The Mosaic Effect: season 2 , episode 2: start with yourself

 

A bit more of a rant than usual. we start off with a bit of a tip of the hat to world war III and rapidly diverge into situationism and guy debord, addiction to spectacle, and the longing for chaos that comes from thwarted evolution, leading to the only real solution to feeling like crap.

podcast page here

Direct download: TME2.2-start_with_yourself.mp3

The Mosaic Effect: season 2, episode 1: Shoot

A clean slate, and return to our roots with the mosaic effect as we explore the hidden nature of current events and random occurrences.

We begin with a dip into the headlines for a pass at the recent squall of school shootings. In so doing we touch upon bowling for columbine, the american frontier, the recently deceased dr. hyatt, willful fragmentation, and the proliferation of the no-exit reality tunnel. no prior knowledge or occult background  required.

apologies for the spotty audio quality. we’re due for new mic, it seems.

podcast page here

Direct download: TME2.1-shoot.mp3

Producing the Means for Seizure

part two: life on the edge of the power curve 2012-2050

Okay, so let’s change our approach a little bit. I’m assuming you can and have read this… so what might that look like, in a little more detail?

  Let’s start with the basics: chances are, within a few years, you will have been more or less priced out of the market for oil and gas. You might be able to snag a bit for emergency use, or critical transport, but most everyone has to carpool, bike or bus it. If you’re fortunate enough to have trains where you live, then that’s great. This trend gets worse as time goes on. Expect something similar to cuba, where traffic cops routinely stop and stuff cars with extra seats, or huge flatbed trucks take on the function of busses.

  The good news is, the cottage industry for ethanol is ramping up. And no, I don’t mean this corn ethanol bullshit. I mean decomposing waste matter into alcohol on a radically decentralised basis. Eventually this becomes an integrated part of all farming operations, as the technology for alcohol distillation is refined and the design of organisms that digest sugar ( and eventually cellulose)  efficiently become more common.  There will almost certainly never be enough of this to replace all the gas we used to use, but it will be able to take over the critical stuff. The need will create the results. This is not new technology mind you. The first diesel engines were made to work on alcohol, after all, and it’s only a historical curveball that hooked us into ‘rock oil’. Most people will eventually have something the size of a rainbarrel that breaks down kitchen waste and dead plant matter into usable fuel. You will occasionally have to deal with the nuisance of these mutant bugs eating holes in your clothes, or some minor structural damage to wood objects… but hey, shit happens.

  Something similar starts to happen with food. A combination of price inflation,  wage deflation and contraction of economic activity makes imports of food pretty dodgy, and expensive. Wall mart, Safeway, all the globalised chains…these all go away. Food in general gets more expensive, and most people take up gardening on their balcony, backyard or community park. 

  This is all well and good until people start actually starving. You’d yank a couple tomatoes if you were starving, right? Eventually a combination of food riots, influxes of starving refugees, and general anxiety lead to most communities, or even neighborhoods, to form up into gangs/militias for self protection, and preservation of resources. You will probably have to deal with the sad spectacle of families going door to door begging for food, or offering to work for it.

  One starts to spend a lot of time pulling up pavement to expose useful soil, composting waste and capturing rainwater. There’s a pretty good chance you don’t have a job anyway. If you do, you probably work from home. It’s cheaper for everyone that way.

 Which brings us to the low end of the technology situation. I mean, we have iphones now, and wireless broadband is becoming ubiquitous. Eventually technology will be cheaper than food. You can already talk to anyone on earth with a device in your pocket, and carry around every piece of music you own. Eventually it’ll be all the music, all the video, all the pictures and all the books. In your pocket. You can put on a headset and carry on a conversation as if you were in the same room with anyone, or any number of anyones, from anywhere. Why even leave the house? Except to harvest the garlic, that is. The ability to make and hyperdistribute your own cultural material worldwide only accelerates the breakdown of centralised forms of media.

