As an early (may I say that?) adopter in the general populace (1994, dial up Unix shell on a SCO-V UNIX) of the Internet, I didn’t get off scot-free. Thanks to BBS’ and Usenet, I managed to write some pretty inane things (e.g. “Are you excited about Mike Modano and the Dallas Stars?”) and various comments of the form “Gillian Anderson is the most beautiful woman in the world!”). Thankfully these comments were widely spread, private (in the case of BBS’), and untraceable (in the case of Usenet).

Unlike what faces modern youth, my revelations of crushes, breakups, or photographs of humiliating pass-outs are not recorded, displayed, and / or, as in the case of particularly recirculation-worthy errors, spread globally with witty, degrading commentary added in sans-serif fonts. It seems that the internet has forgotten the essential truth of being young: as youths we fuck up. For a taste (possibly not-safe for work), consider Late Night Mistakes.

To say “fuck up” may seem a discordant note in an otherwise slightly-more-highly-minded essay, but I think “fucking up” is exactly what youths do. It’s not that the young “err,” implying a sense of understanding cause and the full length of effect and they do the wrong thing. No, rather they fuck up. They leave mowers in the rain, crash cars, text and drive¹, and run out of gas.

When you ask them why they did (or did not do) what ought have been done, they often have no answer because, research shows, their brain is not fully wired up yet; in case you missed that, they literally do not know. It’s all the free will of an adult without the experience to see final consequences all while being divorced from the motivation. It’s asking for chess, a game of evaluating predicted long-term outcomes, from a Candy Land player (“I go to the green square now!”).² This implies to me not that they chose to do the wrong thing, but that they simply fucked up. Incidentally, to me this seems the game of parenting: molding kids by providing rote maxims while hoping your kids don’t fuck up unto death before they can start making sense of the world as an adult.

When young the brain is not fully developed, the risk-evaluation cortices are immature and fucking-up occurs. Surely at the age of 25 everyone wishes the option to have a wipe-out, a quashing on mention of the fuck-ups in the previous 25 years. To remember the moments of burning humiliation, despair, isolation, and cruelty are the moments that forge our characters, but it’s nice to know they live back there away from quotidian existence. To feel that bitter flush in our temples and ears when the memories come back too clearly is our private boon, a spur to the right, or a sword-wielding, flaming angel warning off from the wrong path. Is it fair that my private character-forming experiences may be commandeered for sport, or that my lessons sans context are found later? In my generation that was not possible, for today’s it may be impossible to avoid. You know your errors will be documented by a dozen cell-phones, be spread like spilled quicksilver, and will live forever.

For me there is another concern. Not only does the burn of shame endure from moment of fuck-up unto the end of the electronic society, but knowing of the deathlessness of modern error, there will be a chilling effect on the healthy experimentation befitting to this time of life. To be clear, there are fuck-ups, but there are also experiments. Admittedly, sometimes that line is fuzzy, I grant. But if one is afraid to attempt an experiment for fear of it it being wrong and then having it recorded and disseminated as a fuck-up, then some wonderful people will not realize their full, true identity. It’s a pre-emptive shove to keep your exploration about your identity in the closet against the master paradigm. And note, I’m not strictly talking sexual identity, I’m talking about loving cello, being devout Muslim, being an atheist, struggling to be a poet. There’s a chilling effect as we see how deathless media can haunt you forever.

Imagine:

…High on hormones and ill-gained vodka, in a music-thrumming bedroom where the room spins red as her lips careen into her best friend’s… hours later her friend crushes her heart and her weeks of angst by publicly blabbing about the “lez shit” that her friend pulled….³
…The humiliating break-up from something you might work…hours later you have to endure a grilling via dozens of text messages…
…That Goth phase….

To remember and laugh, to move on, to accept is a blessing of aging, but to have it indelibly etched in so many 1’s and 0’s for eternal sport and to know that this is the case could make anyone run from seeing something as a folly of youth or an experiment and turn it into something, quite possibly, not worth living through and past.

