I have been observing apocalyptic potential for a while now. From Norman Mailer’s essay, Faith of Graffiti, to the impacts of technology on our culture, I have been charting the expressions of change. We all know the score, from the middle east, to the dwindling resources setting us up for war before, the apocalypse has been on all our minds. AI, borders, income disparities, between wage workers and trillionaires, all the signs of profound technologically induced shift has been on our minds, and I realize now if you want to know why it is this way, follow the money.

This summer I was faced with a choice, since I want my old university to finally give me the degree I earned years ago. I left just before walking with hurt and arrogance, upset with the way the French department and the general public viewed the war in my parent’s homeland. That breakup of Yugoslavia was a threat to the stability of Europe and so after visiting with my grandmother and aunts, after seeing the aftermath of bombs in the front yard, and tanks rolling down the street, I was horrified to read article after article decrying the loss of economic stability for the richer countries of Europe. I walked out after a verbal sparring with an old professor of commerce.

My naiveté was commendable, and in hindsight, poignantly, laughable. The world does not spin on an axis of justice, but rather it spins at the confluence of commerce, technology, and only to some degree, our collective sense and agreement to what is morality. So here I was, decades later, ready to get the last two required classes the university insists upon out of my way.

As fate would have it the French department was a shell of itself, and the schemes of advanced or even honros work was thwarted by the administration. The Rutgers Dean in charge of my reentry offered me one core writing course, in the religion department, and on the topic of Apocalypse. “I write about apocalypse!” I said, “I can show you my book and these articles…” and the Dean just looked through me. I signed up for the course, Apocalypse Now?, and prepared myself for my first religion course since Catholic high school.

Here’s What I learned

I’ll save you the details on the course, on how remote learning felt at the university level. We don’t have time for that now. What we do have time for it this, what qualifies as an apocalypse or what brings about apocalyptic thinking is almost always a relationship to two things, a loss of power, and a shift in the economic system.

From the Hebrews under Babylonian and later Roman occupations, to the shifting end of the world themes in England at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution all the way to the American Evangelical movement and its love of rapture, you can see that it is systems of currency and the distribution of new types of currency that fuel the visions of a new, more just world. Every modern movement calling in the end of the world is borne from a loss of value, a confusion of currency, and a distribution system that deprives people of their monetary power, and therefore their dignity.

The first temple destruction? It was the destruction of more than the chamber of God, but the destruction of the system of the commerce that ran through it, and a loss even of the food system, one that would be sanctified and distributed from inside those walls. In terms of England, the green areas surrounding it become sooty enclaves of poverty wages. William Blake’s Jerusalem poem drives that imagery home, as it looks for a new Jerusalem, one that is actually England and which is one again green.

From the modern religions that dominate our views of apocalypse to the lesser known upstart “cults” found throughout the world when foreigners descend bringing their goods, but withholding their technological know how, the story of the end of the world unfolds. Each story differs and each one shares a hallmark. Each apocalyptic vision has more to do with abrupt switches in environment, in economic and social currency than they have to do with visions had by hermits untouched by the world. In fact, even the modern Christian evangelical visions that did not excite or interest many Christians for many years, can be pinned to a desire to reclaim an old power structure, one that has a kind of reverse or inverse vision to the others. It seems the colonizer’s vision of apocalypse is flexibile, fitting the victimization story into a potential future where the captain of industry no longer monopolizes power. It’s complex sounding but it’s all really simple, when society and economy changes abruptly, people throw up their hands and ask for a clean slate. What they do to perpetuate that desired clean slate is another story.

Apocalypse — Religions v Cults

A good example of this came to me when I read David Attenborough’s, Journeys to the Other Side of the World, which compiled his impressions of touring Melanesia on behalf of the BBC and the London Zoo. In these recollections from the 1950s and 60s, we meet a different Attenborough, one that shows his own naive view of the world and the colonialized natives he encoutered.

Attenborough and his team go to find animals for the zoo and footage of people, and place for the BBC. It’s on these trips where he encouters locals viewed as rebellious and odd. It is on his visits through the region an on the island of Tanna that he encouters the John Frum cult.

Even Attenborough, the same lovable naturalist we know now, but younger and bit more patrician and prejudiced towards other cultures, found himself unsure of what to make of the Joh Frum believers, those that blended local culture with a desire for “stuff.” He asks locals that had already waited for decades for their savior John to return if it made any sense.

This John Frum, the bringer of cargo, was a mixture of local and colonial culture, and at first glance it could seem odd, and kind of misguided. John would return, and banish the foreigners, but he would bring more of their stuff.

When challenging one of its believers as to how long it would take for their redeemer to surface, the native man shot back, asking how long had the Christians waited for Jesus to return. The mirror held to the westerner, to the occupier seemed to fail to make the impact then, that it might today.

Attenborough was having this conversation along a string of islands and terrains where one could pay for portaging services in schillings to one group of colonized tribesman, and would need to pay in salt to the next group where stores and coin exchanges did not yet exist. Seen as backwards by the Britons, the French and the others, John Frumism reflected back a view of unfair rules, and unevenly distributed earning power that now dictated the lives of the tribes. Want more stuff? Work harder, for us.

The disparity in value structures and in the ability to create value according to new structures helped give energy to these cults, whose purpose was to regain dignity for its native peoples. By engaging in the cults the locals took their trauma and displacement and adopted to the new patterns of commerce, of culture. It is this re-patterning practice that even Attenborough failed to notice, and which only now is being understood by anthropologists.

“The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.”

― William Gibson

The quote from Gibson that technologists cite these days, about distribution of the future can be a light for understanding some of the desires people have expressed for their belief in the end of the world. Water a free flowing resource, for years a right, is now according to many governments a privilege. (Set the scary music and picture a data center).

When people are colonized by those with greater technological knowledge or power, the structures of society change but the value is not evenly distributed. When the food system is pulled from small farmers and bioregional distribution circuits, that too, can change world so that it becomes unfamilair.

The desire to reset the playing field becomes intense and so in this way, an apocalypse becomes desirable. The desire for sense, for equity and capacity to be human and equal to others, creates a deep belief that in the next world, in some future world, things do get better. Some of us escape into fandoms, the scroll or some other method that suits a secular world, while others amongst us go for the old game, calling on our religions to help us reset.

You and I know that technological distribution was supposed to be more open, more equitable. We know that the early promise of the internet was not to fall into the hands of just a few big players that now control the privacy and rights of people inside opaque agreements between public and private entities that seem more and more out of touch with the majority of people. You and I know that a “rapture” is both the stuff of belief, and the stuff of science fiction, and that somewhere at that that confluence, only human persistence, and more equitable distribution of currency can help us find our way through to a better future.

The apocalypse is here — it’s just not evenly distributed

I got through my class at Rutgers, learning from a professor I liked well enough, downloading Jstor articles like it was my job. Yes she asked me not to get distracted, to stay focused and to go into the details of the ancient and modern movements, to stay away from the graffiti and the things she didn’t think fit into the course. I did as I was told. But now that I am out the other side, I can tell you that more than ever, an apocalyptic storyline is as old as time, and it is simply a tool of desire, one meant to give hope in rapidly changed world.