  A small blip occurs when the rolling blackouts start. Or depending on where you live, they started a long time ago, and become permanent. Most of the essential widgets are run by efficient integrated solar panels, and everything else gets run by ethanol generators. Once again, not enough electricity to run your air conditioning, or baseboard heaters; but enough for the lights, the cooking and to recharge your widgets.

 Now all of this so far presumes that you’re really lucky and you live in a (reasonably) sane part of the world. Either that, or you’re smart enough to see the writing on the wall and get the fuck out of dodge when things get bad. A lot of places will be subject to the no-go zone effect. The government loses the ability to project force, and provide services to a region, and said region is simply dispensed with. No cops, no soldiers, no utilities, and no trucks bringing anything. It is entirely possible to fill in all those parts of the equation, as I’ve said above, but the story of any particular place comes in how well that happens, or doesn’t.

  All of this really means a radical redefinition of the power dynamics in society and in the world. What happens when you have the ability to provide your own security, your own services, your own food, energy, culture? Whether by your choice or not, this is what is going to happen. Embracing it will make it easier. The whole idea of  ‘top down’ is going to fall by the wayside. Technology, the proliferation of ideas and institutional de-evolution will level the power curve for everyone to large degree.

   No, you won’t have cruise missiles, tanks and stealth bombers, but within a short time those things will be mostly irrelevant, just as they are mostly irrelevant in iraq or afghanistan. You don’t subdue a wireless, super-empowered, self-sufficient open source retribalised 21st century hyperculture with tanks and bombs. It’s impossible.

  But there are bound to be those stupid enough to try, and this is where it gets a bit scary. You see, it’s already possible right now, for someone of modest education and skills to manufacture a deadly infectious pathogen and it’s only going to get easier. The kind of people who do this are mostly dysfunctional reactionaries, but when you place the whole world in a hyper-connected echo chamber of threatening ideas, there will be no shortage of people with intelligence, equipment, and substandard coping skills.

  The biotech revolution is following an accelerating curve even faster than the one for computing. Eventually, you will know at least a few people who are running a gene sequencer in the basement. Which is good for when some fuckstick lets loose a hemorrhagic fever in your vicinity, and you need a vaccine, but not so good when the backlash comes from what remains of the ‘powers that be’, and a platoon of special forces drops out of a helicopter to machine gun you and burn down your neighborhood. 

 I mean, yeah we expect government to protect us from psychotic people with bioweapons, that’s a good thing. But they won’t discriminate. The crackdown against biotech will threaten to take away the radical life extension, disease elimination, stem-cell regeneration and every kind of weird gene alteration imaginable being cooked up in an environment like this.

  The instructive analogy is filesharing. Every so often, the big boys smash a central hub of filesharing with lawsuits, raids and jail time. And then what? They can’t arrest everyone, they can’t even find everyone, so all that happens is darwinism. The survivors get smarter, sneakier, harder to track and develop more and better ways to keep filesharing.

   But what if that file is a complete genome? And if people these days can crack iphones, they will sure as hell be able to make biotech equipment, when the time comes.

  The sort of chaos you see in the world of intellectual property, will soon be the chaos of our own genetics. And all of this taking place in the social and political chaos of what was the world we once knew. And this is chaos in the mathematical sense, which opens the doorway to a hidden order…

next???

It’s (still) only the end of the world again: 2008

Part 1: the curbstomping at the end of history

Who’d have thought the future would get here so soon?

  I’d been thinking for awhile of formally checking in on my future predictions series, to see how far along we’ve come ( not so much the later series which is really more about my method of discerning future trends). And perhaps adjust my thinking a bit.

 What  I found alarming was that, not only are my predictions for the next five years on track, but things I thought were at least ten, maybe even twenty years out, are starting to happen now. Also my long term, conceptual view has gained a few wrinkles, which I’ll clarify shortly.

  I would obviously suggest you read the original three articles ( and indeed most of the stuff in my futurism category, to get a feeling for where I’m coming from ), but if you can’t be bothered here’s the capsule summary for the first bit. The next two parts to follow…

 the next five years(written in 2006, so that covers up till mid 2011, I guess):

-  past peak of oil and gas extraction

- economic meltdown due to loss of confidence in the dollar, among other things.

