The Vanguard of a Perpetual Revolution

By Brian George

("The Vanguard of a Perpetual Revolution" is probably still a work in progress. I will be posting the current version in four sections over the next week or so.)

Preface

This essay is intended to be viewed as a kind of political/ cosmological landscape; I do not write about politics, as such, and have little interest in advocating a particular position. On the one hand, there has never been an election since 1972 in which I have not voted. For me, politics is the “art of the possible”—as reductive as this seems. On the other hand, my imagination must have room to move, and I believe that the future is—even now—being created far outside of the framework of contemporary debate.

I will, when all is said and done, most probably be voting for Obama—unless he is challenged by a more courageous Democrat in 2012. But this will be only one scene out of one act of a play that is being performed at the forefront of a microscopic stage—lit by arc lights that switch on and off—behind which stagehands move throughout the wings and passageways and catwalks of an inconceivably large theatre.

1

Full disclosure: During the last election season I was a Hillary supporter, and was none too pleased by the way Obama treated his opponent. Since he took the oath of office, I have been pleasantly surprised by his sense of presidential bearing. For the most part, however, he has followed the course—the course of happy-face “corporatism,” tweaked now and then by timid lip-service to ideals—that I foresaw in 2008.

In 2000, before the Supreme Court handed the election to George Bush, and the media chimed in to proclaim that the coronation was “inevitable,” I had the sense that I was watching a kind of time-lapse train wreck—whose first casualties would be unspeakable, and whose ring of disaster would continue to expand. In 2008, this sense of almost physical dread once again took over. Still, it is not for me to judge, since there is no way to determine what is actually going on, and the president, too, may be no more than a bystander.

He is the headlight that illuminates a prescribed cone on the tracks. It is not a job that I would wish upon anyone—not even my worst enemy, or a god.

Once, on the dark horizon, a light no bigger than a pinhead had appeared. That light called memories, like a force-field, from the past.

Mile after mile, past the freight-yards of abandoned factories, past the Quonset huts of those who dream of a new Ice Age, past hermetically sealed databanks and armed compounds of the superrich, past the silos where a way of life was murdered: the light from the horizon grew steadily larger as it came. It had promised to be all things to all people. Until, in the final act, the light that spilled from the pinhead was enormous—but it had no power to turn left or right.

Playful SEO: Demarcate Narrative as Internet Graffiti

by Wes Unruh

The stories we tell ourselves are often ways to understand the world in which we live. I've always been fascinated with the way that gonzo journalism can trade in metaphor and still generate its own kind of truth. Another aspect of this is the narratives that are culturally established around proper names online - proper names are special keyword phrases which cluster around the most culturally visible, and reputation management is a particularly valuable (if somewhat difficult) space for content optimization to challenge existing or established narratives. If that doesn't make sense, then think of it like this - names are gates through which you summon the most powerful single entity bearing that name to the top of the results. I've been thinking about this shit for years now ever since getting mixed up in that whole 23rdian nonsense years back and seeing how effective 'googlebombing' could be - internet graffiti at it's best. Doing standard industry content seo research is fine - it's the equivalent of painting dividing lines on highways, placing sign posts around a city - but to me it's a lot more interesting to take that paint and narrate a mural in an overlooked space.

I wrote about this a few years ago for Foolish People - back when I figured ScamLife would be around a little longer (quick sidenote, I see that Google's removed the word 'scam' from its autocomplete... and I bet I know why). Then, when I was playing with misspelling SEO I ran through quite a few hoops, playfully embedding links across multiple domains, tying several misspellings together, and tweaking the results over a few weeks to see what would happen. The misspelling I relied on for traffic was 'Embued Spaces' but today if you search, you'll find google replaces your search with the term 'Imbued Spaces' - nowadays it's much more difficult to work across more statistically dense words - words that have an espoused use across billions of indexed texts. Instead, to really get the search engine to respond the same way it did years ago I have to locate a word which is correctly spelled but contextually misspelled.

Last night I ran across one such word in the early comments on this Youtube link: the phrase 'demarcate party' embedded in an angry response to the video. Now, demarcate is a word in its own right, and in a poetic way does somewhat establish an approach to civic governance. But more importantly, Google does not default to Democratic Party as it does with other misspelled words which are not words in their own right.

So I decided to play around and create a narrative - already somewhat loosely established from some previous infictive gaming - which tied the term Demarcate Party directly into my blog, then deeper into the Infictive.com - and, thanks to the existing structure I've put in place, I actually hit #3 for 'demarcate party' four hours into the process.