Apocalypse is a tool for dealing with cognitive dissonance, and for imagining equity in a world where the game is abruptly dicated by new rules, new referees and totally new field parameters. If that sounds like the current game we are in with crypto, AI, fluctuating resource markets, tightened labor borders, and a global oligarchy then by all means, welcome to the apocalypse. The more you know, the better we can all play this game.

Mariette Papic is the author of the 2016 book, The Digital Nomad Manifesto, and is a co-steward of the Design Science Studio. You can read her writing on food on Substack at TheKnead.

Technology and language are constantly in motion and these days that motion feels set on hyperspeed. But more than velocity is at play in this time of maxxed out actions. In a world where we are at the post-everything level, the “xx” of maxxing, any maxxing at all, tells us about more than small trends. These are in fact tiny, micro trends that populate the landscape of an entirely new epoch. Let’s divve into it.

Language is a system and it’s the system that helps us relate. Language helps us relate to people and to machines. In this particular age we are in the remix language era. We remix as hybrid ethnic groups, such as those of us who speak Spanglish or Hinglish. We remix as those who code or vibe code everything from family vacation spreadsheets to personalized ear bud controls. We literally switch language upon language and remix them along cultural and technological weaves. We are our linguistic tapestries. How we use these remixing capabilities alone and as trending groups gives us a sense of controlling our desire to control our unique slivers of the world.

Ground control to avatar — Planetary Cognixxion

In the Design Science Studio we hosted visionary Bruce Clarke. Bruce, aka Bruno Clarke, once played at Woodstock, as a member of a beloved and intentionally hokey band, Sha Na Na before he went on to earn a PhD. Bruce is now a leader at Gaian Systems, a transdisciplinary research project dedicated to cultivating new forms and practices of planetary cognition.

There’s nothing like observing as one person’s life arcs along with history, its travels illustrating for us the profound capacities of human fluidity.

From hard wired coding and punch cards to vibe coding, one lifetime illustrates the Woodstock generation and its dissolution into the post-everything era. From the height of physicality to the first flush of virtual, ephemeral landscapes, Bruce Clarke asks us to think like a living planet, to think outward and outward until we get to the bios in the sphere, deep into the atmos that is part of our DNA. Basically Bruce’s work asks us to go go into the Gaian model. GGaia!

Maybe what I am saying is too freeform. So go think like a mountain.

The first steps and babbles of cybernetics was in relationship to Gaian theory. Bruce Clarke has now authored a few books on this using his academic training. In Zoom, this unassuming academic doesn’t give away much of his leather-jacket wearing days. What he does give away, thankfully, at least in this post, is the story behind Gaia theory; how it came together and spread — through connections, relationships. The counter-culture is alive!

We are at an interesting time in history where our computers, our machines, might be the last ones to point us to how incredible our lives are in the context of biological systems.

As we move towards synthetic intelligence and synthetic landscapes we are at a particularly sensitive moment, one that has lots of potential. We can forget our biological for our technological OR we can seek to integrate these two parts of our new, post-everything beings.

We might even be at an intersection of maxx culture, a place in time where this technology and the culture that came with it, begin to become one. This might be evolution in open, expressed by remixes and recuts times xx.

The old and the new, the directly related and the personally relevant, the logically integral to the seemingly tangential are intersecting into actual structures, into novel scaffolds.

Bruce is part of that novel scaffold, a shape-shifter who went from the heights of pop culture participation to discernment refined through academic method. Bruce is another example, and a fine one, of living bridges. As individual stories these are illustrations of where we are, and potential signposts of what history might notice.

Bruce is another code switch patch in a world where paths are less linear than they were. Part of that loss in the linear is troubling but some of it is exciting. Does something in your own life or family encompass that arc?

Yea Dear, you’re part of this too, xx. ?? !!

Over ten years ago I noticed that our slang was going faster. I noticed it and some of you did too. Aunties and cool teenagers might language maxx differently but the movement, the flexibility of language and technology arc that brings us closer together than we realize, that pops in our own lives.

I noticed it in New York City and in the way my nieces in the suburbs were using our old slang but better, or shorter. I liked that linguistic remix and I still do. I like that we are building the new world together, that you and me and all of us are part of an emergence. We are the living experiences, the quick smiles and looks of recognition as we touch virtual grass and biological grass together. We are the first generations that can hold them both at the same time. We are mixed media humans.

Remix in music, as we know it today, started around the time of Woodstock, just after during and around it, because the technology of remix was ready. The tape machines and the mixers, the actual machines were easy enough to splice and dice sounds. It was slow by our standards today but it was fast as compared to all that history before it.

The recording, the sampling all of it was about to get going. The message boards between university computers, that was also emergent back in the day. From a time where the Apollo rocket guidance system was the leading edge to a time when AI bots can send your emails for you, the age is linked by computing.

On the streets, the young were alive with remix, with leftover vinyl and with turntables that would soon go from luxury to hackable machine. People, and their technology were ready and so remix emerged in the laboratories of real life, of youth and music and creativity.

Remix also started by the copy and paste of code. Together they led us to the maxxed out time. We are post-human, post-perfect. We are the digital moment when even remix material is a mix of a mix. It makes sense we are in a maxx moment. X might mark the spot, but a double marks relationship. Foodmaxxing means more than eating food, it means your are hacking that food, double-dutying that nutrition source, and that is already a lingo your ancestors from not too long ago would not understand. Termination of a system is no fun, patching it to the next system is how we go past this time.

Peak language, Meet Peak times? Wait, are you related?

We are post all the marks of the past limitations and so in sneaky places we double a letter to give emphasis. It’s a mark of global cultural cohesion amidst every unique and individually hybrid amalgam of identities, expressions and ways of being. Can I get an Amen (break)?

We are maxx human at the edge of transhuman dawning. We are performing command and control with language and with settings inside existing systems. We are doing it naturally as digital natives, from the arc of today’s grandparents to our babies.

The longer we stay on this horizon, the one that arcs these eras together, the more post-everything this game gets and the more intense our personal responsibility is.

If you feel it like me, that your privacy and your efficacy in the world is hitting cyborg levels, like you manage a self and a device-self, and that you need better systems to be your best self, then you might be in the land of the maxx, and maxx self care.

This is the horizon where your central command decides on the value of every single major relationship. Earth is the system, and the question is, are you connected? And how are you maintaining connection? What is your formula?

I’m working on that today. I’ll be vibe coding something new to share with you all.

LINKS? Yess.

WATCH — Bruce and Donna Haraway in conversation! It’s above and here — Let me know if you watch this and let’s pick up the conversation and take it somewhere new!

