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In this Halloween episode of the podcast, KMO welcomes Erik Davis back to the program to discuss pulp horror author H. P. Lovecraft, who has achieved an astonishing level of posthumous legitimacy and is now recognized as a seminal influence in the popular imagination. Erik is teaching an online course on the works of H. P. Lovecraft for the Maybe Logic Academy. In the second half of the discussion, KMO and Erik use the themes explored in Lovecraft’s work as a jumping off point for a more general discussion of the role of the human faculty of imagination.
Atmospheric music by Dr. Richard Grossman
http://www.techgnosis.com/index.php
http://www.maybelogic.org/courses.h
All readings in this episode are from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, by H. P. Lovecraft.
You can find a LOT of H. P. Lovecraft audio material on the web, for example: http://www.yog-sothoth.com/modules.p
http://www.thegrowreport.com/Forums/sho
I read a short piece in Newsweek recently about how Apple's new tablet computer thingie will "reinvent computing" and how with it some indigo child of the post-iPod age "will be inventing a new language for telling stories."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/217683
And who knows? It may go that way. That would certainly be good news for me and my fellow "outside the mainstream mediocracy" podcasters, but I have lost my techno-Utopian religion.
Five years ago, I had DSL service in my home. Now, I use the wifi at the public library and I spend a LOT less time online than I did half a decade ago. I can imagine this being a temporary "setback," and I can also see it as an indicator of what's to come for a growing portion of "the Tribe" and as a decided improvement in the state of things.
John Horgan was telling me about a conversation that he had with an anti-terrorism think-tank wonk about how in five years the norm will be for everyone to be online all the time and that it will be extremely suspicious for anyone to be offline, just as now it is extremely suspicious for a person to leave their cell phone at home. The assumption of the authorities is that, since the GPS gear in your cell phone creates a continuous timeline of its (and presumably its owner's) movements, then the only reason to leave home without it is to avoid creating a record of your movements, and the only reason you would want to do that is because you are up to evil doings.
This is the panoptic dark side of the on-going collapse of the distinction between direct experience and electronically mediated experience. Things could go that way, but again, the faith of my younger years has wavered.
I think that in five years time most of us will still make use of the internet in some form. Some of us will continue sleep walking into the Panopticon and think that we're making "progress," and others will be spending more and more time "offline," and that doing so will both enrich our experience of life and make us personae non grata to those who occupy the top spots in the hierarchy.
I actually don't think that there is much danger of "the Internet" going away. "The Internet" (qua the global network of networks) existed for decades prior to the advent of MySpace, FaceBook, and free web-mail, and I suspect that some segment of the population will continue to make use of it come what may.
I can envision a time when the multi-media bells and whistles of the World Wide Web prove too expensive, impractical, and stunningly extravagant to maintain but in which Usenet, IRC, and similar text-based interfaces thrive and enable the functioning of far-flung "communities" that would otherwise not exist. It wouldn't pull the same audience as FaceBook and YouTube, but that might be for the best.
As I have slid increasingly into mnemonic and organizational impairment in recent years I have become ever more reliant on my Gmail inbox to serve as my prosthetic memory. As more people become reliant on the functions of "the Cloud," I can also imagine a time when the generous and civic-minded machines at Google might decide that if the service they provide to me is really "all that" then I shouldn't mind too terribly much if they asked me to fork over a few clams in exchange for searching the hundreds of thousands of messages in my inbox for all emails from Neal Kramer or that make mention of "the Singularity."
If that happens, a lot of people will add one more category of expenses to the list of things that they "have to" pay for each month... things that their parents and grandparents never imagined themselves using, much less "needing."
And some people will decide that they can do without the services of the Cloud. If the percentage of people who opt out is small enough, they will be ridiculed and considered kooks on the level of people who refuse certain types of medical care on religious grounds. If they are more numerous or if they opt out involuntarily due to deteriorating economic circumstances, then they may remain unacknowledged in the mainstream discourse, like the tens of millions of Americans who opt out of the annual income tax filing ritual. Whether they are ridiculed or not spoken of, they will be viewed with suspicion and antipathy by those who require a servile and predictable hoi polloi.
Most people reading this will be familiar with the life and work of Edward Bernays and his successors and with their decades-long project of blurring the distinction between wants and needs. Only in the scenarios that most resemble the fantasies of the techno-Utopians will this program continue its relentless conquest of the space of human concerns. In most of the futures I see as likely, the continuation of this program will fall into the category of endeavors that Jim Kunstler derides as "efforts to sustain the unsustainable."
