Having spent the past few days reading drafts of the forthcoming book The Art of Memetics, by Edward Wilson & Wes Unruh, my spirit was elated this evening to come across this ad campaign for Pangea Day, 10 May. a) The Art of Memetics is a truly phenomenal treatment of how memes act to infect and how we can use this to personal advantage to survive and become strengthened in the coming Information Age. b) These videos are such a great idea: we’re so accustomed to hearing our national anthem sung by ourselves, it’s like the little voices in our heads. To have a nation we’re generally ignorant of or have little dealings with take it upon themselves to treat the anthem with such care and heart, makes for a poignant campaign in our coming post-national world.
I find that people tend to jump at the notion that memetics and marketing can be used for good. And I’d like to thank Edward Wilson & Wes Unruh, and the Pangea Day folk, and everyone else out there who understand that as long as everyone is educated, no one can well turn it against another. We can use these technologies and wisdoms to work for a better future.
Above is France sings America. And I’m not pointing fingers at anyone, but as a Canadian (anglais & français, as well as a whole swath of Asian and Middle Eastern dialects), I’ve always found it odd that the Americans would so inappropriately stereotype and ridicule the nation that gave America one of their greatest symbolic gifts: the Statue of Liberty. Regardless, it’s a beautiful sentiment.
I came across this via Kottke. I’ve seen bits and pieces posted about Outside over the past couple months, but this is a good review of a game everyone should be dying to try:
In terms of the social environment, almost anything goes. Outside has a vast network of guilds, many of its players are active participants in designing the game’s social environment, and almost any player will be able to find company to undertake their desired group quests. On the other hand, gold-buying is rife, the outskirts of virtually every city zone in the game are completely overrun by farmers, and the developers have so far proven themselves reluctant to answer petitions, intervene in inter-player disputes, or nerf broken skills and abilities. Indeed this reviewer will go so far as to say that the developers are absent from the game entirely, and have left it to its own devices. Fortunately, server uptime has been 100% from day 1, despite there being only one server for literally billions of players.
The reviewer gives it a 7/10.
ADDITIONALLY, just reading this on the Telegraph website, which goes to show just how peculiar IRL and Outside can really be depending on what tribe you end up playing:
Six Masai warriors, who are so fierce they kill male lions with their bare hands, have been warned that surviving the perils of the African bush will be child’s play compared to what they can expect on their first trip to England. […]
"Even though some may look like they have a frown on their face, they are very friendly people — many of them just work in offices, jobs they don’t enjoy, and so they do not smile as much as they should."
The Masai men — who become warriors after tracking, running down and killing a male lion — may struggle with Greenforce’s interpretation of how English law operates.
"For example, if someone was to see a thief and chase after him and, when they catch him they hurt him, then the person who hurt the thief would go to prison as well as the thief."
Came across this on reddit this morning. After having studied "Spirituality and Japanese Design Practise" (via Ambidextrous or the AIGA), the notion of the Japanese intuiting much more than their Western counterparts has been of interest to me. A tidbit from this interesting LiveJournal entry:
Japanese social interaction is all about intuiting the other person’s wishes without discussing them openly, at the same time that they are intuiting your wishes without discussing them openly, so that although nothing is ever verbalised, the two of you will always exist in a compromise position of equilibrium. If you like someone, that intuitive part goes into overdrive, because you should be able to understand everything about that person without them ever telling you, and you should be able to please them without ever asking how, even more than you would with a normal person.
I also can’t emphasise enough just how passive the passive partner is. The way a woman kisses is by submissively opening her mouth, not moving her tongue unless she is cued to do so; if she’s really feminine she won’t open her mouth at all, until she’s told to. Sometimes women will move around a (very) little during sex, but mostly not at all. The slang term for a woman who lies completely still in bed is maguro (tuna). For me, with my western sensibilities and preconceptions, calling someone a ‘tuna’ in bed sounds like an insult, conjuring up images of cold dead fish, but in Japan that word has a very positive connotation. Tuna’s an expensive delicacy.