AND PS — send me your grandmas or sign up yourselves (ladies only sorry!). If you come to my Conscious Computing Basics — Presentations class as a Medium reader I will be sure to set aside time for us to discuss whatever cyber topic you would like, but you have to do the exercises and help everyone else make slides, too :) deal? deal!

Thanks to Roxi Shohadaee for curating visionaries for our Design Science Decade, and thanks to Bruce. Visit his website to learn more about the unfolding horizzon of cybernetics.

Buy me coffee? Thank you.

I woke up to yet another barrage of headlines explaning how Zohran Mamdani was threatening the landscape of the political status quo. The 33 year old Mamdani, born in Uganda to Indian parents has traditional strategists and many corporate media outlets scratching their heads. This is what corporate climbing gets us, people who may court the cutting-edge of society but can’t always understand it. Mamdani comes from the internet age, and despite the use of technology in these big brolandias, many can not see the decentralized trees for the technology forest.

This cognitive miss on the part of the current establishment in all its forms provides a few key takeaways.

The current landscape first: Bloomberg reports finance bros will run to Florida in search of their escape portal from the future, at least that’s the threat. They are clutching their pearls over “Hot Commie Summer” and planning to run away to a nice place. Of course, this utopian hideaway is rife with climate problems and fleeing insurance companies, but the first instinct from many big players is, if we can’t win, we will leave.

The New York Times is also flummoxed, featuring a piece on the diminishing power of the black vote, and one on the widening rift between old and young in the jewish vote, expressing a dismay that only the comments can clarify. The consistent theme according to the establishment in New York is one of confusion. The comments are lucid, reflecting that the actual electorate may think global, but it wants to hire Mamdani to act locally and with competence, not theater. A top reader’s pick comment from a young women does not mince words.

In light of Mamdani’s win, the established power brokers might have to work harder to understand that Trump is not the only one upsetting the playbook. He is not a wizard as much as he is a master of media. Trump, however is a bridge not a destination as far as new media is concerned. Mamdani comes from this age of the internet, falling into an age as a digital native, and his successful trajectory is tied to a consistently comfortable ride into the algorithm.

1 Let’s get real and funny: Mamdani scores with the young voters of Gen Z because of his “His humor, wit, candor, and linguistic abilities were on full display, alongside his telegenic face and stylish wardrobe.” This is according to The Nation, in their article, Zohran Mamdani Won the Internet. Here’s a newsflash, this human approach also works with anyone alive who is not entrenched in the system to the point where stasis is their mantra and their key to prosperity. Mamdani made good use of being approachable and real as has AOC and in some ways, similar to Trump. The interwebs like to be entertained and it gives points for it.

2 The internet is not a gimmick: According to yet another NYTimes article, featuring the turnout of the muslim vote, the use of TikTok and all the other platforms was focused on the realness, not the memeness of Mamdani’s posts. “Mr. Mamdani’s social media posts rarely used memes, Mr. Dash pointed out, instead featuring the candidate making policy arguments about everyday things like the cost of groceries and subway fare.” By being alive, and not relying on AI images or snarky content, Mamdani connected, and got muslim youth and the youth at large, to come to the table. As one 72-year old commented, in the article, Young Muslims Loved Zohran Mamdani, and Their Parents Listened to Them, “It’s not because he’s a Muslim. It’s because there is a change.”

3 The internet is non binary, just like computing evolution: Mamdani is all about his mixed, or one might say expansive, personal background. With a touch of India, a bit of Africa, and a whole lot of internet, Mamdani doesn’t just represent his ideas, he is emblematic of a changing world where personal identities are collages more than irreversible dictates. As extremes plague our country and the global political scene, the exhaustion of upholding these extremes is of little interest to many. Mamdani can’t win on exclusion so he wins on inclusion.

Do most New Yorkers want a better life? Yes. In fact, from Gen X to Gen Z, with Millennials in between, health is one of the number one concerns. For the GZ’s health care, mental health, economic health, civic health, any and all kinds of health is the goal. They want health for themselves, for others, and even for the planet. Young people want health so badly that they are willing to choose ethics, clarity and evolution over choosing a candidate based exclusively on whether or not they look or identify exactly alike. They will choose according to the individual and to the situation in front of them rather than choose according to binary choices, or even their own voting history.

As the current political climate has swung to extremes, it is these smaller yet not tiny political races that illustrate that one election result does not assure a reliable pattern or trend, at least not one based on binary choices.

As computing sits on the threshold of quantum mechanics, and non binary qubits, so does the human condition sit somewhere beyond binaries. Primaries will reflect this most since they are also more free, offering more candidates than the de facto two-party system.

4 Identity is a remix: Politico reports their own takeaways from the results, and their number 5 is explicit, “Mamdani’s success with younger voters could signal a sea change in electoral politics, where indicators like race and geographic location become less important.”

The hyper body of the internet user is not tied to a single identity nor does it want to be dictated to based on its inherited roles of gender, race, and religion. The average young person might be embracing tradition, religion and their history, but not at the price of being exclusive about it.

In fact, this age of the internet is defined by the power of the personal remix. Remix was led by first generation computer designers, hackers and cultural hackers. Urban artists, primarily New Yorkers, began the remix age with hip hop, and electronic DJ culture. The culture may not seem relevant, but these forms of personal expression grew up next to the expanding internet. Through these turntablist hackers, our cultural language has expanded us into poetic remix. Mamdani is a remix.

In a short fifty years or so, the hyperlinks have expanded our media and our sense of “self.” Mamdani who comes from within this 50 or so year timeline, understands the remix natively.

Once again, the extremists want to offer us the religious and social expression of 200 or 2000 years ago, whereas most people today are just happy to live and let live. Mamdani won on his use of technology but also on his identity, one enabled by migration and change. Can technology be used for regression? It sure can, but generally as a reaction to the expansion. The bigger shift over time is towards mobility, expansion, towards a reality that reflects the flexible nature required by these times, this is what Mamdani embodies.

5 The Gerontocracy is so last industrial age: According to Pew Research, Gen Z and Millennials both believe that government can and should do more. This means there is a block of people from barely voting age to their 40s, that actually believe that government matters. They have tired of watching angry grandpas run things. In fact, the age of the angry grandpa is waning just as AI comes streaming over the horizon. Just as the apex of TV came and went during this time of Putin, Trump, Orban and the others, so are they facing more frequent and sophisticated criticism from the internet. Elon Musk can not keep up with the internet, even after he bought TwitterX.

According to Forbes, Musk posted “a crying laughing emoji in response to an X user who reposted a tweet from Zohran Mamdani that said “queer liberation means defund the police,” with the caption “you can just say things,” suggesting Mamdani’s statement didn’t add up.” The reality is that for Musk, he won’t admit he understands, because he disagrees. In fact, Musk does probably understand gravely, that money alone can not sway an election, not even tech bro-level money. This is again an issue of binary or its attendant centralization of power, falling apart.

