free knowledge vs. the intellectual trust

Most of us have love for this internet, but as a model for the pursuit of “free knowledge,” I must contest. The notion of a mass (or “open”) information consensus generator is not tantamount to “free knowledge,” as it says on the wikipedia homepage today. You do not need wikipedia, an internet connection or even property to pursue or express “free knowledge.” What we talk about when we talk about net neutrality is preserving our current intellectual trust, an open resource which, at this point, attaches some of us to our practices and most of us to what we deem valuable, but values change quickly. More quickly now than ever. What are we doing to anticipate those changes?

Consensus is possible because we can place our faith in the specialists around us, which may include ourselves (researchers, observers, cooks, so on). When we no longer trust the specialists or ourselves we can go above to the sources of those educations and put our trust in those things or add criticism and the consensus can be maintained. To attempt a deeper read than consensus falls beyond the boundaries of the current intellectual trust. The internet is an expensive, technocratic expedition into known space [note]. It is a system that augments, not allows for, the human “free knowledge” capacity by enforcing linguistic ‘givens’ so that we don’t need to question the relevancy of certain things for expediency’s sake. For example, when confronted with the feeling that one’s job generates misery for the self and the other, one can take that situation and report it with the intention of increasing the good humour of others. As we know these good vibes will come back to us amplified a great deal, we will see our own pain and our own desire return with a resounding “LIKE.”

So here is an illustration of the surface of the thing; how the open information consensus resource can interfere cooperatively with the idea of a task-at-hand, not lead us to overthrow the need for the task itself in our own lives; how it is a reflection of my expressed self-image and less a manifestation of a desire for actual change; it is a joke.

Wikipedia is an internet organ created to convert information into commodity within the body of the reality it claims to foster, like HAL 9000 in 2001. The directive of HAL in our case is facilitated by those who control the flow of information and how that information is to be presented to us. The internet is one form of possible consensus management. Like HAL, the management purports to contain within it the necessary items for advancement and social stability and prosperity, and so here we see on the list of necessary items for future society it has placed itself.

No doubt it is important to maintain discourse on the internet. No doubt it is important to use this thing as a means of organization, for a dance troupe must observe itself in motion many times before it executes the performance. But let’s not begin to believe that the thing itself is revolution. The expression of free knowledge is revolution. That happens outside of the consensus. By its nature internet is media and subject to coercive radiation. I suggest that it is a good tool right now, and that I wish I was part of more discussions surrounding better, simpler tools more fitted for liberty of thought and action. I wish I wasn’t drawn into conversations about how to save this particular system. I would rather replace it. Jan. 18th, 2012

[note: what is “known” vs. “unknown” here? I’m talking about the stuff we’ve mined from experience and made physical for checking and double-checking. I’d like to point out also that words like “overthrow” and “revolt” represent only the possibility for serious discourse, and as individuals who have been paying providers for this service for years we are only now coming upon the appropriate language for those discourses today and are discovering that the medium designed to contain us is being used to prevent its overthrow. This experience we all have here is traffic’d. So when I say linguistic givens I guess I’m lazily referring to the vernacular of the pharaoh, where the roles of starving student in forever-debt and well-intentioned protester waiting for the sky to clear are quick, easy and comfortable while the role of the mystic or the revolutionary still seems beyond what’s possible for most internet users, myself included.]

PEAK-SEER

Regarding space travel and mind travel I want to say that life as I understand it affixes itself tightly to the rocks at the bottom of the ocean and remains there unaltered for millions of years while possessing the quality also to free itself from the surface of the earth and travel great distances through the oceanic void AND BEYOND, perhaps never to see the same place twice in the natural course of its existence. On the surface of the boundary between earth and water, a new vein in evolution connected increasing brain size with capacity for free movement and environmental manipulation, which one might naturally add is no less cool than the advent of the human being itself. I feel it would be a false comparison to say that whales and octopuses are the humans of the ocean floors (humans being the humans of the sky floors) because humans are, more or less, chained to the earth. It seems to me we’re in the absurd position of coveting the skies when we very much resemble the sort of life that spends its day affixed tightly to the rocks, preoccupying itself with food-gathering and, when not strengthening preexisting bonds, affixing itself tightly to something new.

I suppose that for every threshold stable enough for the formation of life there will eventually come a peak-seer: a kind of entity that exists on a dimensional maximum, yet is rendered immobile due to its roots in some other dimension. Seeing flying insects cut through space itself with the effortless precision and speed I might employ  on a mouse-click or in writing the letter “L” on a piece of paper has me cursing my own practices; they are all designed  and with seemingly infinite variety, yet here is this little mother fucker in a state of true and perfect earthly mobility. I hope he’s pleased with himself. Here we are capable of colonising the highest peak available or the deepest trench, and further still into other realms of sense-experience yet our intuition is to raise minds endlessly to what lies beyond. I guess I don’t know about space travel, though most people seem to be content with looking up. The object of this thought need not even be space travel. When we tire, I believe we will yearn to merge with what lies beyond. Maybe it will take the form of our robot children going forth like insects into infinity so we can spend more time at home dying and forgetting all this backflip infinity bullshit. Until that moment, I SEE YOU, INFINITY.

(When I say “dimensional maximum” what I’m talking about is how I feel we’re faced with what’s beyond in every waking moment. To look up from the highest peak, for example, is to see the stars and what lies beyond. The same must be true when looking anywhere at all. I must be looking at a screen and what lies beyond.)