- political implosion of the neocon regime and the republican party in general, with a possible realignment of US politics in general, most likely towards some kind of reactionary neo-fascism.

-general war in the middle east and africa, which is really more of an open source guerrilla style bloodbath, and metastasizing into other locations.

  Now, none of these are rocket science, at least not in my book. The writing has been on the wall for some years before I even wrote that old piece.

 If I remember correctly, oil was at around 60$ a barrel in 2006, and now it’s hovering around a 100$. All promises to open up the taps from saudi arabia and whatnot have been proven just hot air. The noise about alternative energy just gets louder and louder, and the price of oil and gas just keeps going up.

  We’re probably in the plateau phase, where all the spare capacity gets used up, as supply starts to shrink and demand grows at the usual steady rate. I have no problem putting off a serious demand crunch for another few years, as there is a lot of slack in the system and waste to be stripped out, before we really start hitting a wall here. People in other parts of the world are already fucked, mind you, but that is, unfortunately, not much new.

Don’t worry, we’re fucked too, just not right away. When that crunch hits and there is an estimated 3% growth in demand every year, matched with a 3% decline in supply, then you’re looking at super spikes in price and what they call ‘demand destruction’, Where whole supply chains start to collapse because they’ve been priced out of the market.

 Keep in mind that 3% is being cautious. The third biggest field in the world is looking at a fifty percent decline over three years. That’s not a decline. That’s a cliff.

 The skeptics in the area are welcome to their opinions, but in every case, they always think in terms of ( usually falsified) proven reserves and static numbers, rather than flow rates, which is what it’s really about. So buckle up.

 Moving on, anyone who thinks we aren’t in major economic meltdown isn’t paying attention. I scarcely need to comment on this, do I?

 This is a bit dated now, but do lets watch Jim Cramer have a nervous breakdown on television, and you can judge the level of feeling in the financial community.

…and bear in mind, things have gotten a lot worse since then. They will have to invent new words for the combination of inflationary and deflationary effects that we will be experiencing in short order.

 Moving on to politics, it looks at this point like the republican choice is going to be the lunatic john mccain. Not only is his support in the world of reactionary partisan politics somewhat shaky, ( he appears to have some actual principles) not to mention his weak appeal to backwards ‘christians’, but he’s also prone to fits of rage and bizarre outbursts. Probably down to his advanced age, and the time he spent in a Vietnamese POW camp.

If anyone thought that the christopher walken character in the deer hunter would make a good president…well there he is.

  The republican chances of winning the presidency again just went from slim to none. The reactionary southern strategy that propelled the republicans from nixon on up has run it’s course and it’s ideology in general has arguably been a spent force since Reagan, so you can be sure when they lose this time around, they will be looking to fuck each other with knives. Good riddance.

 Not that Obama or Mrs. Clinton is really gonna help much either. I will concede that electing a white woman or a black man to the presidency is a huge step for the united states, in principle, but I seriously doubt either one of them is really equipped to deal with what’s happening. They would have to demonstrate some understanding of it first, but that hasn’t happened, and probably never will. So four years from now, look for the democrats to implode too.

And finally, we have what we will eventually know as world war III, but won’t recognise till long after the fact. Everyone is expecting that we have to have nuclear tipped ICBMs flying around to have world war, but what we’re going to get is general breakdown of the nation state and regression to primary loyalties ( that’s another word for ‘tribalism’). It’s not going to be about issues large enough to launch nuclear weapons over, or between bodies large enough to command them. Iraq, Iran, the Sudan, Pakistan, Columbia, Chechnya… same shit, different languages. When war is happening everywhere, that’s called a world war.