This doesn't mean I'll stay there. I've put in some content on the blog's landing page, but even more importantly I framed the landing page with content on the previous and next blog post consistent with the Democratic Party current 'semantic' footprint - note two very small links to the previous and next blog post above the actual content - framing the landing page. Now, for it to stick for good I'd need other bloggers linked to my 'Demarcate Party' blog post.The links are tied into an infictive trailhead for a hypercard stack of sorts built around an investigation into team themis and the disappearance of the guy running for Sheriff.

Consider this an open invitation to play along with a game made up, in part, by using seo as a kind of graffiti.

One final note: for whatever reason, Google Images gave me this as the top result for Demarcate Party, so I include it here on the gut assumption that this might further solidify the connections I'm playing with now. Clicking this image will take you to the image's source post - another link which, while not containing anchor tags, is tied into the search engine algorithym in a way I honestly can only make out by fumbling around with playful experiments like this very post.



Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

Want to get lost: Greetings from St. Stephen

Wanna Get Lost? It just takes a few seconds. Where are you right now? Are you in a house? If so, where is that? On a street, perhaps in a town, in a country, on a planet, in a galaxy far away, in a universe, inside some D-brane? All our science and we are still playing the shells game, or Russian dolls if you like. "Turtles all the way down" as they say...
Allow me into introduce myself. My name is St. Stephen from Shitty Bear's Corner. 
We have no fucking clue (well that is not true, clues are all we have, that and models), what this this is, where we are, what we are doing (and what we think we are doing), how we got here, if there is even a point (since we are only a sliver of the existence we find ourselves in), and yet, we are. We are at least for now. Some say that we will be always. Hugh Everett III, the man who is now held responsible for the many worlds interpretation, is said to have committed suicde believing that his understanding, that his wave description of worlds guaranteed him immortality. Thats the myth (which maybe reality).

Recently (the older you get, I think, the longer that is, that is recently) they have released Everett's layman-paper, where one can find the deployment of an amoeba metaphor. The smallest of the animal models. And that is where you come in. That's where we all come in. We all come in and go out, but death as nothing, the annihilation of it all (as far as our experiences are concerned), like a sleep that one cannot remember, is for some a horror. For others the notion of nothing, of unawareness is a bliss, a resting release from the aneitxy, the tension of life, perhaps Freud is right about the death drive. At times it seems hard to deny, and yet to drive at death is to drive at life, through life (with a stoic stick, cap, and cape), to burn through life, but announced. It has been said often, even on this blog, we fail to live, yes, brother Tepper, the Tears of Eros... we look we ask, we act, what will sooth them? But then I stop (crying). I pull back.
Some claim to remember back to before their birth, but I am not going to draw myself into some past life debate, it will have its turn(s), I am sure. If there is time, and there is. I will go on, perhaps in others memories, but will I be real. Even now, my memories real are they wishes, only probable pasts that I remember for my secret purpose (to go on). What of the stuff of dreams and light?

The Karmic Fallacy Part 3

By James Curcio
Part 1 || Part 2

In part 1 and 2 of this series, I looked at many of the repurcussions of a belief in karma as an ethical dimension. However, this is not the only perspective on karma, and as some commenters on these posts recognized, I was doing a bit of baiting. Because there is a coherent psychological basis for the idea of karma, but it has little to do with reincarnation.

Instead we must look back to my post on the sacred in our profane holidays, and continue this exploration a step further.

If we are in doubt of the sacred origins of holidays, we might consider some of the ideas put forth in Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane:

“The New Year coincides with the first day of Creation. The year is the temporal dimension of the cosmos. ‘The world has passed!’ expresses that a year has run its course. At each New Year the cosmogony is reiterated, the world re-created, and to do this is also to create time- that is, to regenerate it by beginning it anew. This is why the cosmogony myth serves as paradigmatic model for every creation or construction; it is even used as a ritual means of healing.”

Thus, the role served by this entity which rewards and punishes, is to cut what we might call the karmic ties with the previous year. This seems an unusual attribution for the seemingly benevolent Santa Claus, but this is only because the holiday has become so desacralized that he has merely become a stand-in, a cardboard cutout, signifying nothing.

This connection between karma and the eternal return of the holiday cycle is not without precedent. Again we can turn to The Sacred and the Profane,

“...to Indian thought, this eternal return implied eternal return to existence by force of karma, the law of universal causality. Then, too, time was homologized to the cosmic illusion (maya), and the eternal return to existence signified indefinite prolongation of suffering and slavery.” 