The very real adoption of “queer” to mean anything non binary, threatens those who want to control the conversation through owning social media. Social media a slippery field, one where to make money you have to enable some of the speech of the masses. Even if you shadow ban, and censor your users; the boomerang could mean no engagement, and eventually no platform.

The Nieman Lab has recently reported that social media has overtaken television as the American choice for news. Musk and Trump both own social media platforms, and our federal government’s public policy is often conveyed to Americans via one of these two platforms, or both working in tandem. TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and others also hold sway on how we get our news today. Whatever the platforms the takeaway here is that innovations in media creates a spectrum of disruptors. Trump disrupted, so does Mamdani, and for that matter, so did AOC back when she was fresh and new. A viral video of AOC and Mamdani hugging illustrates the continuum of one strain of this disruption. Trump and Musk becoming BFFs with a massively public meltdown is another strain. Connecting the dots between these two strains are many shades of gray.

The internet with its hyper links, devices and its spaces, brings abstraction into reality. It also takes abstract ideas of who we are and places them into social news spaces we can control more than the old media formats. There are obstacles and anomalies, but there is always progression and quick, sometimes unforeseen reactions. The establishment media, politicians and strategists might be scratching their heads, because Mamdani has gathered potential liabilities into a unified field of voters.

So let’s conclude this with a quote from Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, a Dutch computer scientist, and leader, who also spent many years in the USA

“The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.

Mamdani is from the internet and his successful campaign represents a new semantic level. Mamdani’s win has upset the reliable stories and voting blocs that most of today’s aging, career politicians can not and will not touch. Trump managed because he came from the TV, but as TV ages out of primacy, so might reactions to his brand be swift.

At the end of it all the internet as a media format and as an environment now shapes us from cradle to grave. The internet has its ups and downs, its tirades and waves, but it does generally reward authenticity, and presence. Is something fake or is it not? In an age when reality is the constant question, Mamdani have proven himself to be real, not hiding away in carefully curated appearances, and this was rewarded. Let’s see where it goes.

I was preparing to give the last installment of a four-session workshop on conscious computing when I came down with a case of poison ivy. As a person with sensitive skin, the experience quickly became a minor ordeal. As the clock ticked towards my final presentation, my thoughts were interrupted by signals from my left arm, and from my right ankle. It was as if my body had become a geography of competing locations, all unified by my brain and all wanting my attention. As I looked into my research notes, I realized that this case of poison ivy felt a lot like being alive; specifically like being alive and online.

“(…)’Hypertext’ is a recent coinage. ‘Hyper-’ is used in the mathematical sense of extension and generality (as in ‘hyperspace,’ ‘hypercube’) rather than the medical sense of ‘excessive’ (‘hyperactivity’). There is no implication about size — a hypertext could contain only 500 words or so. ‘Hyper-’ refers to structure and not size.”

— Theodor H. Nelson, Brief Words on the Hypertext, 23 January 1967

23 Profiles and A Single Processing Unit

The women who took my workshop wanted to master basic skills, to finally understand their computers, not only use them. I had to find a way to make it make sense, and nothing did that more than mixing up the machine history with the human story. To do this we took a small trek back to many eras, and finally we landed back in the 1960s, when American Ted Nelson coined the term, “hypertext.”

I rolled out adjacent terms, like hyperlink and the women started to really get it. One asked me, But isn’t that a link? Yes, it is a link — but that’s actually the shortened term we use. The full name, the underlying foundation — that’s “hyper” link. You could see something in her shift, and something in me did, too. Then I introduced the concept of hypermedia, and everyone continued to shift. Videos? Links? Links inside videos? All of it is hyper media, and all of it leads to hyper experience. We all paused.

Then I mentioned that because hyper in this context is not about being manic, that we can move into this new awareness, calm, cool and collected. I showed a somewhat hastily done slide on the topic. A few more moments, a few more shifts, a mention of another word coined by Nelson, then we continued.

Five letters and a Whole New Game

There was a missing language system that these women had just walked into, and through to the other side. There it was, waiting for these women. This tiniest bit of language only five letters long, began to unlock who they were, who they had become through their emails, playlists and fitbits.

Sort of like me and my itchy poison ivy reaction; these women noticed that their lives were a terrain of experience. A slight change of context was all it took, to get them to their hyper reality and to this new view of their own unity and complexity. We breathed in slowly, covered our topics cheerily, as this awareness changed absolutely everything.

With this fundamental awareness, of hyper existence in place, they agreed that the overwhelm of profiles and data management was suddenly less overwhelming. Yes, they still had to understand the difference between the cloud and their local computer, and yes they still needed to understand some other basics, but you could sense something fundamental had been unlocked.

In today’s world our bodies are maps, and our bodies are links. Our limbs may stick to left and right, but our places of existence, our planes of experience; those are many. Tending to those many parts of ourselves can be hard to do, and the work it takes, even with tips, tricks and tools, can feel almost impossible. By introducing this simple term, one that many of us take for granted, these women were given a method of knowing of their full selves. By naming their experience these women started to embrace their privacy as a series of understandable boundaries for their hyper bodies. Their knowledge transformed from technical jargon to new words for key parts of themselves.

I have often talked about the next step in it all, in the socio-political and gender bending implications and realities found in the hyper self. I went so far as to place that self inside this context of transreality, of a “trans” self that had little to do with gender and everything to do with all binaries. This transreal self was, and remains in my mind the mobile version of hyper reality and the hyper self. But I might have moved too fast, bringing in layers without the needed foundations.

I’m thinking to go back to the hyper terms, to teach the basics from the original language imagined years ago. It’s not because I’m abandoning the deeper implications, but because that might be for intermediate or advanced conscious computing workshops. After all, the transreality has barely kicked into being, while the hyperreality it is based upon has been going since their grandparents days.

Why does it matter? because our selves are our products.

People still do not realize the extent to which they, their very thoughts and dreams, are the product of today’s data marketplaces. They do not realize that their five free email, and three social media platforms are costing them more than the words “privacy” and “security” can truly convey.

To quote Jaron Lanier, “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.”

Most of us don’t understand what is being data mined when we agree to all cookies or when we click to those terms that go on and on. We don’t have the language to care, to behave in our own interests online. Without that awareness, and without understanding the intimacy of it all, we are much more likely to give ourselves away to the lowest bidders.

We are the terrain, the body and mind, being mined through data mining. We are so rich with information, habits and actual power, that we are equal to gold, rubies and cobalt. Nobody told us. We need to tell people.

As the conscious computing class drew to a close I was itchy and aware of my body as unified but distinct territories. I was acutely informed that my arm could itch more than my leg, and that the left and the right could deliver both relief and gouging scratches to the other side. I became more aware with every passing minute that my body was both a unity and a complexity. I had to end class on time or risk losing my cool. Despite what my slide said, I was interconnected to my body more than Zoom as the itching and burning of my flesh grew.

