The long-predicted law changes that allow for a dual speed -ie official/unofficial- internet continue to be passed around the world. Google has announced it is already using “AI” (ha!) as part of its search algorithm. Our world without sin is at hand.
And yet.
Even though the 90s-era digital utopia is entirely dead on arrival, my mind turns to the ways this military infrastructure we call the internet and the mobile ecosystem is being exploited not only in unpredicted but permanently unpredictable ways. The metaphor of digital systems as one big neural network is intended to promote a sense of glorious, futuristic predictability… inevitability, even. The inevitability of Kurzweil’s demonic vision.
The trouble is we have no fucking idea how the brain works. MRIs performed on dead salmon still show randomish electrical activity in their brains.
Clearly, ‘they’ want ‘us’ to consume digital content in a socialised stream of nonsense -sped up more than the wilds of the internet and in as frictionless way as possible- and most people are. But then, as Chris Knowles points out, ‘most people’ weren’t those wackadoo early Christians kicking about in Roman catacombs, smashing together necromancy and what might be a pre-industrial UFO cult.
For reasons that will become clear in fairly short order, Chris’s latest post is one great stonking sync. And, as Eric has been recently exploring, sync is very likely to be misdiagnosed psi… certainly not an unfamiliar idea at Rune Soup. Actually, I think quite a bit of human experience is misdiagnosed psi. (Perhaps even the entire physical universe.)
Psi effects are wholly predictable from the future and sometimes show up as weird little neural firings just before they happen, as is the case with precognition observed in clinical environments. If digital systems are a metaphoric brain, does that mean there is a ‘connectivity model’ here?
Perhaps.
The only cure for tyranny is decentralisation. Tyranny hates decentralisation because it reduces predictability. Consider academia. Not only is it, as a system, pre-industrial, it is pre-modern. Literally. For most of its existence, it was a private infrastructure built for and modelled after the medieval church. The pursuit of knowledge was never its goal. The ownership of knowledge was. Thus it should not surprise us that once it detached from the church teat and re-attached to the state, it did and does exactly the same thing: promote state-sanctioned worldviews without sin. Today that manifests as the legitimisation of identity politics that will ultimately lead to civil unrest that will ultimately lead to even more draconian laws and curtailments of liberty.
And yet.
It is the chaos magician’s prerogative to crawl over the literal and metaphoric garbage heaps of western civilisation to salvage parts for her own spaceship, her own gnostic escape pod. If you look at the entirely predictable grumbling emerging from academia around the rise of decentralisation vectors such as academia.edu, you will spy two things. One, the absurdity of their own silly little position -“I don’t like it because it means I am no longer in charge!” Two, a rich vein of valuable garbage for your spaceship.
Mega-journals, such as PLOS ONE and Nature Scientific Reports, tend to reduce the emphasis placed on ‘gatekeepers’ of research such as academic editors, editorial board members and peer reviewers who traditionally make judgements about a paper’s disciplinary ‘importance’ and community ‘interest’. Mega-journals’ approach to quality is based on an assessment of ‘technical soundness’, ignoring traditionally-valued criteria. [More.]
Here we see (rejoice!) the erosion of ‘official’ gatekeeping power. We also see the appearance of an ontological landscape that is really only challenging for the very lazy. If there is no bespectacled, government funded shill to filter the signal from the noise for you in a manual, medieval way (“this is canon, this is not canon”), then who is going to do it?
I am. You are. Adding to the ‘best practice’ model for how we as occultists navigate an increasingly militarised digital infrastructure, we must find the only use for the ‘internet as brain’ metaphor. That of psi. Unpredictable -from this point in the timeline- connections. Unexpected packet transfer. Let the shadow state try attempt information filtration based on a very-probably-wrong materialist model of the brain. Let us attempt it based on a definitely-less-wrong psi model.
We thus have:
- Redundancy in network connectivity/platform agnosticism.
- A network that is earthed in the real world, by design, at at least one point.
- The transmission across these networks of salvaged garbage.
Have and share some garbage. I want to see some blog posts and social comments about this stuff. Filter it through your beautiful, deranged minds.
- A fantastic article from Taleb, exploring his ‘skin in the game’ concept
- Light in a Neolithic dwelling: Building 1 at Koutroulou Magoula (Greece)
- Why Should Folklore Students Read “Dead” Legends?
- Hildur Queen of the Elves: Introduction
- How Elvish Were the Álfar?
- The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies
- Narrating Myths: Story and Belief in Ancient Greece. (That’s a Sarah Iles Johnston piece, by the way.)
The outcome, the worldview it creates, the additional network nodes it builds… these are permanently unpredictable from this point in the timeline, and just as with the early Christians Chris describes, there will always be a fundamental worldview asymmetry between the monocultural and the gnostic. That is precisely the point. We do not want -and will never have- monocultural legitimacy, no matter how many conferences you attend or official groups you create. No one ever beats tyranny in a pitched battle. Tyranny is defeated by becoming unkillable shadows.
Your arteries, your nerves, your tongues are the internet you are looking for.
You are what is found at childhood’s end.