Part of what was so bamboozling the first time I had sex in Japan was that I didn’t know there was a Way of Sex, with strict gendered roles, and I just was happily doing my own thing, throwing my partner into total confusion. Seiji told me much later that dating me made him feel like he was gay, because I was active in bed, and he couldn’t connect that with anything except masculinity.
Don’t think of it as a piece on sex, think of the nature of the predefined roles and how they shape life and culture there. And, more interestingly, how rebellion would come to be directed 180° from the status quo — perhaps shedding light on Japan’s peculiar sexual fantasies and fetishes as glamorised in the West through their manga and stereotyped pop culture.
I’d love to get some feedback from Klint’s wonderful community and readership here, especially those who happen to have experience in design, marketing, and business. After some discussions with fellow designer, Coe, who himself has an esoteric streak, I’ve been considering some issues that might be keeping the contemporary spiritual movement that is the occult subculture (and its legion of niche cultures and interests) from reaching its potential in North America (and possibly Europe).
First to address is whether being different is something that the members of the occult community thrives on, in and of itself. Personally, I’ve noticed differences between the persons I know involved in the esoteric arts. I’ll call them the Few for brevity’s sake. There are the goth shops that stock the books on magic that I’ll visit if I’m too eager to wait for an Amazon shipment. While the books and knowledge are the factors that draw me to their locale, the people and artefacts that are sold there are of no interest to me and, in fact, sell a stereotype that I find repugnant. (Sadly, the books in my section are the cultural accessories to the majority of wares they huck: clothing, hair dye, witchcraft gobbledygook, incense, shoddy pewter jewellery, and punky goth paraphernalia.)
There’s also the New Age shops that huck their own brand, though with a more aligned focus to the ultimate goal of spiritual exploration: crystals, incense, oils, lame calendars with ooh-ahh paintings on them, CDs, cheesy T-shirts, et cetera.
So all this material would be the halo effect, as it’s referred to in marketing. Unfortunately, goth and witch cultures seem to have let the accessories take the focus away from the core cultural values that spawned them in the first place. Which leads me to wonder what state does the North American occult community find itself.
Now, keep in mind that I’ve worked in design for a number of years and now currently work as a brand consultant. What most people don’t understand about brands is that they are what the people say they are, not what the companies wish to define them as.
This is an interesting point to get across because persons that decide to hate a particular brand are projecting their own form of identity by hating on the brands that rub them the wrong way. The little mental boxes in your mind that you used to define that brand is neurologically linked to other elements that you associate with in your life that you use to define what you’re not. Sadly, by choosing one’s enemies, like I see in these books and posts about “occult warfare,” fans of this thinking do themselves the disservice of filling in all the boxes they dislike. The mental boxes (or mental white space) that remains moulds personal self-identification with the cultural or experiential leftovers that haven’t been already commandeered by others.
Rarely do I see popular subculture movements hijack and infiltrate the mainstream in order to spread their art among the masses. The Few that become self-inflicted prisoners, bound by the things they refuse, begin to wrap these leftover ideas into its own mishmash subculture. Then they get mad when the mainstream adopts and makes it their own. Think of punk culture adopting military garb as their own, or the Barbie girls out there that seem to be standardised with a back-ass tattoo and pierced bellybutton and tongue.
This brings up the universal archetype known as the Elixir. In Joseph Campbell’s monomyth one of the necessary traits of a Hero is to enter the underworld and return to the masses with a so-called Elixir. The Elixir is wisdom. And I define wisdom as knowledge + experience.
“It is important that art is produced, but it also has to be consumed. The dynamics of producers and consumers is the motor of art.” Turkish caricaturist Ercan Akyol said that, and it remains true in all elements of life (unless you’re pursuing a Zen-like knowledge of the self, in some cave somewhere, by choice.) But think of art in this case as a the Elixir of wisdom, this knowledge and experience that is being hoarded by one group or the next, but rarely shared across borders. Borders who’re really only being defined by these little, semantic boxes we build in our heads: aka brands.
One of my favourite things that Grant Morrison says during his well-known Disinfo talk has nothing to do with sigils or his writing. It’s that he’s wearing a Donna Karan suit. Then he spills his drink on it and cheerfully laughs, “Fuck it!” The suit is a beautiful piece, and it serves its purpose. It’s Morrison’s mask magic at work. He doesn’t avoid fashion as a vice of contemporary life, but embraces it and uses it as a magical tool in his everyday life—experiencing what a fine garment can elicit in others, and how that attention can be embraced.
