Redefining the relationship of man and machine - an audio-visual meditat...

The weird turned pro, then gave up.

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Poll! Double Plus Poll! Double Plus Ungood Poll! Never Mind This didn't show up in my feed so I never saw it. My Feeeeeeeed *snort* Mud's a bit dry today Doris. Two legs Baaad. Squirrel! Netflix n chiiiil It's got electrolytes.

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It's weird to be an old man in the future, and I'm still a couple of months off 40. But I guess I'd already be dead in Huxley's version.

I made a facebook post in about November last year saying something along the lines of "dear psychopaths, please don't blow up the world until I've seen the new star wars". There was some confusion with Putin deciding to start taking out some of the lunatic mercenaries destroying Syria, and I didn't think it would be well received as it didn't appear to be part of the plan. But while I was trying to be funny, I genuinely meant it on some level.

Then something strange happened. The year ended, and the world carried on. But since then, I don't know if it's just me, but it's like the futurist weirdness, that we of my generation have since 2000 been joking hasn't happened, has kicked up a gear. And while there are definitely real signs of all kinds of dystopian potentials, there's also a surprising number of things to feel positive about. And unfathomable mounds of uncertainly oriented weirdness being shovelled on top daily. In fact YouTube is getting something like 65 years worth of video uploaded every day, which is birth to retirement covered. Well it was. The retirement age will have probably gone up a couple of years by the time I've finished typing and a few more jobs have been made obsolete by bots.

And I've just been watching "we are legion" then "the Internet's own boy" about Aaron Schwartz... that was depressing.

This  [Ableton] forum was kind of my pre-facebook facebook. Funny thing is 15 years ago, around the time I discovered Ableton and this forum, that sentence would have made absolutely no sense. And there's a whole load more that could go with it.

I'm not even sure we said "Google it" yet in 2001. We certainly didn't say things like "I just swiped left on Tinder and sent a snapchat and just got off skype and found out we were already Facebook friends and following each other on tumblr, instagram, flickr, and I liked a few of her posts and she retweeted one of my tweets before we called an Uber to take us to an AirBnB to watch some YouTube then stream spotify and do some Jaeger bombs then netflix n chill, I mean literally [figuratively] OMG LOL."

I mean what the hell is going on? That kind of weird is straight out of Huxley, Orwell, PKD and all the dystopians. It's double plus untweet in the Feelies, I think I left my soma in the cloud.

I thought I was one of the modern futury types, and I'm not sure if people are still speaking the same language, or if I'm in that Twilight Zone episode where the guy starts to not understand anything anyone's saying and at the end he's sitting on his kid's bed at story time looking at a kid's book that shows a picture of a dog and the word says "Wednesday".

The really weird thing is I actually think the weirdness is just getting started.

We're really likely to see self driving cars in use by the end of the decade, and augmented and virtual reality, after having billions thrown at it from every major tech co., is getting started this year. We've all just started getting used to people constantly looking down at their phones, after the first iPhone isn't even ten years old yet, but there's a very real chance that the same amount of time from now from when I first joined this humble forum of what was then a humble music startup, no one will be looking at phones, they'll be walking around with AR glasses wildly waving their arms around touching holograms no-one can see while waiting for their robot Uber and that Tinder date may be less than 50% of the same organic matter they were born with for all kinds of reasons.

So will I say the same thing before Star Wars XII? Is it even possible that someone who saw the original Ep. IV when it was still the decade it was made in — the 1970s — might actually be able to watch Ep 12 and enjoy it? Or will I not I give a fuck if President Kardashian-Trump and 90% Synthetic Putin nuke us all first?

So in a way I feel like with every legendary figure that keeps checking out it makes more and more sense that they have to go because that whole age is over. The new world is the wrong kind of weird for them.

The real canary in the coal mine was Hunter S. Thompson topping himself. His actual motto was "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." If even he, the biggest tripper of the 20th century, had decided it had got too weird, it should have been a clue.

Oh yeah, happy new year!