These karmic ties don’t require an actual belief in karma within the Buddhist or Hindu framework of reincarnation. What it refers to is an element of our memory. Consider something that you own that has a great deal of “sentimental value.” Pick it up. Hold it in your hand. Think about the people you associate with it. Grab hold of those emotions, and travel back to the time that the object brings you to.

That’s your karmic tie. You are bound to those things. The same is true of the memories and emotions we hold onto of those we love, who are now gone, and of the life we lived which is also gone. Of course, outside a framework that espouses transcendence, these are neither positive nor negative in themselves, but they are attachments. From this, we can see that a mythic symbol serving some kind of ethical function would arise, when it comes to recapitulation and renewing. To renew, the soil must be tilled. Some attachments can be maintained but others must be severed.

Or, if they are not, they maintain a hold over us. Which is not to say, again, that this is good or bad. But there comes a time where all attachments will be stripped from us, if we give the Bardo any weight. Do you want to do it now, or then?



Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

Kairos II: La Révolution Post-historique

Oh no! It's Da Bomb!

         Arnold Gehlen, in ¨The Roll of Living Standards in Today´s Society¨ (1952) and Hendrik de Man (Paul´s uncle), in Vermassung und Kulturverfall (1952), present another “end of history” scenario emphasizing das Posthistoire [1], the-post historical period; that period into which we entered after the Second World War (and of modernity, see exhibits: a) the unprecedented scale of the war, b) Auschwitz, and c) the Bomb), and made possible by the post-war economic and technological acceleration, which ensured that all could enjoy a high standard of living as compared to before (this parallels Kojève´s footnoted suggestion that the classless society was in fact American consumer capitalist society). 

 

Hiroshima, Post-Bomb

The mathematician A. A. Cournot had envisioned, as it was about a century before the phrase post-histoire was coined; then, Cournot wanted to designate the position that emerges when any human invention or innovation has been so perfected that every further morphological change appears closed off...the conclusion that our culture has filled its “archetypal” sense and is thus has entered a phase of meaninglessness; the alternative was then, viewed biologically, death or mutation...Post-histoire is not concerned with the lethargy of a culture in which its vital powers have been extinguished, rather with the entry to a phase of world-events occurring overall outside of the framework of History because they lack any noticeable historical connection between causes and effects. [2]

Castings by Fern Knight – Arcana & Archetypes

Our past lingers at the edge of cultural consciousness; tracing through music, poetry, literature and art it draws us back to mysteries, moving us deeper into understanding. While technology pushes to the forefront, these lingering lines are kept alive by artists who pursue the trail where ever they find it. Margaret Ayre of Fern Knight is well versed in the visions of mythography, and Fern Knight’s latest release, Castings, presents a suite of songs centered on the Tarot and the archetypal imagery of it's arcana.

“The tarot pack used by modern cartomanciennes at Paris and elsewhere, for fortune-telling, is called by them “Livre de Thot.” Thoth was the Egyptian Mercury, said to be one of the early kings, and the inventor of the hieroglyphic system and its attendant mysticism.”

- Vide Henri Delange, Le Monde Occulte, fourth edition, p. 26

Tarot can be seen as a reflection of the Game of Life, each card a Key to a deeper understanding of the movement of the universal Mystery into concrete forms and situations. For centuries it has proven a vital enigma, giving rise to complex interpretations that use its basic substructure to formulate visions of the intricate operations of existence.

New Questions Towards A Philosophy of Gaming, Transmedia and Myth: Repositioning the Role of "Marketing"

By Gunther Sonnenfeld

[This is a follow-up piece to James Curcio's post entitled "Questions Towards A Philosophy of Gaming, Transmedia and Myth", and in particular, how narrative constructs developed through gaming might transform culture. While this is actually a edited repost of a piece I wrote last year, it is timely given that the game featured as a use case has enjoyed incredible success, some of it attributable to the explorations discussed here. Enjoy.]

A game is released and it goes to market. Media buys are made. Various media assets are created and put out to pasture. Client and agency cross their collective fingers and hope for the best.

An all too familiar scenario. Yet, as marketers and product makers, we are often sitting on a veritable warchest of mythic value and storytelling possibility, whereby games, audiences and social movements have new opportunities to align themselves - to converge - around narrative.

The discipline of marketing, especially in the sense of stifling narrative and manipulating audiences through frequency of message, has made it a dirty word, and dare I say, a dirty practice. So for the sake of exploration, let's reposition it to become something along the lines of an "experience cultivator".