The time is, sadly, inevitably coming (has already come?) where the Internet’s perfect, inhuman, and inhumane memory will drive a beautiful life to end itself. Perhaps I can take a page from Dan Savage in preëmption: “For those who have embarrassed themselves on the Internet, it gets better. No matter how bad it gets, we’re born naked, we die with little control over our bodies, you will do well sometimes and poorly others, you will rue and relish alike, and everyone is a fool in love. Try to be honest, nice, and respectful to others, especially those you share your secrets and bodies with. And lastly cut yourself and everyone else a little slack. Be that voice of conscience that doesn’t relish the safe, mean blanket of schadenfreude over the beautiful quilt of friendship.”

Whatever evidence is left, you are more than the sum of your experiences and their record.

Notes:

1. I’d almost rather give a teen a beer than a phone before putting him/her on the road
2. Obviously this varies by individual, so yes, there will be some teens who know more about electrical engineering by 16 than I ever will.
3. Times being what they are, this situation may now be a bragging point.

Vanity Fair allows you, yes you!, to take a walk on the Sheen side by playing Mad Libs as the poetic and fierce Mr. Sheen. Here’s what my imagination turned up.

I’m going to go out there and say it, I’m loving Mr. Sheen’s zone. If he is, as he says, drug free and enjoying the fabulous life he has created for himself, who are we to judge — provided children are safe, firearms are not brandished, cars are not driven? His father did some of his most amazing work while on all sorts of yaks-blood while in the Philippines filming Apocalypse Now. Maybe tottering on the edge of unstable is where Sheen men commune with their muse.

And I have to admit, while I was not thrilled by the 2000 presidential results, I had an optimism for what sorts of malapropisms and neologisms it would create (that thrill was short lived, first Elian Gonzales, then trickle-down economics, and then 2001 anno domini). Sheen’s own poetic Irish blood seems to be frothing forth in a foment of fecundity: “…fire-breathing fists,” “tiger blood.” I hope that he continues to let this diamond keep on shining.

I hope he’s well, and if he’s not I hope he can find help. But in the meantime, I’m going to accept that this is a man in the public eye giving us a very real crash course in a mans pursuit of sua amor fati, his Thanatos.

Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.

These were the words of Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston. Well Mr. Marston’s social experiment worked. Via comics, a whole generation, including me, learned of powerful ladies and to think nothing special of it.

This amazing creation has been appropriated by MAC cosmetics and here is what we see…

Personally, I think this image must have Marston rolling over in his grave. If Wonder Woman were around today, do we doubt that she’d be doing anything but loading up the invisble plane with physics books for young girls in Kabul? Wouldn’t she be out loading editorial boards on magazines so that instead of yet another “please your man in bed article” they would write about “discover who your man really is?” Wouldn’t she be lassoing up crooked CEO’s? Apparently the worst fate that can befall a girl is to look modishly chic like Helen from Ladytron.

Which, as a Ladytron, and uhm, Helen fan, I don’t find the worst fate that could befall a lady.

Hm, looking modish and/or wearing a re-do of a Nehru suit, this is a fate worse than being turned to stone?

What you can’t see in my snapshots above was Katy Perry’s “Firework” blaring at sentience-numbing levels. Can’t you hear it: “You’re special, you’re unique, you’re special, you’re unique. Makeup!”

It was all such a deviation from the backbone and sexual strength that Wonder Woman is supposed to project, it just made me sad.

In his acceptance address, Liu espouses the usual high-minded views that one would associate with a Nobel-winning dissident: free expression is a right of all men, democratic reform is coming to China, social diversity is better than a master-planned autocracy, etc.

What was most surprising to me was the poetic description of his love for his wife:

I am serving my sentence in a tangible prison, while you wait in the intangible prison of the heart. Your love is the sunlight that leaps over high walls and penetrates the iron bars of my prison window, stroking every inch of my skin, warming every cell of my body, allowing me to always keep peace, openness, and brightness in my heart, and filling every minute of my time in prison with meaning. My love for you, on the other hand, is so full of remorse and regret that it at times makes me stagger under its weight. I am an insensate stone in the wilderness, whipped by fierce wind and torrential rain, so cold that no one dares touch me. But my love is solid and sharp, capable of piercing through any obstacle. Even if I were crushed into powder, I would still use my ashes to embrace you.