World wars.... another moved Facebook rant

I guess there's not that much that's not "world" about it now, other than the region where most of the fighting is ... the image that went around of European refugees flooding onto a boat going in the other direction from Europe to Nth Africa during WW2 was pretty poignant. 

Most people in the west tend to think of WW2 as starting simply when Germany invaded Poland in 1939... but why not when Japan invaded China in 1937 or even Manchuria in 1931? Or Italy/Ethiopia 1935? (The European civil war theory is kind of interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Civil_War ). 

Growing up in the "cold war" we grew up thinking of a WW3 being an all out nuclear war with a 3 minute warning, but what they call WW2 gradually started to spread in Europe and Asia in the 1930s, similar to what's happened in the Middle East, Nth Africa and Central Asia over the last decade.... 

In a way the whole "world war" concept is kind of arbitrary... it never really stops, it just varies in intensity and region. Likewise, the "cold war" concept is a bit misleading - Korea, Vietnam and the Soviet-Afghanistan wars were all proxy "hot" wars between the US, USSR, (and China) — they couldn't go directly head to head without going nuclear, so they did it covertly, just like they're doing now. Millions still died and were displaced. 

The M.A.D. doctrine is still there... the US and Russia have had a lot of practice at fighting over resources indirectly and covertly without going head to head.....

So  in the USA ... land of the free, black women apparently aren't allowed to drive BMWs in New York, and 14 year old Muslim kids aren't allowed to build clocks.

How many billions have been spent on stupid shit like this vs how many actual real terrrrist attacks have been prevented?

I'm sick of saying this shit.  I've been calling it out since before George W. Bush even got voted in.  His election was probably pretty much the moment my faith in humanity started to fade.  Then his predictable, but still equally terrifying response to the WTC attacks. I could live with Afghanistan given there was apparently an actual link, but come 2002/3 and the bullshit of Iraq/Saddam, it was obvious the whole thing was a load of shit and loads of people were about to die to prop up the US military industrial complex, and thus their economy when the were spending millions every day on a stupid, pointless, unnecessary war.... not a whole lot different to Vietnam.

Then Tony Bliar was the next big nail in the coffin of my hope.

Rudd did a good job of taking some kind of faint hope and pounding it into a mound of self composting turds, but the end result of his shit was the unrelenting pile of shit that was Tony Abbott.

So you Australians will excuse me for my brief moment of jubilation that we managed to get our version of GWB gone in just under 2 years after he only managed to send 6 RAAF jets to bomb Syria.  That feels like an improvement to me.  God knows what else that demented twit would have done to save his job if Turnbull hadn't have finally stepped up and put an end to it.

Turnbull is no Messiah, but "the dude who stopped Tony Abbott" is more than enough for me.

The Turnbull leadership challenge

Well I think the Guardian starting a live feed on the leadership this morning was a clue, but it's now clear why I've been feeling particularly restless today.

[from a FaceBook post]:

I have strange, mixed feelings about the LNP leadership situation. I have been increasingly embarrassed and appalled at the complete and utter bollocks the Abbottses comes out with on a daily basis, but it's also become my daily entertainment. I actually look forward to logging on at the start of the day to see what the latest insanity the lunatic has said or done today. From a purely comedic perspective he was the gift that never stopped giving.

But at the same time it was obviously absolutely humiliating having his as our leader, and I shuddered every time I heard his name. I've become almost obsessed with him, morbidly fascinated by the fact that we somehow let this Gollum like creature, the Abbottses, run our country at all.

So despite the entertainment value, and the risk that Turnbull could actually give the LNP another term (or more) I still instinctively feel a desperate relief, even kidding myself that I might actually be glad to have Turnbull as PM.

I have no love for Bill Shorten at all, I kind of see him as Abbott lite. He only seems to know how to react to things, with nothing to offer.

But I'm a Green voter who won't vote LNP or ALP anyway, my hope is there could be another Labor Green coalition with loads of independents, because that is always more democratic, but I still get to have an opinion on who leads the country while the rest of you keep supporting these old timey parties.