It is this complexity of self, in terms of biology and in terms of technology that seems to be absent in computing today. Hopefully by mentioning the hyper experience I, and you, can help bring it back. The human is such an incredible platform. It deserves its language and its dignity. The human is still the foundation of all technology. Before we bring in the AI, we might want to be sure that all the humans get the hyper memo, that each of us has the right to be hyper according to our own terms and conditions.

I am in week three of a four-week workshop and the mission for me is actually quite simple. I am tasked with teaching other women how to manage the basic tasks of their computers. In doing the work, I dutifully distill the history of computers for the women, and in a way for myself.

Before we head into understanding the tools, we go back into the foundations of who and how this world of ours all came together. In a time when AI stands on the horizon of our next great evolution, you might think this is too backwards, but in no uncertain terms, I think that looking back just a few or more decades into our computing past, we can see that in every way, this convergence of human and machine was foretold, and even invited.

In going backwards I can tell you that the urge to make data into pictures of people goes back very far, but in terms of government it goes back to about 1890, and the Hollerith Tabulating System that used punch cards to bring the US census in under budget, and months before the deadline.

In going backwards to that census we also get a view that Hollerith took inspiration from the Jacquard loom, but also from the shapes that train conductors punched into passenger tickets. The desire to turn data into figures had the quantitative and qualitative aspects alive in it from the very beginning. The loom was the quantitative engine, the train conductors were kinds of artists. The loom was the move towards removing the human from the heavy lift of production; the hole punching conductors were the creative impulse expressing itself.

Hollerith and his machines became a foundation of what would become the genre leading, International Business Machines (IBM), but this type of story, of vision and desire, of mathematical rigor and co-creation with machines was not unique to him nor to those who would later become household names.

In fact, the thing I am gleaning as I prepare each session is that we are indeed in an era where it is good to know our computer design and evolution roots because these are the roots of a new age of humanity.

For years I have upheld that it was and still is, the graffiti artists, early turntablists of what became known as DJ music, and of course the gamers who are the forebearers of today’s most vital collective culture. I know this is true, that the early pre-Internet cultures of the urban bodies are the ones who led the shamanic way, and the way of the grassroots, the masses, into what is now our future. But I also now have a greater raft of names from within the rarefied world of the academic, the staid halls of science with its attendant theoretical mathematics upon which to illustrate this picture of mutual evolution. It’s not just the quantitative to qualitative balance, the have-nots to the haves, but the absolute poetry of complexity behind it all. This complexity is cosmic, for lack of a better word.

Lady Ada Lovelace, the first software developer could provide me with quotes enough for an entire class that could fit into any session about the future. I could surely connect her and her “poetic science” to any slew of explorations on the role of women, to the role of famous fathers in shaping the rebellion of their offspring. It would be no large leap to turn Lord Byron, her poet father into Zeus, and her into an Athena, merging their reality with the mythos of the past upon which they and their ilk stood. I could have a great day of play around it.

But today I want to share a bit about the thing I think we forget, and it links me back to the nature of being. It links me back to the nature of nature, and to the symbiosis that seems to be at the core of it all. This brings me back to a man that might no longer be listed in the short-term memory of the internet, and yet he is hidden there amongst the long-term memory. The man is of no particular interest to me, we are not distantly related nor do I plan on studying him and finding we are lost kindred spirits. No, his name is J. C. R. Licklider, and back in the fall of 1962 this psychologist by trade, became a key figure at ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency.

For two decades Lick, as he was known, was an experimental psychologist at Harvard University and at MIT, where he had explored the auditory cortex of the brain. His 1960's thought-piece on the symbiotic nature of man and machine is still an important revelation. His vision of an “Intergalactic Computer Network.” is obviously quite relevant today. Yes he worked on the early ARPANET, not on today’s TCP/IP internet, but now we’re splitting hairs, and getting away from the point, which is the vision that underlies today’s technologies.

Lick knew that these networks of computers, and their coming together to form a network of networks could take all of the disjointed knowledge of humanity and make it more useful. He used the human brain as his example for finding a pathway for this vision. Since he knew the brain pretty well, Lick ended up envisioning workstations and computing the way we do it now. He also imagined a digital commons, not a digital race to coercion, competition and machines in place of humans. Lick envisioned machine to human symbiosis, not the expulsion of the human in the name of profits.

It sounds quite simple and it is, but sybiosis was at the core of this “grandfather” of cloud computing’s vision, and it would be a shame to get stuck and miss this.

We are getting stuck on supremacy, and ignoring symbiosis at our peril.

We are, depending on the group and the fears, stuck on supremacy of the old, men, zealots, the wealthy, and so on and so forth. We are stuck on the subjugation of nature, on the supremacy of human at the expense of the monkey, the polar bear, the wild, the deep, the anything that doesn’t fit into a real estate plan. It’s a shame because in our race to teach the ever-expanding and escaping machine minds, we are torturing the biological “others” both human and not.

What are we teaching the AI by example?

Today when someone wants us to imagine an intergalactic channel I am reminded of a bumper sticker I saw that says, “EARTH FIRST! We can screw up the other planets later!” That seems to sum up how short-sighted we are. That seems to also sum up how we seem to have forgotten that we are first and foremost symbionts of the network of networks, and that network, is the primary, universal, cosmic one.

If we are to find our way towards a peaceful co-existence with our machines, we might need to deeply consider what kind of peaceful co-existence we have with our neighbors, with the very environment that made us. To be sure the internet memes have a good sense of our collective nature, but when we get back to work, or to reality, we often lose this. I would argue that there is only one reality and although it might often be comic, and sometimes painfully boring, it is always cosmic in nature.

Leave your concepts of who and how we were all made out of this if you can, and just focus on the very simple truth; that there is a common core to who and what we are.

There is a common chemical, biological and even mathematical basis to all that we know. That ground of common sense, of a shared commonality with all that exist alongside us is not fluff, or extra, none of it is mere commodity, nor resource. In fact, none of this is less than an intergalactic trip. Nothing here is anything less than cosmic, and for that reason we should honor our neighbors, and our earth, and remember ourselves as symbionts.

I have often looked to the arts to uncover the consciousness of our times. I have looked into crevices of subcultures, walking alongside men and women wielding spray cans; danced alongside others like me, finding our shamanic rebirth in the halls of house music. Today I realize that I was right to look into the arts to find the future emergence, but I also realize that right in front of me in the visionary pool of scientists, there existed the urge to also merge with the sublime. For some they found the universe in the eye of a storm, for others they found it in mitochondrial genetics, and for others they found the eye of interdependence in the living shape and sharing of knowledge.

Conscious computing is what we need today if our children are to understand not only their machines, but also themselves. The role of the human is infinitely creative, and it is not meant to conquer in pursuit of control, but to endeavor to always explore, finding its, their, our way back to the cosmic source. This is the loop of the cosmic symbiont, to move in circles of greater complexity, ever uncovering and honoring the layers of infinite patterns that encompass our realities and illustrate our interconnectedness to all. To fail at our network of networks by making it into a prison of prisons, would be a shame. The more we become machine-symbionts the more we must embrace and preserve our biological surroundings to hold onto and integrate our full selves.