I wandered lonely as a cloud

It’s not often that one mentions Wordsworth and science fiction in the same sentence, yet his famous line kept coming to mind as I read this oddly moving and beautiful report from NPR which muses about what sorts of life may be wandering out in the Universe now that our base assumptions have forcibly been widened by our discovery of arsenic-based life forms.

Says the author, Krulwich:

Imagine a cloud of stellar dust several light years across quietly drifting through space. Powered by its own bursting stars feeding it oxygen, carbon, life-giving chemistries, could it not become a slightly lonely but vastly oversized life form? An enormous space traveler?

Accompanied by this sentiment is one of those beautiful, extravagant, lush space pictures that makes me thankful that the government wastes my tax dollars keeping NASA (barely) afloat.

The article goes on to remind readers that if there are extraterrestrial life forms they are, by definition that is easily forgotten, going to be extra-terrestrial and will have evolved on a planet not like Terra. As such we should be prepared for life that looks like intellgent slime mold, or beings that have latticed themselves into meteors, or gigantic Water Bears who have mastered tricks like enduring the vacuum of space in a self-induced stasis before returning to a life-friendly region and getting back to the usual things like eating and reproducing.

Thanks to Frank Herbert, the notion of intelligent gas-based creatures is no foreign idea to yours truly. Herbert’s work The Jesus Incident describes a generated, theocratic society that subsists on a distant, rocky planet where wandering (seemingly) indifferent gas-blimp creatures called “hylighters” tack and jibe though those stranger skies with the aid of the rocks and outcroppings befitting such a harsh surface. Ulitmately the diety of the society (an AI ship) watches the humans grow to understand that life as an ecosystem is stranger, more beautiful, and more important than their own short-sighted avaricious and political plans.

In one moment of rumination the ship remarks that the great void of space has the capacity to surprise even him. And perhaps that is the beauty of being the intelligent, wandering cloud fed by stars, that it could wander slowly across the cosmos beholding the folly and beauty that is the panoply of life and lives across the heavens.

Only Portishead will do for a conclusion…

Content seduces us (good, ill, pornographic) while the delivery mechanism re-patterns our thinking process. That is we can’t think about idea acquisition, as moderns, without “book.” We can’t think of “a day” without a notion of a measured, external reality that is divided into 246060 measured by the rattle of a cesium atom

Prologue

McLuhan: “The content of a medium is ‘the juice piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind’(Carr, 4).”

Consider: Maxim that “content is king” heard at SXSW and other conferences. We celebrate the content which has been “the same for every new informational medium going back at least to the books that came off Gutenberg’s press. Enthuniasts, with good reason, praise the torrent of new content…a ‘democratization’ of culture…[s]keptics, with equally good reason, condemn the crassness of the content…a ‘dumbing down’ of culture” (Carr,2).”

“The technology of the medium, however astonishing it may be, disappears behind whatever flows through it..”

This is as “The Matrix:” a world pulled over our eyes.

Confer: “Snow Crash:” by patterning our mind by exposure to certain content we immunize, or throw the gates open to the raiding Greeks, the defenses and structures of our mind. Seduced by Sinon’s story, we miss the function of the content (i.e. that he is a reuse designed to allow a mental re-patterning).

Thought: What if, by all this distractibility-inducing content, the famed “man verusus machine” war has already been fought and lost by my side: capitalism (Zynga/Pincus, FB/Zuckerberg, Twitter/…) and the espoused love of content have allowed the virus in, and now it can’t get back out.

Chapter 1

“the Net seems to be … chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation(Carr, 6).”

“‘I have lost the ability to read a longish article on the web or in print‘(Carr, 7).”

Philosophy degree holder Joe O’Shea, Rhodes Scholar: “I don’t read books…I go to Google and I can absorb relevant information quickly (Carr, 8).” Steven: This is absurd! College, esp. a philo. degree is not about getting the points ticked off in progression, it’s about learning to follow an intellectual thread. To know that Berkeley said X is worthless, to know that Berkley’s X was a reaction to Malabranche or Descartes and why is the point. What a waste of time, O’Shea. I suspect he’ll come to rue that being in print.

“I can’t get my [Literature!] students to read whole books anymore (Carr, 9)”

Chapter 2

Nietzsche acquired a Malling-Hansen typing ball, an early typewriter: “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts’ (Carr, 19).”