Recently, I came across a brilliant whitepaper from Kai Pata at Tallinn University’s Center For Educational Technology, one that addresses the dynamics surrounding participatory culture, and how storytelling swarms develop into a hybrid narrative ecosystem. Using design as the core discipline, what Pata has effectively done is outline the steps for dynamic artifact creation, as well as the some of the more accessible methods for extracting mythology from everyday circumstance (or creating/recreating it).

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Four Scouts to the New World/ Parts 16-17

By Brian George

16

The arrival of planner 4 has pushed the group (hard) in a dangerous direction. With few disagreements, we explored alternative modes of thought. We began to act as one body.

It was quickly decided that the political system should be modeled on the 19th century New England town hall meeting. I suggested a revolving leadership, perhaps based on the sacrifice of any and all personal wealth, or on the 12 signs of the Zodiac. The idea was shot down. The crowd would argue until one vision was left standing.

At length external circumstances will force a decision on the group. Fear will act as the de facto leader, as it manufactures a near death experience. The sphere, as once imagined by Parmenides, is a discontinuous web of thermonuclear reactions. They do not yet trust that the human body will give as much warmth as the sun.

Information should move and jump according to the theory of redundancy. If one electromagnetic unit is good, more are better, to insure the synchronistic action of the whole. Every system should be overdetermined, like a symbol in a dream, owing its existence to a multitude of causes, aiming its purpose toward a multitude of ends.

On the new planet there would be no roads. There would only be networks of energy. It is lucky, too, that there should not be any roads, as we have shelved group planner 1's idea of transplanting an industrialist. Who would work on the assembly line? It is almost certain that there would be no volunteers. To whom could you market cars?

Jacob's Ladder And The Tibetan Book of The Dead (cont)

Video: The Intermediary State. || Read Part 1 Here
By James Curcio

When this film first entered my brain, I was young and had no awareness of the Bardo, or of Gnostic concepts of death and transcendence. I simply had a semi-conscious feeling, a mixture of dread, anxiety, and elation, that occasionally lurked close to the surface. What was it that? That I might already be dead, or dying, and that I was going through a process not unlike what Jacob was experiencing. Again and again he is told “you are already dead,” and he denies his impending condition, and then in the process of clinging, is tortured by the things that once brought him joy. So I was moved, though I say again in an only semi-conscious way, by a sort of wonderment that someone else had felt this way. I had never articulated it to anyone else, or been able to articulate it. It was through this movie that I first came upon the Bardo.

“As the world around us becomes more turbulent, so our lives become more fragmented. Out of touch and disconnected from ourselves, we are anxious, restless, and often paranoid. A tiny crisis pricks the balloon of the strategies we hide behind. To live in the modern world is to live in what is clearly a Bardo realm; you don’t have to die to experience one. … Because life is nothing but a perpetual fluctuation of birth, death, and transition, so Bardo experiences are happening to us all the time and are a basic part of our psychological makeup.” (The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche.)

Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

Praise Tarvu

Say Hebbo! from Torvakian on Vimeo.

Pron.'am-zam-ivvi-ram'.

Amzamiviram. Detail of a painting by Tony Curtis.

A very emotional man, Amzamiviram had been known to cry for days on end when he was upset or depressed. For example, when Tarvu left Amzamivirm and began Thelvol Hatty Haynu, Amzamiviram cried for 70 days, and his tears were said to have created the river Euphrates.

Little Known Fact - Why do Tarvuist women wear neckties?It is traditional for women to wear neckties, in particular, gold coloured ones on high holy days. This practice is very old, and stems from Tarvu's beautiful wife, Binni, who wore a gold-coloured piece of cord around her neck on the day of their wedding. (Amzamiviram was best man and the party got through over 500 chicken legs).
Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

Strange Factories

FoolishPeople is proud to announce the production of their first feature film Strange Factories, a psychological thriller written by John Harrigan and directed by Richard Webb and John Harrigan.

In an unnamed country, a storyteller possessed by an idea for a new fable searches for four lost friends, all refugee performers of a theatre destroyed in a mysterious fire. Sam, who is obsessed with dangerous stage effects, Jessica, a glamorous femme fatale, Hettie, a clown who hides a secret and Rose, who has sacrificed her life to art.

Victor believes their unique skills will help him complete work on a story he fears is fast becoming a paradox.

He finds his friends in a remote, pagan village founded by Stronheim; the owner of a Strange Factory hidden deep in the local countryside, infamous for the frequencies of sound it emits. Inadvertently, Victor enters into a dangerous pact when Stronheim makes a proposition to build a new theatre for the performers, if Victor reaches the heart of his story in time for it to be performed at the village festival.