Some random Lick links?

J.C.R. Licklider Inductee Biography - Internet Hall of Fame

I woke up to a horror story splashed across my Instagram by The London Economic. By today’s measure of horror, it included no physical violence, so that was assuring. The problem, as you can read, is that this woman was buying a dress for her granddaughter for a family wedding. The dress was $19 US. With the new tariffs that price become $54, with just over $31 going to pay the tax. To say the least, I had some mixed feelings, some very complex feelings. The apocalypse of Temu is complicated. Let’s get into it.

Now, you may or may not realize that global shipping is a major contributor to climate change. From the fuel to the ballast waters that have to be taken in and later expelled to make it through locks and channels, the water from global shipping often results in aquatic animals being transferred to where they become invasive, destructive. Global shipping delivers problems.

In its defense, global shipping is a major contributor to fun and responsible commerce. It opens up our economies and can open up our worlds by providing items we might not have or make on our own shores. So, global shipping is a give and take, a balancing act.

I won’t say that Temu is specifically bad, but it often offers really cheap, really disposable clothing and goods that do very little good in the world. The dress bought on Temu will not wear well. It will not go far, even if it is handed down or recycled. It will probably shed microplastics into the girl’s home and into her local water supply.

The Temu dress would make the girl look nice for a day and it would bring grandma actual joy as the provider. But what’s the deeper cost besides the water and the fiber shedding?

The Temu dress comes from a factory sytem where workers labor 12 hours a day, 6 to 7 days of each week. Temu is owned by PDD holdings and that’s what they’re known for doing. Grandma’s dress is now being judged by wealthier women who would never ever dream of buying such a thing. She feels the judgement growing.

Imagine it now, the moments before her angry post onto the social.

Imagine this woman placing the order and looking at her screen.

The sticker shock sinks into her fingers. They grow heavy. She closes her eyes and says a small prayer no one else can hear. She has healthcare to pay, and a mortgage due. They refinanced long ago, to send someone to college. It hasn’t paid off. The woman at the screen is not trying to destroy the planet, nor is she trying to drive some other woman to sleep at her sewing machine, at least not intentionally.

The woman wanting the dress, we don’t know how she voted in the last election and it doesn’t actually matter. This is a complex scene and it has been growing like its own kind of invasive species.

Imagine now, we see the creature coming up over her grandma chair, to her face. It has tentacles with screens for eyes. One eye flashes the stagnation of worker wages since 1979, the other flashes productivity and the third eye flashes the rate of CEO wage growth.

She stares into the numbers overwhelmed. The productivity is good but the wages are low. Despite being in a booming economy she hasn’t felt safe or sure in many years. She begins to wonder if she is actually middle class.

She pleads to the creature, Isn’t this what we have leaders for? Do I have to be a genius to survive? Can’t I be decent, and hard-working and good? Isn’t that enough? The creature shakes in what could be seen as a giggle.

She goes to the socials and posts, with tears flowing down her consumer-worker-grandma-human face. The vine wipes her tears, while one of it’s tendrils picks her pocket.

The apocalypse might be coming for Temu and the consumer, or if we’re really lucky, it might be coming for exhorbitant income inequality. We don’t know yet. We can’t know yet. We are in suspense.

The apocalypse comes in fits and starts, and it comes in ways that demand integrity. It demands more of those who hold more power, or so it says. For today it is not so nice to the grandma.

It has big ambitions and little mercy. You see, the apocalypse is by nature large and messy. It defines complexity. This might be why a binary system of choices doesn’t fix much of anything. This might be why binaries spread problems more than solutions. Like a left-right march, it can only go in a line. Like an up and down movement, it can’t make a curve. But I digress.

The apocalypse of Temu is a tidal wave holding an invasive creature we cannot fully define. I hope that girl gets a beautiful dress, but I’m not a good enough writer to know how this turns out.

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I have taught a lot of software courses in my time. In the early aughts you could get contracts and slots as a day player all over the country, teaching everyone from university professors, and executives to sales teams everything about their daily work environment.

Eventually that kind of companywide “computer training” fell by the wayside. Workforces attained skills, schools sent new graduates with a higher baseline of proficiency. The newness had worn off, and we assumed that in an age of tech saturation that we would all know what to do or could and would simply watch a video and learn it ourselves. To some extent, this remains true on the functional level, but it is nowhere near true on a deeper level.

Suddenly, in an age where nobody remembers doing things with paper and pen, these basic computing skills classes are needed and desired again. What gives?

I haven’t done the analysis yet, but in an age where children’s first screen time exposure starts before the age of one, it’s safe to say that there is a new kind of “classical” education needed. It’s an extension of the old academic belief in a well-rounded education makes for a thoughtful person. It harkens back to a time when good education meant less about a degree for a job, and more about a way of engaging the world critically, with an informed curiosity.

As I prepare my “Conscious Computing Basics” workshop, with practical topics for tasks as mundane as setting a recurring Zoom, I am actually overwhelmed with how important it is for those of us who aren’t necessarily developers and engineers to sit down and consider the cyber terrain that is integral to our lives now. In fact, there are a few points that are becoming clear.

Firstly, this edition of the workshop is being offered on a women’s only platform, so I am obligated in some way to cover the women who created the ground on which we run and romp. In preparing the history portions of each lesson I am reminded of the female contributions that complicate the narrative of computing as male. I am thinking of interplay between the likes of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. Several slides later I am considering the interplay between Native American women at Fairchild, and the Silicon Valley men.

We tend to view computing as a purely numbers game, and as a male pursuit, but the first “computers” of the modern era were mostly women crunching numbers. The first programmer was the daughter of a poet. The first chips were meticulously crafted by women I can see as the mothers of our circuits today. To bring this awareness of craft and pattern, of various types of interaction to this group, even if it is only in brief, will probably bring revelations.

Secondly, comes the “consciousness” part. Long ago I used to land clients by pursuing what I called, “authentic” social media and marketing. We were all pursuing what was resonant within this new social sphere and I felt strongly that authenticity was not only the accepted way to approach this new field of interactions, but that it was the ethical way to do it. Having run hard and fast from traditional Madison Ave. advertising, I welcomed authenticity and community building.

In the years since Facebook was new and MySpace was better, it is harder and harder to live without authenticity and yet it is harder and harder to access it. With so many content creators, newsfeeds and streams, it can be confusing for people to understand the dynamics that shape today’s narratives. I realize that the more that the screen-based world progresses, we need to have an awareness of the drivers and philosophies that shape our experiences and our choices; many of which we don’t even know we have.

Thirdly, as biological creatures, and the ostensible and collective, Dr. Frankenstein of the computing and AI world, we need to have some awareness of the impact this has made and could make on our bodies and our environment. Our brains, our limbs, where and how we learn and even where we will age and get arthritis are all impacted by these tools.

