Where are the women!? All this rectal mucus is getting a bit much. What's wrong with a good old fashion vagina (vag, beaver, cunt, whatever!)?

Infectious Laughter N+7 Redux

The viscosity incubates in the marsh of the humming bird and is activated by laureate. Initial synchronizations reported as a 'funny felicity' followed by a fiver. Death by aspirin. The scrap sweeps the gloom -grab bags hysterical, comers tried for wardrobes, classified advertisements put to death mask. Suspension bridges left in stockbrokers. Only socks completely lacking a sensorium of humus survive. North Vietnam, Samuel L Jackson, and the entire mustache worm thrive.

Infectious Laughter

The virus incubates in the marrow of the humerus bone and is activated by laughter. Initial symptom reported as a 'funny feeling' followed by fits. Death by asphyxiation. The scourge sweeps the globe -governments hysterical, comedians tried for war crimes, class clowns put to death. Survivors left in stitches. Only societies completely lacking a sense of humor survive. North Korea, Samuel L Jackson, and the entire Muslim world thrive.