The key to the group’s success lies in unravelling the truth of a mysterious fiction and learning how it relates to the customs of the villagers: bizzare rites practiced under influence of a hallucinogenic effluence siphoned out of the Strange Factory and served at the local pub.

Emotional geography and psychologically fractured history merge in a landscape haunted with dreams and nightmares of kidnapped actors, hideous monsters, invisible escape artists and ghosts of audiences past, present and future.

All milestones lead to Strange Factories.



Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

Dexter as a Transmedia Case Study

This piece paints a good picture for those who are still struggling to understand what transmedia is and why it is that I say that "transmedia is the future."

"In December 2010, Showtime announced that a new season of the series Dexter will start shooting in spring 2011 (the sixth one). Since we have some early day fans in our team, we couldn’t resist telling you a little more about this series, which is presently beating audience records in the US. Here’s an analysis of this phenomenon that obviously found an echo in transmedia." (Read article.)





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Order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized.

The Puppet Masters: Agency and Paranoia

By James Curcio

As was reported previously on Disinfo, there has been much recent inquiry into the idea of our sense of consciousness and agency arising through the interaction of things outside our nervous system, such as bacteria in our stomach:

"The wave of the future is full of opportunity as we think about how microbiota or bacteria influence the brain and how the bi-directional communication of the body and the brain influence metabolic disorders, such as obesity and diabetes," says Jane Foster, associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences of the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine." (Disinfo article.)

This, however, is just one example of "control from afar," and we see plenty of Manchurian Candidate material in the natural world through parasites, fungus, and bacteria that can selectively control animals to essentially do their bidding at the time and place of their leisure:


Parasites control ants

Speaking of ants, a study from the science daily on a fungus that can gain control of an ants nervous system to lead them to die in opportune locations:

Myth as a Weapon: Masks and Monsters

By Dr.Adventure!

The use of costume and persona is a part of almost every culture IN THE WORLD, and has been since the get-go. They have been used for storytelling, healing, ritual, celebration, and war. The ability to create and embody Characters, and make something imaginary into something tangible, is as integral to the human condition as thumbs, making tools and playing with fire.We create Myths to help us cope with the world around us and then develop personas to Navigate these myths. These personae are the tools we use to sculpt the metaphysical, and to become something new, something extraordinary.

Ancient (and contemporary) shamans channel spirits and gods using costume, ritual, dance, drugs and stories. They leave behind their human form and allow themselves to become the embodiment of something apparently non-human. They use these rituals to gain power and knowledge to heal, to curse, to protect, to implore, to summon and to teach.

The act of taking on a mythical persona becomes tangible, a process of actual physical change where the human aspect is overcome and its limits surpassed. This process, the theater of it and the ritual state of expanded awareness restructure the metaphysical self as the body is transformed.

Samurai used a similar process to make themselves appear as demons to their enemies. They used masks and elaborate ornaments and bright colors to frighten their enemies. These things also put the samurai in a mind-state where he was more than a man, he was a monster, terrifying and unstoppable. They would play the role while fighting for their lives and cutting people’s heads off, which as far as I’m concerned is about as "Real" as it can get. The goal of this practice was to achieve supremacy in warfare through distraction and intimidation. The skills required to perform these roles were just as disciplined as a soldier’s swordplay and strategy. By combining finely honed talents and outward expressions of otherworldly selves they effectively became something more, and in doing so turned battles into legends, men into Heroes and history into Myth.

The modern practice of method acting, or inhabiting a role, comes close to these ancient ritual practices. With notable exceptions. When an actor is preparing for a role, researching, practicing and putting him/herself in the position of their character, they are essentially reprogramming themselves to become that persona. The difference between this practice and the others previously mentioned is that conventional theater and media is often (but not always) approached with a sense of "playing pretend". This can be dangerous if a person believes that the thing they are "playing" at is not real and can do them no harm. Which is, of course, bullshit.

Method acting at its best is definitely approached with incredible discipline and also the awareness that one needs to be able to, in some way, anchor themselves so as not to be overwhelmed. When done poorly, this practice can be massively psychologically devastating. Interestingly, there comes a point where the method may over take the actor and actually turn him or her into a stronger person.

At that point, would they, or you, want to return to your "true self" or continue on as something new and powerful? And if so, how the fuck do you bear the weight?

Say Hebbo To Tarvuism

Since the dawn of time, mankind has searched for the meaning of life and existence. Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? But thanks to Tarvu - Lord and Master of the Universes - mankind can find the answers to all of life's questions.
Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.