 I reffer you to the brilliant and insightful John Robb of global guerrillas who examines this trend in minute detail and echoes my own thinking in many ways.

 long story short: the war of all against all, with semtex and ak-47’s. And that’s if we’re lucky. Because once we kick over into 2012 or so, you’re gonna be nostalgic for the days of car bombs and drive by shootings.

next: 2012-2050?

the conqueror worm

another half baked foray into self experimentation, this one stemming from the principles of reichian bodywork and neo-magickal psychophysicality as expounded by christopher hyatt and friends.

our initial theorizing and background material is recorded, and the actual experiment will be documented in written form, as we go.

podcast page here

Direct download: the_conqueror_worm.mp3

explosive catharses of released muscular armour are sure to ensue…

Day 1: the first segment is the top of the head and the eyes. I spent a few minutes today a couple times massaging around the eyes, the scalp, the temples and whatnot. a few accupressure points that a merdian chart would disclose if you’re interested in that sort of thing. also the standard reichian technique of making faces, rolling the eyes in circles etc.

the result is sort of surprising. at first the expected tingling in the scalp and face, lessening of tightness or tendencies towards tension headache. but after a short time, I found I was having trouble feeling the top half of my head clearly. probably in contrast to the rest of the body and it’s otherwise normal tension level.

Most interesting was a kind of loosening around perception. I’ve described elsewhere how in vipassana practice there can be a kind of ‘porthole’ effect around the illusion of the inner observer, and a kind of muscle tightness helps reinforce the delusion that there is a watcher ‘in there’ somewhere. mostly around the eyes.

So anyway, when you release the tightness, the sense of the watcher seems to loosen as well , and although it seems odd that there should be any relationship between tension in the face and clarity of insight, I must confess a degree of clarity and precision and sensitivity to obvious perceptions that is rather uncommon, at least for me.

As I’ve said the mind works through conditioned association, and no doubt part of the way it holds together distorted perspectives is by linking them to a chronic tightness in the part of the body that most deals with perception.

Day 2: continuing from last night, I have to say the regular breathing and folding exercises are really doing a number on me. I feel intermittent nausea from the solar plexus region and muscle spasms that feel pretty vigorous in my lower abdomen.

There seem to be jolts of nerve phenomena going down from where ever I’m focussed on for the day and into my pelvis. Sometimes mild pain, twitching or tingling. Mostly weird sensations that feel like an elastic snapping.

the jaw segment was pretty low key. I did notice a greater degree of sensitivity to the taste of food, and the difficulty finding my head has spread farther down. more circulatory and nerve based phenomena that I’d associate with decent accupressure release.

Day 3: things progress more or less as the literature would lead one to believe. the throat segment seems to hold back sensations or urges to cry or vomit. I experimented with sticking my tongue out until I gagged or retched, and it seems to help. I’ve started experiencing ‘clonisms’ which is a word that seems to have fallen out of common usage that refers to rhythmic contractions of the musculature, primarily in my core. They are described as precursors to the ‘plasmatic streamings’ of the complete, healthy, organismic discharge.

On a bit of tangent, I’m re-reading reich’s Character Analysis and there’s a long section where he describes his treatment of a schizophrenic. Funny thing is, the symptoms of this schizophrenic, while shocking and warranting committal back in the day, are somewhat mild by today’s standards. So either the old standard for mental illness was totally whack, or we’re having a societal epidemic of dis associative disorders of the personality.

So as usual, the true answer is probably somewhere in the middle.

…I’m off to practice my gag reflex. Tread carefully kids!

Day 4: things getting a bit sketchier. I’m getting oscillating urges to cry, vomit, scream, or kill someone. As I loosen the shoulder and chest segment, I’m getting more conscious of restraining my arms, by folding them, tucking them into my belt, etc. something about about holding back impulses to strike or strangle, expressions of rage. It’s a bit unsettling.

When I stretch my face, I get nauseous, which is rather peculiar. It feels like the nerves running down from my jaw into the throat are triggering a gag reflex, and stimulating the stomach likewise.