Rollo May says, in Man’s Search for Himself, “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice… it is conformity.” Whom among us have conformed to our particular set of friends? Their expectations of us, our subcultures’, or our families’? Why? Like Morrison, laugh out loud, “Fuck ‘em!” I want everyone reading this right now to say to themselves, three times, Fuck occultism, fuck conspiracies, fuck the little boxes in my head that keep me from exploring the things I simply believe I hate.
And on that, as I digress from my initial hope to encourage some feedback to better a conversation I am having with Coe and sometimes with Rev Max, I leave you with two quotes to encourage some thought on this matter. But remember, they apply when you embrace the lifestyle of a Hero yourself. The archetypal Underworld in many a case might just be the very mainstream that so many so-called “occultists” tend to avoid and dismay. It is that very nightmare I encourage you to embrace! Learn to flirt, learn to dress up as much as you might desire to dress down, and truly put Robert Anton Wilson’s and Ramsey Duke’s ideas to work:
“It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.” —Thomas Sowell
“A few harmless flakes working together can unleash an avalanche of destruction.” —unknown
London: City of Disappearances is a 655 page anthology with over 50 contributors, including: Ann Baer; J.G Ballard; Paul Buck; Brian Catling; Driffield; Bill Drummond; Tibor Fischer; Allen Fisher; Bill Griffiths; Lee Harwood; Stewart Home; Tony Lambrianou; Rachel Lichenstein; Michael Moorcock; Alan Moore; Jeff Nuttall; James Sallis; Anna Sinclair; Stephen Smith; Marina Warner; Sarah Wise.
Citizens disappear constantly, along with their homes, artifacts, buildings and spaces. As your time-flow accelerates, old friends email the latest obituaries and the function of the writer becomes increasingly clear. You’re there to count the dead; and re-count the missing landmarks. Scribe of mutability and mutation, you’re only a memory-shaman, chronicler of the crumbling scrolls - destined yourself to become a mere neural trace in the world-brain, as the towers tumble around you.
Author Robert Wright explains “non-zero-sumness,” a game-theory term describing how players with linked fortunes tend to cooperate for mutual benefit. This dynamic has guided our biological and cultural evolution, he says — but our unwillingness to understand one another, as in the clash between the Muslim world and the West, will lead to all of us losing the “game.” Once we recognize that life is a non-zero-sum game, in which we all must cooperate to succeed, it will force us to see that moral progress — a move toward empathy — is our only hope.
For all you conspiracy theorists and so-called anarchists out there. =]
A Vatican panel has issued a report that concludes that unbaptized babies go to Heaven, not limbo, as the Catholic church has been claiming for centuries.
In the 5th century, St. Augustine declared that all unbaptized babies went to hell upon death. By the Middle Ages, the idea was softened to suggest a less severe fate, limbo.
In his Divine Comedy, Dante characterized limbo as the first circle of hell and populated it with the great thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as leading Islamic philosophers.
The document published Friday said the question of limbo had become a “matter of pastoral urgency” because of the growing number of babies who do not receive the baptismal rite. Especially in Africa and other parts of the world where Catholicism is growing but has competition from other faiths such as Islam, high infant mortality rates mean many families live with a church teaching them that their babies could not go to heaven.
Father Thomas Weinandy, executive director for doctrine at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the document “addresses the issue from a whole new perspective — if we are now hoping these children get to heaven, there is no longer any point in worrying about limbo.”
Erik Davis talks about his new book, The Visionary State (with Michael Rauner), about the psychogeography of California.
This landscape ranges from pagan forests to ascetic deserts to the shifting shores of a watery void. It includes dizzying heights and terrible lows, and great urban zones of human construction. Even in its city life, California insists that there are more ways than one, with its major urban cultures roughly divided between the San Francisco Bay Area and greater Los Angeles. Indeed, Northern and Southern California are considered by some to be so different as to effectively constitute different states. But that is a mistake. California is not two: it is bipolar.