To Blog or not to Blog... that's not any kind of question, just a half-arsed attempt at a title.

There is a niggling voice in the back of my head that's usually effectively inaudible above the noise, and it's telling me to write, frequently, or ideally daily as a routine.  So far I've failed.  But now that I'm doing a PhD, and the advice is essentially the same for that, maybe it will be the catalyst that finally spurs me to action.

I'm tempted to start a fresh, new Blog that can be associated with my professional identity, so that I can share posts freely without any concern that the content of previous posts might damage any kind of academic reputation I might develop, or the frank, sometimes brutal and ugly posts on mental health issues, but I think for now I will just carry on here.  I can always un-publish certain posts if it comes to it.

Usually a good indicator that it's time to think about Blogging again is when I start to get carried away on Facebook.  And at the moment I'm kind of obsessed with Tony Abbott and his parcel of fools.  A lot of it is Schadenfreude, and a sense of "Told you" to all the people who subjected us to the endless humiliation he subjects us to collectively on the world stage.  But I wake up each day and eagerly check the news just to see what the latest bout of lunacy might be, and whether the LNP are sufficiently embarrassed enough to have their next leadership spill yet.  The chatter seems to be increasing, and as I type the Guardian has started a Live updates page on the leadership question.  That's a good sign I think.

But as twisted as it sounds, I think I will actually be a little disappointed if he goes now and isn't booted out by the people at the next election.  Even more concerning though is the worry that by some terrible combined lapse of reason and massive Murdoch funded bombardment he might actually get voted back in.  I mean, he got in once, and I thought at one point the idea was too ludicrous to even contemplate.  George W. Bush got voted in a second time.  And Shorten is almost a kind of Abbott lite, with the same ethos of reacting to what everyone else does without offering any kind of direction of his own.

Ultimately, I am now a Green voter, and likely to stay that way.  I watch Australian politics with a kind of morbid fascination and find it kind strangely entertaining, but I suppose what I'm most interested in is witnessing the decay of a system that is becoming less functional by the day.  It makes me think of Michio Kaku's civilisation types — he says we are a Type  Zero Civilisation, but we now have a Type One Communication system, which will hopefully help other aspects of our society progress to Type One, eventually even energy, which is by his definition when we become a Type One Civilisation.

I hate everything. Why not.

Yeah I think 'why not' can be a statement.

Some days I do.  I hate everything.  Far too many days.

Okay, not really everything.  I can't justify that.  There's a lot of human things worth preserving.

I'm watching Larry David's 'Curb your enthusiasm'.  It's a funny show, I'm enjoying it a lot.  I just wrote a Facebook post and then instantly set it to "only me" because I felt I shouldn't share it.  Maybe until after I'm dead and my son curates all the crazy shit I've written online for anyone who cares.  Maybe I'll be some kind of Samuel Pepys.  Just some boring nobody who happened to be really useful for historians in a couple of centuries because I wrote shit down.

Let me just paste it before I carry on:

"Facebook is like torture sometimes, especially to the ethnically Catholic ... a pit of shame and guilt and misery and regret... and ethnic Catholics don't even get the catharsis of practicing Catholics because we don't go to church and have confession, we just have all the culturally induced self loathing. I think Jewish people have the same problem.. I'm watching Curb Your Enthusiasm at the moment and it's so familiar...I guess it must be an old testament thing.
In one episode Larry David was at the cinema talking about Wagner and a guy started attacking him saying "Are you Jewish? You must be a self-loathing Jew to be whistling Wagner!” and Larry David said “Yes I do hate myself, but it has nothing to do with being Jewish!!”.
I think it's good in a lot of ways, it means you've been raised to have a conscience, but it kind of makes your life a misery in a lot of ways, and Facebook seems to be like a cesspit of it. I guess it makes sense it was invented by someone Jewish, but I bet Zuckerberg has a few Catholics on his staff. This place is surely designed to propagate this crazy shit." 

I have a lot of positive things to say about us before the intergalactic anti-viral is administered.  A lot.  Maybe not now, I'm not in the right kind of mood.