It’s important to talk about the WYSIWYG environment and its GUI flows into our eyeballs and into our brains. It’s good to understand the impact of sounds and blue light. The relationships between body and technology should be taught so people can make better decisions on how, when and which devices to use, or which types of privacy settings and tools to choose.

It’s deeply important for us to stop regarding the technologies as alien, and to understand them as intrinsic. From farm to table and from boardroom to factory floor, our lives require more not less, thoughtfulness since they are integrating with these ever advancing technological systems.

It’s necessary for us to spread the word that computer science is actually quite interdisciplinary. There is the development and engineering, yet there is also philosophy, art, and history of numerous strains. There is an entire mirror world to consider, complete with ethics and even games. In some rarefied academic circles this interdisciplinary aspect of our evolving culture is understood, but it is rarely communicated to the broader base of society.

To make good decisions as individuals and as member of human society we need to understand our history and its melange of influences, from the mathematical and historical to the poetic.

There are more reasons why conscious computing is important. I’ll get to sharing those soon.

Let’s put it like this: Transgenderism isn’t the only Trans experience that exists. Transgender is a starting point of something much bigger.

Transgenderism is an experience of feeling different on the inside, than on the outside, and using the existing technology to reconcile those two experiences. As exotic and new as it might seem, transgender is only a glimmer of a horizon starting to take shape, one that requires us to decide — whose body, whose choice?

Can’t relate? Then think about your games. Do you get sad when you lose or happy when you win? Do you ever play in XR situations where it all feels so real? Do you feel that you emerge from the game somehow different but still you? That’s an evolving trans self if ever there was one, and it doesn’t have anything necessarily or at all to do with your gender.

Soon we will realize that the technologist’s playground of AI, robotics, and other innovations will enable us to do things with ourselves we never could do. Game play with haptics so you feel it more? How about games with haptics with bots that will continue to chat after its over? What about AI hologram concerts? All of it exists and is growing. This is your body on technology.

This emerging technologically enhanced body will allow us to be ourselves, and a little more. It will allow us to hack our bodies and to hack the system in a way that few if any of us are actually discussing. Will that teaspoon of microplastics currently in your brain be put to good use through innovation? It sure could.

Today’s bodies are starting points for creativity in a way that is both exciting and bit overwhelming. We see it with trans bodies but also with plastic surgery, with CRISPR and so on the litany of technology involving the body goes. Is it a little or sometimes a lot scary? Sure it can be. Does censoring it or not discussing it make any of this go away?

For some uploading their minds to a human made neural network is their desired transhuman flavor, just as the father of reductive transhumanism, Raymon Kurzweil. For others, implanting their body with robotic enhancements will be their trans entry-point like it was for Neil Harbisson, who used an implant to get over his inborn colorblindness.

Today’s pacemaker might come after a stent, while tomorrow’s might come while training for a marathon. Sounds far fetched? Aren’t your airpods turning into hearing aids? What happens when that technology jumps by leaps and bounds?

Maybe plastic surgery will soon confound aging, through tiny implants that stimulate the body to defy the existing timelines through nano bots and self-replicating emergency proteins. I barely understand the picture I painted, but I know it’s true. You know it’s true too.

Does it sound like science fiction? Well, it does. But maybe that’s why the person who coined the term of a transreality, Rudy Rucker, is both a mathematician and a science fiction writer.

The transreality is the name that we borrow from Rucker to identify the new horizon where we write our own stories with greater autonomy. To do this correctly we need more freedom not less. We need more discussions that dial down the woke and dial down the greatness of old ways of being to meet at a productive conversation that we sorely need. The technology won’t stop accelerating even if we aren’t willing to have these crucial conversations.

The key thing to consider about a general age of transhuman existence is not will we be able to use the cutting-edge of medicine, science and technology to augment ourselves or redesign parts of us, but who will determine our freedom to do this?

I know we have to have the bathroom talk, since we are collectively like babies in terms of transhumanism, so poop conversations come first. But what comes after those conversations?

Computing makes our bodies a starting point for different identities. Some of these identities are our simple email avatars and some are our gaming bodies. Do you play Fortnite or World of Warcraft? How about SIMS or Animal Crossing? Let’s go way back, did you ever cross the Oregon Trail? Increasingly as humans interact with computing based experiences, our sense of self is changing. We are multiple versions of ourselves just based on these everyday experiences. We remember wins and what they looked like in places that are cyber. We are not who our pre-Internet ancestors were.

Right now transhumanism is discussed by a small group of elites. These same elites hide out when we discuss the bodily rights of women or of the population wanting to opt out of a pandemic vaccine, but that is because elites don’t want you to think about this critically.

They would rather direct your transhumanism from their privileged positions than give you a say in any of this. So the issue isn’t, do Trans people or does Trans consciousness exist, but who gets the right to control it for you and for me. Elites want to criminalize words and thoughts and to censor people’s public records, but that never works. They want to control your body because they have gotten a taste of it through existing data they’ve mined.

Look, I don’t want a 40 year old man declaring he’s a woman tomorrow and then hopping into a female sports competition. I don’t want abuses of the biological feminine or to make each transgender person into some kind of guru, but I also don’t want them turned into a scapegoat. We need a middle way to deal with this and legislating some people out of existence isn’t it.

If anything these trans gender people are canaries in the coal mine of changes brought on by a corporate investment landscape that drives innovation faster than humans can grasp. They are the result of a changed biosphere and a changed civilization, one that can only return to common sense by revising its application in new settings, not by willing it out of existence, stubbornly.

These days are a precursor to more subtle understandings of Self, where the body is a biological base, one that can be hacked and changed through technology consumption as clearly as through daily diets of food and drink; of patterns of thought.

The biological triumvirate of mind, body and spirit might seem outdated in this context, but in fact it forms the strongest basis for a healthy emergence of a new kind of being alive. To have healthy innovation we need less reactionary dogma and way more wisdom. We need to slow down enough to reframe and listen to what is really at stake. Do you want your body to have an earthly overlord? Or do you want to use your body to explore your relationship with the Lord. There’s a difference.

Our bodies are transiting realities as we speak, even if we don’t want to admit it. From quantum to computing we are dynamics more than static identities. Did you smile at the emoji sent to you now? There is transhumanism in that smile, since your brain thinks that is real. It would not have thought that a hundred years ago or even at birth.

The capacity of smiling emoticons to trigger the occipitotemporal sites of the brain, exactly like real smiles, were published in 2014 by scientists at the University of Flinders, and yet we are not discussing these truths. We are thumping books with ever more ludicrous attempts at restraining personal thought and autonomy.

I am not saying you have to change your pronouns or let people you don’t know or trust into your bathroom. I am also saying it is very dangerous to let people who don’t know you into this personal space of deciding who you are. The DNA sequences exist, the wet and hardware interfaces and links are growing. Devices and cameras are scanning you often. You have few of the rights that a Network Citizen deserves.