In the coming years, I see more and more people regaining a working distinction between the conditions they need in order to live and enjoy a good quality of life and the objects and "services" which they have been duped into regarding as essential for the maintenance of a desired self-image and social status.
Whether by Flicker, or sneakernet, or semaphore flags, the people who opt out will find ways to communicate with each other and share the techniques they have learned for getting by without some of the so-called "essentials."
Much of what we fear will never come to pass, and much of what we fear will come to pass, and we'll discover ways to cope with it, learn from it, and live better because of it, in no small part because circumstances will force us to work with and depend upon the people close to us rather than paying anonymous and distant strangers for the things we genuinely need in order to survive.
KMO plays the second half of AyasminA’s interview with Dr. Stephan V. Beyer, author of Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. Steve details the importance of the auditory aspect of the Ayahuasca experience, and then the conversation turns to the paternalism and condescension of First World defenders of indigenous peoples. Later in the episode, KMO plays a clip from the It’s Not Us, It’s You! podcast about the totalitarian aesthetic of Wal*Mart’s new generic product packaging.
Music by Zarathustra.
KMO plays the first half of a conversation between AyasminA and Dr. Stephan V. Beyer. Steve is the author of Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon, and in the conversation Steve details his lifelong odyssey into the deep regions of consciousness and spirituality which include fifteen years spent in the upper Amazon with the Mestizo keepers of the Ayahuasca tradition.
Music by Joseph A.
The excerpt from Steve's book that I read appears on Reality Sandwich:
http://www.realitysandwich.com/singing_
Here's the link to the YouTube video that Doug Lain put together that I mentioned at the end of the program:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzf4r4QM
In spite of the music, the fast cutting, the hyperbolic over-dramatization ("It will be a Mad Max world"), this actually does present a pretty tight summary of the major implications of Peak Oil.
Patrice Gros appears in C-Realm Podcast episodes 15: Fearless, 16: Sudden Violent Death and 78: Fuel vs Food: Not!
http://www.foundationfarm.com/
And if you haven't seen Waking Life, or if you want a refresher on Alex Jones' contribution to that film, here's the link for it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfEuSNej
...and for his bit in A Scanner Darkly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDtfKNRT
It's time once again for Podcast Awards nominations. Last year the C-Realm Podcast was a finalist in the "Culture/Arts" category and lost out to the podcast version of This American Life. This year, I notice that Duncan Crary is asking that Kunstlercast listeners nominate his show in the "People's Choice" and "General" categories.
I leave it to you to decide what category best fits the C-Realm, but if you would take a moment to nominate the C-Realm Podcast I would very much appreciate it.
Link: http://www.podcastawards.com/
Podcast Name: The C-Realm Podcast
Podcast URL: http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com
KMO welcomes Frank Aragona and Neil Kramer back to the program to discuss sacred geometry. Neil, immersed in the experiential study of crop circles, describes stepping into one as an encounter with paradox. Other topics include the use of sacred geometry in permaculture design, the suppression of sacred symbols, the extreme polarization of forces by industrial cultures, and the possibility of communicating with non-human intelligence via the language of fractal geometry.
April 19th Bicycle day
April 20th (4/20) KMO's birthday
November something Buy Nothing Day
And so forth.
Please post your suggestions.
http://www.thegrowreport.com/Forums/sho
Happiness is a legacy of a reinforcement architecture that existed before brains were powerful enough to implement general cross-domain consequentialism. A reinforcer is a crude approximation of the abstract knowledge that a particular category of activities is likely to lead to terminal value achievement.
In short, happiness is a legacy and only creatures with the luxury for legacies will implement it. Memories of the distant irrelevant past are a luxury – even if you have them stored somewhere, you wouldn’t recall them unless necessary. Storytelling is a luxury.
Thanks to Eric Boyd for the link to the Overcoming Bias essay.
KMO reads from and responds to editorials from Michael Lynch and Charlotte Allen and then plays the conclusion of his recent conversation with James Howard Kunstler which also touches on those two editorials. Other topics include looking for villains, Y2K, and the outrageously elitist notion that some things are better than other things. Jim reminds us that life is tragic and that history does not care if we make bad choices. Stupidity will continue so long as circumstances allow it, and when circumstances change we will adopt new behaviors.
KMO welcomes James Howard Kunstler back to the program to discuss "green shoots" delusions, the diminishing returns of information technology, "favela chic," and the failure of virtual experience to provide a fullfilling substitute for authentic experience in our electronically mediated lives.
Music by Ken Tucker and James Swafford
http://video.reboot.dk/video/486788/bru
http://www.coloco.org/fichiers/_squelet
No, but I might think carefully about what I ate or drank in the hour prior to my hearing the voice of the magic genie.