Pop-data: The brain has high neuroplasticity, through all life. Hope for stroke victims, keep practicing and your brain can learn to route around damage. Don’t stop.

Chapter 3

As we go through…[the process of] intellectual maturation [in a topic], we are also acting out the entire history of [that topic]. Specifically, as a child moves from primitive mapmaking (“Square and Triangle house with me out front”) to abstracted designs, assuming technical competence, (blueprint of my house on a birds-eye-view map…) we trace the evolution of that concept’s “being needed” through history. Lascaux caves didn’t need abstracted maps to know where a kill zone was.

Tools come in 4 varieties: * Sense amplifying: binoculars * Body amplifying: forklift * Nature altering: reservoir * Mind amplifying: clock,books, Web

The clock and the map changed us to believe there was an a priori entity “time” or “geography” that nostris abitis exists without us. A clock teaches us that something else is marking out a reality external to us but that we participate in, but it is we ourselves who created the thing! Cf. A. Huxley Island who points out that the gods are our inventions that we move that who, in turn, move us.

Walter Ong: “Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.”

Technology has an intellectual ethic that goes with it, rarely recognized by its creators (Carr, 45). Our intellectual ethic is defined by books (even now, although slipping). Starts with Plato in the Phaedrus extolling written over oral knowledge transmission. Unsurprising, he was rich and well-born.

Chapter 4

Books went from being the realm of the rich to the many. The intellectual ethic (Chapter 3) went “viral.”

“[we]…trained our brains to control and concentrate attention (Carr, 64)”

“The reader becomes the book” in “deep reading.”

Books, their mass production, re-patterned, or pre-patterned in the case of children, the assumption of books’ existence and the requisite ability to focus and hold a thread of argument or description across units of time. This patterning may not be happening anymore, a stronger pattern is coming.

Chapter 5

The internet is ubiquitous and more media (including print journals) are going ot it. Hunter S. Thompson is only possible in a “Rolling Stone” that needs more pages. TV is looking more like the net, only so that it doesn’t let itself go to obsolescence. Libraries are replacing books with laptop space.

Chapter 6

No, hypermedia / web is not an improvement to a book. The image of a book: imago libri.

Book reading may return to being the activity of the rich. Mass book reading was a blip thanks to cheap paper presses. Steven: Soon the plebs will be amused by twitter and other Idiocratic “ow my balls” amusements while the skill to read, the will so to do, will return to the wealth classes whence reading started pre-Gutenberg.

The plebs will not know that their addiction to blip-meia has marked them as lower-class more surely than an Eliza Doolittle faux pas.

Consider the irony of the “populist” movements. It’s not that the “Tea Party” members actually know the material better, instead they believe in blip-media icons who interpret the facts for them and give them signs to promulgate as if they had read the material. Cf. “The Onion: Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be”

“Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence (Carr 108).”

Chapter 7

Mezernich “[Internet tools’] HEAVY USE HAS NEUROLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES”

The brain /is not/ a hard drive. It requires gaps to process and take in information. You’re filling a bathtub with a thimble, in that gap to refill the thimble magic happens. Continued bombardment creates superficiality and fleetingness in what you’ve “learned.”

The promise of hypermedia / video everywhere viz. pedagogy has not been achieved. It’s not made schooling better / faster.

Multitasking is a lie.

Chapter 8

Google.

Search engines are not a replacement for learning. A linked up library of alexandria (google books) with convenient hyperlinks is not better than books or a library. All that noise and clicking, the medium of online display is not conducive to actual reflective, stored reasoning.

The old “it’s not the technology it’s who uses it” is false. This is the important note about mind-altering tools. They have strong neurological changes. Give a man a shovel, he will still become strong. Give a man a Web and he will only be able to learn and think with it on, all the time, with him.

Any wonder, then, that always on devices are becoming so…essential? London cabbies’ knowledge is fading, kids’ ability to read a map, thanks GPS.

Google as Taylorist utopia. Everything is measured, A/B validated. Everything is measured in efficacy to the point sought. They cannot provide the context for the integration of the idea.

Chapter 9

“As people grew accustomed to writing down their thoughts and reading the thoughts others had written down, they became less dependent on the contents of their own memory (Carr, 177).”