I feel very much like I want to cry, but find I cannot, or lack the proper impetus. A couple relationships back, I had all the crying burnt out of me, or it seemed so at the time. I either transcended a lot of my emotional attachment, or simply went dead inside to large extent. Maybe a bit of both. If the latter, it doesn’t strike me as a healthy state to be in, and it’s bound to come back on me.

I feel sore and tired, but I’m also becoming more aware of extraneous tension, which became a lot more noticeable in kung fu class. It helps to be able to actually beat the crap out of someone too, I might add. Consenting adults and whatnot…

Day 5: …was a bit of a debacle. I sort of suspected the diaphragm and solar plexus would be the seat of a lot of problematic stuff… but holy shit, man.

I basically had a nervous breakdown that lasted about twelve hours. Crying, sobbing, screaming, violent acting out. smashing shit. just enough presence of mind to not do anything too stupid. Lots of nausea and soreness afterward, but clarity has returned, and some relief from aimless fury with no outlet.

This is not, I may hasten to add, out of keeping with what one is told to expect with long standing armoring of this type. approach at your own risk.

Days 6-7:  kind of went off the rails, as I recovered from day 5. Feeling mostly tired and emotionally drained, but strangely, with a renewed sense of kindness towards myself and the desire to live a more fun and relaxed life, without so much dire struggle. I may have to re do some of the earlier segments, or perhaps spend some more time breaking down the armor of the solar plexus and diaphragm.  Reich  states that some people are  incapable of involuntary  movements of the diaphragm, due to excessive internal rigidity. They move it with conscious effort, but when their attention wavers, the diaphragm freezes up again. This may require more investigation. I may have this problem to some extent, or acquired it recently from insight related shell-shock.

conclusion: well, I’m still experimenting, but I’ve come to realise that this is not something that can be carried out on a concise timetable. trying to compress this into a small timeframe to write about, nearly pitched me over the edge, so we’ll be stepping back and taking a new approach. As well, I’m not sure the level of subtlety that this work calls for can be adequately conveyed in written form, at least not in a short form. I’ve found time and again that the best results come from small adjustments that I have trouble articulating in anything but the most precise sensorimotor and anatomical language.

  I am very convinced of the underlying soundness of the operating principles of this kind of work, and have some thoughts that build on my experiences here, but I’ll leave them for another time. other things are waiting on me.

FINAL UPDATE:

I recorded another podcast with some better articulated conclusions:

podcast page

Direct download: conqueror_worm-conclusion.mp3

a kind of madness

a bit of a one-off podcast to get the muscles going again.  More of a emotional tinge to this one, as we talk about the epidemic of depression, and what it might mean.

 podcast page here

Direct download: a_kind_of_madness.mp3

… I’m rethinking my approach to a number of things right now, so expect some twists sometime soon.

Your christmas message…

Leaving aside any solipsism, it’s fair to say that the outside world doesn’t really exist. not to you anyway.

  think about it: everything you think you know about the world is a representation of the information processed by your nervous system and assembled into a coherent gestalt to be thrown up on the screen of your awareness.

  What that means is, you don’t really know anything about other people. you know a lot of things about the inside of your own nervous system, and how it processes information.

  the good news is, the most exhaltedly saintly, christlike and wonderful person you ever met or imagined, is really just an assemblage of qualities that you have already internalised. In effect, the qualities of such a person are really your qualities. You just map them onto the signals you may or may not be getting from the outside world.

 The bad news is, the most fucked up, depraved evil bastard you ever met or imagined, is also just a collection of qualities that exist in your repertoire.

   As far as your nervous system is concerned, other people don’t even exist. Just placeholders for a spectrum of feelings, emotions and perceptions that you’ve already learned to recognise. Those aren’t their emotions, those are your emotions.

   It has always been you, all along.

    Be nice. Merry Christmas.

   If you haven’t all achieved enlightenment by the time I get back, heads will roll. This is your only warning.

Externalities

Some years ago, british columbia fell under the governance of the Canadian liberal party. And by ‘liberal’, let us be clear that this was not social liberalism, in any real sense, but economic neoliberalism, to be most accurate. 