November 24th

curioustoned:

twice in the past 12 hours ive been playing the last track i tumbld and simon has diatribed about dubstep and its reoccurring themes etc. he asks rhetorically ‘can you tell this is dubstep’ as it begins—his assertion is no, not until the wubwub.  but both times its come up i’m reminded of something that happened at work the other day.

these two dudes are hunched over the dimebag book, one is vibing to my music and asks ‘yo is this dubstep’ and im like yup and he tells his friend ‘i could tell. this that new stoner shit.’ and they vibe

simon says ‘i think that there is no dubstep. there is one dubstep song, that producers dip into: its fifteen minutes long, and they all sample from this one song’

In other words, I offer this:

Today’s market is saturated with the electric tooth brush, something Oral-B in their wisdom have decided to rename the “power brush.” Fine. I remember when I saw my first power brush. I was young; a child. Despite its enormous size in my mouth it was a refined tool and something beyond my own abilities. Now, nobody tells you to press the head of an power brush into your forehead until the battery drains and the thing wurrs down. Nobody tells you not to do it, either. This is why the secret of dub step has been held quietly for decades.

If they had put it on the box: “DO NOT PRESS TO FOREHEAD: YOU WILL FORGET SELF QUICKLY” this dub step, when invoked, would offer a free-access, non-dual holiday for any individual. You come out of it, but you don’t forget what it feels like when you find a way to access yourself through yourself like that. No, they do not mention this.

My experience with this dub step goes much deeper than the question of my familiarity with those others who have harnessed the supreme via pressure and electronic sensory amplification. Dub step at most is the invocation of an intense holiday within the confines of music, AND NOT MUSIC ITSELF.

Played 31 times [Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

“Incense & Peppermints” by Strawberry Alarm Clock

 

ANTS

There was a decision made to name our house “The Jungle,” though some of us still call this place the “House of Operation”. I have called this house many things. For a day I called it “FREEDOM! House,” but it was roundly refused. For a day I called it “HAUS VON KATZE UND MAUS,” but it didn’t please others and ultimately it didn’t please me either. Past house names have utilized great geological metaphors in their titles (I suppose ‘The Jungle’, then, must be close enough for most). “BERINGIA” and “CALDERA” come to mind. I thought for a while that “House of the Ants” might be a deserving name, though I quickly saw it as the equivalent of nailing a crucifix to the mantle.

Ants, ya’ see, are the dominant life-form of the house, lording over white flecks of paint, black mold and legions of hungry pill bugs, which aren’t bugs at all but crustaceans that spilled out of the sea looking for food. The living room floor on the day we moved in was a desert of carcasses. The search for food in this case was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The first brave idiots to trek that insane expanse of wood and dust I call our living room represented the first true oasis for those who followed. More than anything, the living room is a scent-way for the ants (so I speculate).

Though I have no direct observations to back up my claim, I speculate the property itself is the seat of a super-colony. That, or a colony occupies the house itself. These ants? They are everywhere. Some of us have decided to deal with the ants by laying traps. Everyone in this house identifies as vegan. Is it vegan to kill ants?

I can’t claim to know all threads of vegan behaviour or justification. By my mind there are a few primary schools of thought:

  1. Economic Vegan. Characterized by a rebellious refusal to integrate with animal-produced items, chiefly food, though as we’re all aware these vegans also boycott things like drywall and shoes. Some times you hear these folk calling themselves ethical vegans, though to follow economic veganism to its ultimate conclusion, you can’t be buying any food from anywhere that also offers an animal product. Society itself consents to steaks. Ethics of this economic nature are a thought experiment when practiced within society. Ethics of this nature also permits ant genocide.
  2. Ethical Vegan. Characterized by the quest for a Buddha-like respect for life resulting from careful consideration of what constitutes a species-ist action. An ethical vegan tackles questions like, “what can be fucking done with these ants if I’m not going to kill them?” by answering their own question, “Oh, right. Live and let live. I don’t get to decide what happens to ants if we’re equally entitled to this space.” Ethical veganism comes down to personal responsibility, but does not avoid the depraved self-flagellation we’re all so good at implementing in all areas of our lives, drawn in by discomfort as we are.
  3. Peter Singer. Characterized by nihilistic rule-breaking. 

With that said, the desert of our living room has absorbed the silent screams of countless ants. Far from the emergent desert oasis of corpses, it has become a plague land. I don’t know if you know what happens to ants when they are affected by the neurotoxin in raid. They seem to lose their sense of direction. They begin to pull their own antennae off. When it becomes too taxing to attempt compensation over a failed nervous system (so it seems to me), the struggle continues beneath the exoskeleton until the damn thing gets carted off by some other ant in the early stages of the toxin. The raid dance is hard to watch, even for those of us who poison them by choice.

I cannot calculate the impact of these decisions, except for how they affect me as a vegan. I strive to co-exist with the life I have around me now, while refusing to partake in the shared ritualistic consumption of food products derived by way of animal husbandry. I fall prey to Singer-esque nihilism every now and then. I also feel strongly about the production of leather goods, fur and other things, though it comes into conflict with my desire to use what goods we have already produced. The question of the ants certainly has me questioning where my personal responsibilities are taking me. I choose to let them live with me, though as a member of this house I don’t know what function that decision has. The ants are dying. Also, I do not mourn a corpse. I think that wearing leather and fur makes sense. I don’t think we need to kill in order to wear something’s body-parts. Animal husks reuse animal husks. Look at the little hermit crab.

Death, I think, is an altruistic action within the system of life. It comes as no surprise to me that the action is not born from an ethical choice, but instead from the entropy of our world. Our bodies were made from consumption and they will be consumed. Perhaps to that extent, “The jungle” is an appropriate name for this house. Then again, when the desire for the comfort of an ant-free house (when there are ants in the house) causes you to set traps, your actions reflect the ultimatum of a cat-and-mouse conflict: vanish from sight, or I will destroy you.

October 3rd!