You see them all along the side of the road. White crosses which mark where a drunk driver snuffed out a life. However, what of the bike riders taken out by irresponsible auto drivers? This interesting article discusses the burgeoning art project in Seattle and elsewhere which seeks to draw attention to the threat automobiles pose to those on bikes. It seems like a positive step toward the type of auto-free city I’ve advocated in other articles.
Sadly, the gentleman in charge of Fixed Earth dot Calm has not kept his domain payments current and you can’t get a look at the marvelous insanity that formed the site a mere two days ago. However, my friend Ben informed me that many of the forces behind “intelligent design” or whatever the fuck have also been taking further steps backward in scientific progress. Specifically, a new assault on “heliocentrism” (more on this later) seems underway. Put simply; the Christers don’t believe that the Earth moves at all, as a number of references to “fixed earth” appear in the Bible.
The part that sent a chill down my spine read something like “the world is one ten trillionth the size science thinks it is!” in large font with lots of exclamation points. What disturbs me about this involves some Howard Bloom-style psychobiology. On the Disinfo DVD Howard discusses a movement back into the darker recesses of the human mind- specifically the limbic functions of “fight or flight”, etc. which result in a return to the Dark Ages. Altho this dark ages would inevitably contain far more atrocities than the previous dark ages. The Westboro Baptist Church and this idea of “fixed earth” forms the template for the Future Dark Age.
However, I keep going back to the phrase above. It seems a strange re-formulation of pre-scientific cosmologies- those of the Sumerians, Egypt, etc. While such cosmologies work for the Illuminated they necessarily limit human psychogeography and in an extreme fashion. Never forget that some exist who seek to limit human psychogeography back at a pre-historic level. As occultists, revolutionaries and scientists, we must never forget the gigantic leap backward offered by such forces.
I generally view First World kvetching re: World War II as so much white liberal guilt. To argue that the average “man on the street” didn’t have a stake in making sure the most efficiently reactionary conglomerate met doom with all necessary speed seems like arguing that women in Kabul don’t have a stake in smashing Taliban remnants.
That said: “Thou shalt not drop an atom bomb or even shit one out in the first place.” I find it interesting to view a landscape completely flattened by the technology of total terror. If shown to 10th graders, I find myself wondering how opinions might fall on this. Anyone who can see something like this and still bleat sheep-like 20/20 hindsight defenses of the US Gov’s seems to have stepped outside of this “reality” I keep hearing about.
Sixty years on and humanity still seems completely intent on obliterating itself. Like fish in water, we rarely reflect consciously and fully on the madness of nuclear weaponry. Not content to merely scorch hundreds of thousands of Japanese men and women out of existence, the Sons of Oppenheimer continued churning out their abortions by the truckload. Destroying the entire human race once over became unimpressive in the context of military competition. It became necessary to murder humanity several times over.
Still, you have to wonder about anyone who thinks this a better use of money than say, food, shelter and education for the world’s population. The fact that such ideas lie so far outside of “serious politics” should represent proof enough of political power as inseparable from logic of its own carnage.
Googling this site for tarot turns up quite a lot of complete scans of various tarot decks. A great resource for comparing symbolism, or shopping for decks.
A couple years ago I read this mind-bending sci-fi epic tragedy, Phoenix: a Tale of the Future by Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka is to eastern comics what Will Eisner and Alan Moore are to western comics. And then some. Tezuku is considered to be the father of manga and created over 150,000 pages of manga and over 60 animated movies and series before his death in 1989. The Phoenix saga was his most ambitious work, but he died before he could finish it. I’m pretty sure A Tale of the Future was the only book of the saga available in English at the time I read it, but now there’s three more books available. I can’t wait. Don’t let the cheesey covers fool you, this is some serious reading.
Perhaps you remember the main character in Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger who commits a murder for now other reason than the way the ocean reflects the sun in his eyes. This is a very clear & powerful example of a psychogeographical effect, an effect that can be consciously engineered in the composition of the city.
William Burroughs tried to expose subliminal messages in newspapers by chopping them up, psychogeography as a city space cut-up does the new thing: it tries to find out what’s out there, encrypted beneath the surface, by navigating through it in unusual ways.
