Who cares?

Greetings,

Here's an article on literature and how novels come to the internet by Laura Miller in The Guardian. She writes for Salon.

..."Do the people who constantly pester us for our opinions care what each and every one of us really thinks? Sort of and not really. What they require are opinions in bulk, so many of them that they can be analysed and averaged out and processed into useful data. Only then can they be sold, and then used to encourage us to buy more stuff. Our judgments matter, but primarily in aggregate, which makes us not so different from the faceless mass of television's audience as we are sometimes led to believe. The main distinction is that the crowdsourced are active collaborators in the commodification of their opinions, while TV viewers just get to sit on their duffs."

The Guardian...

Metta.

14 ministries

Greetings,

I work in the Chinese Propaganda Department. There are 14 ministries in the department.
Before the internet there was only one ministry, The Ministry of Truth. 

We, the drudges, have ministries all over the place and it's a huge financial and time consuming operation. Growth causes all of us, and I'm talking about millions, stress, anxiety and proverbial FEAR. 

I am authorized by Sir George Orwell to tell you about four ministries.

George is a good guy. He doesn't accept bribes, cash donations, cars, floral arrangements, luxury apartments on Hainan island with free golf membership and clean educational opportunities for his children at the finest schools money can buy so they will prosper and behave themselves in a harmonious society. 

It comes down to controlling information. Ignorance is strength. We've made some mistakes but we're improving our quality control.

The Ministry of Filters, for example, purifies and validates search engines, links and tags to verify their adherence to the Party line. The Party line is a secure communication system in a Mongolian yurt. It is covered with a thin veneer of high grade ultrasonic vibration-free saran wrap. This prevents exposure to Echelon communication satellite interception. Echelon is a big vacuum cleaner in the sky.

The Ministry of Soup controls emergency eye scans of all Chinese people to determine their thoughts. Thoughts are precious and the Chinese people only have a few centimeters. Thought control is part of our culture.

The Ministry of Culture and Currency is vast. Their responsibility is to provide and maintain a network of fake useless paper currency to create the illusion of value. The currency is embedded with sensors to monitor any and all verbal and non-verbal communication before, during and after any and all exchanges. It is very effective. 

A strong and important subdivision is The Ministry of Advertising. You can easily imagine how pervasive this subtle, subliminal and esoteric form of control is. It creates false needs, wants and desires among the sheep convincing them through thought control how insignificant and meaningless their worthless life is without more consumption behavior.

The ministry develops, maintains and reinforces, especially focusing on the poor lower classes how their lives will be enriched beyond belief if they struggle to raise their expectations. It's a circle game.

They used to walk. Then they wanted a Flying Pigeon bike. Then they wanted a radio. Then they wanted a refrigerator. Then they wanted a washing machine. Then they wanted  a 46-inch plasma television with remote control. Then they wanted a car, house, vacation, free medical care, cheap food, books and incense to worship the dead.

The ministry controls all the people by a large remote device. This device is embedded into every Chinese citizen's cerebral cortex at birth. It is very effective. 

Big Brother is watching. Thank you for your attention.

Metta.

Read more...
 

Decode yourself

Greetings,

"Information is alienated experience. Is information alive and real?

"Get yourself uploaded into a computer to be immortal. You can redesign art, economies, and law to reinforce the perception that information is alive.

"Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information."

You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier.

Metta.

Discarded computers in Bursa, Turkey.

 

Texts without Contexts

Greetings,

You may find the New York Times article linked below worth reading. 

It refers to the ubiquitous Web, capitalized as if it were a capital of a place. It's an artificial state of mind.

I live in Web city where everyone is connected by instant glowing all to brief emotional attention spans. I am too poor to pay attention. Web's impact on personal and social development, reshaping human lives is good, bad and plain ugly.

For example, I'm sitting in a remote sleepy Cambodian town breathing, writing in my Moleskine and typing new human texts because my mind is a computer and the hand is faster than the eye. Electricity goes out. No juice. No power. All the local internet service providers are out of work. Having no internet connections is a profound joy meaning writers get, the joker word in English, writing done.

I've enjoyed many books lately balancing out creativity, sitting in the local market absorbing language and pedaling my black bike. Real paper books like, The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago which won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1998 and now Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami, the Kafka of Japan, among others noted in the Amazon side bar.

What's a side bar? Part of a river bank? A side bar according to the International Bar Association is a bar frequented by people on the side, content knowing their direct bar is indistinguishable from, say a bar not on the side.

A quote from the article. "As Mr. Manjoo observes in “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” (2008), the way in which “information now moves through society — on currents of loosely linked online groups and niche media outlets, pushed along by experts and journalists of dubious character and bolstered by documents that are no longer considered proof of reality” — has fostered deception and propaganda and also created what he calls a “Rashomon world” where “the very idea of objective reality is under attack.” 

So, what did I do while reading the article? Using my handy-dandy gadget phone I traveled by wireless to Amazon Kindle downloading You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier and The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby. 

As Lanier writes, links and tags may be the most important inventions in the last 50 years. Incredible!

Before closing this entry I upgraded my MotionX-GPS to version 9.4 and added the application Star Walk to find my blind way home in the dark walking along a bridge in a constellation. 

 Texts Without Contexts...read more.

Metta.

An original computer using binary operations.