We may want to defend the rights of trans people not because we get them exactly and all the time, but because something bigger is here inside their aliveness, and this bigger item is the right to dignity and bodily autonomy for all human beings at all stages of life. Now is a very good time to spread the word, that denying trans rights sets us all up to have less rights in the future.

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I started writing about culture and technology because I was involved in both industries. I taught hundreds of people how to use their software and I also studied and made art. Before that, I worked on Madison Avenue. I left. Screaming. Now that we have my credentials out of the way, let’s talk about sequels and remixes, because this outlier has something you might need to know.

The golden dawn of a new age or whatever has been promised to the American people is nothing new. It’s a sequel. Within this narrative sequel are all the trappings we have come to know: heroes (all male), damsels in distress (all deeply and only hetero), and a version of ultimate goodness and universal order — one that depends on fealty to a Sun-king kind of God. Now, none of the original story elements are bad. We like God and all that they hath wrought. We like women and we like men. So, how exactly does the sequel get it all wrong?

The problem with trying to make people live in an old story is that it does not keep up with the timelines. The sequel of returning to the 1800’s doesn’t fit our geo-technology paradigm, and it only results in a toxic level of cosplay.

This cosplay takes over daily normalcy and natural evolution and replaces it with despotism. It replaces variety and spectrums, things found in nature and tries to annihilate them. This attempt to destroy the basic foundations of physics, of all life, results in what we have going on now in the United States and around other countries all across the globe.

The sequel itself is a product of globalism, but one that is only focused on narrow horizons. The growth of sequels in the movie industry was due to the fact that moviegoers outside the USA were more easily able to follow the storylines. So for profits and the motives they create we the moviegoers noticed more and more sequels in cinema. That sequel move didn’t actually save the traditional movie industry from streaming platforms, now did it? It didn’t stop a decentralization either since we know that Bollywood and Hollywood both do well.

Similarly, the sequel playing out now in our governing system will not save the existing order that the tech bros want to perpetuate. They want to negate the evolution of culture but keep all the technology. That only results in cognitive dissonance and in dissonant systems. We know what dissonance does if it overtakes a system, now don’t we.

What we term as “woke” can be annoying and a bit out of control, but the quality of being awake is akin to being alive. We can not live in the past, nor can we revive the old awareness to fit today. Musk is annoyed he has a trans daughter and so you have to suffer. Donald wants to make money through constant exploitation, well the icebergs in Greenland might have more to say about that than the people even do.

The remix has always existed, because it’s what viruses do to reinvigorate themselves. The remix is adaptation. The remix is everything from our mitochondria deciding to no longer live outside us, and it’s the strength of our DNA and its many recombinant features. Without the remix we would all be amoeba.

The remix now is vividly tied to technology. The remix comes from music, from turntablism. It comes from security guards who saw angry people throwing away disco records. Those guys turned scraps into the basis for the dominant types of music in the world today.

The remix creates new variations from existing technologies and from existing cultures. The remix is what gives a self-made man a chance at all, since it allows him to achieve beyond the station to which he was born. The remix also allows a woman to mix up her abilities, to educate herself and be both mother and boss. The remix doesn’t care if you’re mostly straight but sometimes gay. It doesn’t care if you smoke weed on the weekend but get your job done all week like a proper adult. The remix is not a binge, it’s reality.

The remix is an imperative to keep moving, experiencing and sampling life. The sequel is what happens in between the remix, and it provides the materials. The remix provides freshness and sequel provides a nostalgic glow that nurtures our sense of history.

Have too much remix and you might get chaos, but have too much sequel and you will also get chaos. Chaos is what is happening now because people who know that we are approaching an entirely new horizon in technology want our society to remain exactly the same. You can’t update the OS on one side of this equation but not the other, not if youwant it to be compatible with the other modules of the system. Too much “again” creates chaos.

In 2016 I predicted (and maybe you did too), that sequel and remix would make strange bedfellows out of those who only want to advance their own agenda. I also stated that they would ask people, in fact manipulate them to become regressive. Asking me to go back to thinking I’m stupid just because I’m a woman would be like asking you to go back to Windows 2000. Asking a brown person to drink apart from the whites would be grotesque for all. Considering how many families now are mixed race and ethnicity that last scenario would also be quasi impossible.

People talk fair economics and social justice and making this all “Great Again,” but none of it is based on fact if it doesn’t allow for resonance, spectrums and the remix. Ask poor dead Carl Sagan if you can still find his books somewhere, the universe is nothing like the tech bros and the real estate bros want you to believe. Authoritarianism is dead, but it wants to die an ugly death.

So, now that we are clear, you may want to ask yourself if you’re alive in your mind — are you dedicated to reviving the sequel like some catatonic zombie or are you excited by the idea of moving the dial on what is truly alive in the world? Are you interested in being a hero or a damsel or somewhere in between? Do you reserve the right to change your cosplay based on your desires? With cyberbodies and robot intelligence the sky might soon be the limit. Do you want those nascent expressions to be narrowed for someone else’s dreams?

I reserve the right to love my God and myself and to not impose that view on anyone. I also reserve the right to remix myself according to my whims. I believe that free will, no matter how fraught that idea truly is, is part of my right to mess around and find out. It’s not some guy in a suit’s right to curtail this. That guy didn’t birth me and he didn’t design my DNA. That guy trying to define all this for me and for you, he didn’t design your DNA either.

You should reserve the right to reject a king or his lackeys who ask you to never think outside the sequel. The reason I say this is not because it’s convenient but because you’ll never succeed. Ask the people in North Korea how it feels if you do succeed in negating your very own interiority. Better yet, ask yourself what gets those people to negate themselves from the inside if it’s not the intense poverty and violence that permeates their lives under their self-loving king-god.

The sequel is one thing when it is an expression of loving the past and treasuring some of its aspects. Nostalgia for the past is natural and to some extent it is good as long as it doesn’t come at the cost of what is living now. Yes life was simpler in the 1800s, but it was also quite brutal. And do you want to go back to those toilets? How about the tuberculosis?

There are only two cultures right now and although gender, race, and sexuality are being used to hide this, there is no hiding the truth that it isn’t about those issues at all.

Does bucking the sequel make you feel nervous? That’s how you can tell if you’re living under it. If someone asks you to identify with fear to the point that you stick your head in the sand or you scream at your children or your family because they should simply fall in line, then it’s time for you to breathe and ask yourself, Am I the sequel or am I the remix? Am I the hero or am I the lackey of the villain? Am I doing God’s work or am I actually imposing my ideology, not God’s love, on others?

Be the remix. It’s just you being you and allowing others to be themselves, right here and right now. You don’t have to change how you live, but you can’t ask others to change living in a way that displays their own interests and truths.

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Note if you don’t like how I used “they” pronouns for God then remind yourself that God is actually a trinity (at the very least) in every single religion. We can argue that another time, but you’ll have to pay me if we do. Otherwise buy my book, The Digital Nomad Manifesto on Kindle and help me fund the newer, better, slimmer print edition coming soon. I’m tired of giving things away to a culture that wants my erasure.