“Naomi Baron: …a gentleman’s commonplace book …served…vehicle for and chronicle of his intellectual development (Carr 180)”

Memorization, a side effect of reading, or an accelerated effect of work is important and should be taken seriously.

The Net is not as the calculator. A calculator saves work of one type of memory, while you exercise the other. The Net mixes the two thus you hurt one at the expense of the other. The Web attacks working memory the calculator does not.

DF Wallace: “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think (Carr 194-5).”

Chapter 10

“Our ability to meld with all manner of tools is one of the qualities that most distinguishes us as a species (Carr, 208).”

Weizenbaum: “The computer was not a prerequisite to the survival of modern society in the post-war period and beyond, it’s enthusiastic, uncritical embrace by the most ‘progressive’ elements of american government, business and industry made it a resource essential to society’s survival in the form that the computer itself had been instrumental in shaping.” That is, what is the rule of the world that requires computers to function? It cannot function without computers. Computers’ existence creates a life where they cannot be rejected.

McLuhan: our tools end up ‘numbing’ whatever part of the body they ‘amplify’. the fingers became numb thanks to industrial weakving.

Even as our technologies become extenions of ourselves, we become extensions of our technologies

TS Eliot: The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.

Even knowing he talks to an ELIZA-bot, humans attribute minds where they are not.

Heidegger: “tide of technological revolution…so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that the calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.” The “frenziedness of technology threatens to entrench itself everywhere.” We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls (222)

Epilogue

Ironically, HAL, the AI’s meltdown and statement of fear, paranoia, is human. We are becoming the artificial. “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence”

The conclusion that presents itself is unpleasant and simple. Our minds have changed to want more events of this type. “But how did I change my mind, I did no drug, I was not brainwashed.” Ah, but you were. You stood by, beguiled by the story of a lying Greek and didn’t realize that Troy was being sacked of its gold behind your back all the while you stood by, begging for more of the fabulist’s tale.

And humans, being gregarious normative creatures, are accepting that others are patterned this way, are patterning ourselves this way and are joining in the cabal to make the distracted society the norm. But I contend it’s neither making us better or more content.

The other day I was working at my my colleague S.’s desk and watched her face get twisted and contorted by phone calls, emails, IMs and desk visits. In fact watching her read her e-mail killed me because a pop-up popped up as she was in the email application to tell her that more email had arrived. Pair this with more and more IM update blinks and it was enough to make me angry at her for tolerating this. How do you ever feel caught up? How do you ever feel sane?

Where is there time for the quiet mind? And don’t you miss it?

Quo Vadimus?

Where are we going, where can we go? Are we caught in a recursive vice such that we’ll never be able to get out (like Postmodern discourse)?

Am I to delete my Twitter account, delete my Facebook account?

Am I to shut down my IM client and turn off my email program?

I don’t think the answer is an unequivocal “Yes,” but I believe the tools and the methods of interface need to be reevaluated, updated, and where necessary ignored. Certain metaphors (“email”, “feeds”, “push notification”) might need to be drowned so that we don’t drown. Just like “Metropolis’” Moloch Machine, we cannot make the survival of the system a higher good than our own healthy function.

I believe some innovators have adopted rules and heuristics for handling this situation. Consider how Richard Stallman (originator of emacs, one of the primary text editors of choice) “browses the web.”

For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

“Slow in real-time…” this might be an important phrase.

Stallman is forcing the “social web” to map to his need of it, not vice versa. No doubt that since he engaged with the web through the portal of “e-mail” in his primitive mail reader (that he wrote) he reads web content not in the cursory ‘scan’ but in a thoughtful, considered fashion.

Also, Stallman clearly doesn’t “surf.” To get a link aggregator site (Facebook, Digg, Reddit), Stallman would have to send several email events to get the updates. As such, he simply can’t be as distracted as those of us who open up an aggregator page and explode out every length. Stallman is mastering a monkey-mind impulse to get more informational drug hits and is sipping a sherry unlike the majority of us who are guzzling dubious grade mental distraction like high schoolers at Señor Frog’s

Another data point is this image:

It strikes me that the difference between important and urgent is being defined and few people are working to do it. T

Conclusion

The net impression that I’m taking away from this book is that we’re a bunch of twitch-moded-next-flashing-light monkeys thanks to constant, ubiquitous, information teases. It’s the same thing that when tied to coins makes a slot machine a profit center. We must make ourselves (again) the masters of the tap. These thoughts were inspired by “The Shallows.” If you would like to explore these ideas further, you might find it a worthwhile read.