  Anyway, they proceeded to implement their ‘agenda’ which consisted of slashing social programs, deregulating everything that wasn’t nailed down, and launching a general attack on the Canadian legacy of a socialized infrastructure. All this in the name of ‘balancing the budget’, which right there tells you everything you need to know about these people and their ideology.  

  ‘Balancing the budget’ can only become a primary concern in an environment where banking and financial interests have come to dictate what governments can do. This is monetarism, where the society revolves around the interests of the currency, rather than what most sane people have come to realize, which is that currency should revolve around the needs of society.  

  Moving right along, the end result of this has been a dramatic decline in the quality of life for most of us here, with the people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder taking the brunt, as social programs along with everything else, are slashed, privatized and deregulated.  In terms of the welfare system alone the number of people successfully using it has dropped between one quarter and one third. No one really knows where these people went, mostly because no one ever thought to keep track of what happens when you cut off the means of last resort for hundreds of thousands of people. It’s a stereotype that the welfare system is full of dole bums and drug addicts. There are those, to be sure, but there are also quite a few mentally ill, homeless, severely addicted, single mothers, sick and injured etc.  This sort of thing is the social manifestation of predatory financial activity, of which the whole world seems to be taking part. The ethos is pretty simple: maximize your profits, and dump your costs, be they social, physical, or economic into someone else’s lap. These costs are called externalities, and to the extent that this is done, you have raised your profit margin by ‘externalizing’ your costs to someone else.    Which is all fine, as long as you can get away from the aftermath of cutting a whole segment of your society loose.

  I guess the thinking must be that if you deny services to these unworthy people, they will go quietly die somewhere, presumably to compost in some convenient location, that won’t stink up anyone’s, oh let’s say… luxury hotel, or conference center.  I mean, even the nazis had to pay for poison gas and bulldozers to dig those ditches.

  So I guess it was a bit of a shock to find that this old hotel had an abandoned laundry tunnel under it, and while the ruling class were discussing the next round of tax cuts and ‘belt tightening’ for the populace over high tea, someone had found the entrance, and moved in. And once it got cold enough, they started lighting fires down there.  How poetic is that? Smoke rising up from under the feet of the rich, from the fires of the poor.   Wish I could still find the link, but wouldn’t you know it, it’s gone down the memory hole, in less than a day. I wonder why?

  …I got your ‘externalities’ right here, guys.

The New Regime

   

Well here we are again, chewed over nicely in some self-generated paranoid dark night hell realms. I always suspected producing for this site is what kept me sane, but I’m starting to wonder if it isn’t true.   

Some people are empowered to spread the dharma, others do it because they are too gibbled to do otherwise. I happily tread this fine line. Closure and certitude are even more debased currencies than the US dollar.  

 I’m somewhat sleep deprived at the moment and can barely summon enough neurotransmitters to recall my own phone number, so I’ll keep this brief. I thought I might do a bit of Tim Boucher style brief daily postings, until my brain starts working again.

Not much point trying to birth any fully formed revelations at the moment. So expect all the channels to start firing away, as I rise from the grave like some dessicated clive barker-ish death god.  

No time to waste. I mean, if this isn’t the apocalypse, it’ll do till the fucking apocalypse gets here, man.

All Gone Quiet

Well, I appreciate everyone’s indulgence while I get my act together on this end. I probably needed a bit of a break to incubate things for awhile anyway.

I should only be a little while longer. I’ve finished moving, my application for the new job is working it’s way through the halls of power, and once the internet is hooked up for the new place, things should be in motion once again.

In the last week, I’ve taken up a new round of dedicated concentration practice, moatly to give my mind something to focus on, and I recommend highly for anyone to try doing it for six or seven hours a day for a month or more. granted i usually take a day or two off a week just to catch up on things that require a more scattered focus, but the overall cumulative effect is noticable and quite strong.

anyway, I shant linger too long just yet, but expect the initiative to return in full force before too long.