My friend Bruce Williams tweeted:

The phone had replaced the cigarette in terms of many gestures

While this quote is certainly pithy and seemingly spot on, it misses what is actually happening. Historically when smokers left the building it was to disconnect from the work environment. In the lounge, turned smoking lounge, turned back alley behind the dumpster, smokers could congregate and “disconnect:” talk about the weather, talk about the cigarette, offer the new girl from accounting a light, and sometimes when no one else was out, watch the world go by.

But a phone, and especially a smart-phone, does not offer this catharsis, it does not push the clutch in on the gears of the same monkey-work one does at his desk. It offers the chance to get away from the flurry of the mentes novae, but in fact encourages you to operate in this same mode, but for your personal life.

Perhaps because I walk down San Francisco’s 3rd street in the business district I’m keenly aware of this sight: clutches of smokers smoking and with nicotine delivery device-free hand, punching into their smart phones ignoring the people immediately to their left and right. It is the height of the narcissism of our times: dancing with ourselves, talking with ourselves.

No longer is “going for a smoke” an escape, it’s an excuse to got an informational+nicotine dose. While this population displays its effects clearly, it is reasonable to conclude that other tribes and social subsets are also being changed as the hyperconnected mens nova becomes their default mode of thought.

Previously I wrote about the mens nova, the new mind, and how, for some it is being programmed and encouraged by our peers and our workplace. It would seem that the mens nova should be localized among certain work disciplines or economically advantageous countries and age groups.

But it is not. As the elder generation dies away, the population will come to be dominated by those who understand and take as granted the mens nova. Further, the older and less digitally entrenched are not immune. Parents will be seduced by text messages, smaller, more frequent, offering status insights on a faster basis. Grandparents will embrace the iMac and a lighter digital bombardment as their teachers, the young, slowly show them how to scale emotional payoff (pictures, video, Skype) in real-time.

Furthermore, markets will demand growth as they always do. Capitalism demands that new consumers be found: the old, the young, the blind, the poor. To convert eyes and clicks into revenue, interfaces will be made more simple, arguments will be made more simple, and complexity will diminish even as social norms and distraction alerts increase their presence.

Again, it is not just the new that will conform to the mens nova. Old media will also put on new personae to fit into the expectations of the mens nova patterned readership. CNN’s news site is now a pale simulacrum of a news site. Fox news’ site blares and blasts with the subtlety of UK’s “The Sun).” But that’s not surprising, they’re owned by the same corporation. Short, contextless atoms of information float in a sea of pictures and sixty-four point headings. This is the world of Internet news and it is dumb, dumb, dumb.

The virus has us already. Barring shortage in materials or energy, we have no choice but await the new mind’s complete infiltration and dominance. What sort of animal is being created? What sort of political being is this? If we can’t make it through a paragraph of an intelligently-written newspaper, how can we be a people of critical thought?

Conspiracy

It’s not unreasonable here to let your mind wander freely and start to come to scary conspiracy-theory grade conclusions. I believe it’s worth getting them on the table:

• The Man™ designed the Web as a Huxleyan weapon of mass distraction. We won’t rebel not because we don’t care, but because there’s so much more noise everywhere else
• The Man™ / Space aliens are patterning our brains (Snow Crash or Macroscope style) to receive an imprinted thought virus
• The Man™ and other plutocratic institutions designed the Internet to amuse plebes whilst they plan a separate tier of actual knowledge and wealth creation information network (Internet 2, or “books,” which will fly under the radar as tmz.com and @justinbieber absorb larger slices of the attention pie)

None of these, formerly the realm of science fiction are inconceivable. Perhaps the greatest contribution of “The Matrix” cycle was to suggest that such a thing was possible and we should be wary of, wait, what just happened on Twitter? Does even the far-fetched nulltopia of “The Matrix” even seem impossible anymore? Or does it just seem to be a higher definition experience than what we currently mediate?

To Be Continued…