Geek-Group-Think & Digital Determinism

Anand Giriharadas of the New York Times, touches on some very valuable points in this talk about developing a digital philosophy. I particularly recognise his view that among geeks (and I consider myself on the geeky side) the propensity for group-think is such that it overtakes religion in its ability to stifle questions such as; is more technology always better, is it always the solution, and where it hasn't yet gone must it always go? These are important issues worth having a view about.

Time Theory Part II

80's Music from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

This is kind of weird but when I mentioned to Marcus that I really liked what he said, I got an email pointing towards this video he made about it when he was going through his rubber gloves period. It's a fun way of reducing my self indulgently long and pseudo intellectual post about drugs and quantum physics. Marcus has a nice little body of social media work if you go into his video channel over here.

We also grew up about 200 metres away from each other in Southampton, hung out in the same parks yet never knew each other. Which is a good thing because I would have probably not appreciated him so much and I know my record of keeping contact with people from my youth is not strong. This is the quid pro quo of an international jet set gypsy lifestyle. There's always a quid pro quo.

The Irish Troubles

It is a slow day in a damp little Irish town. The rain is beating down and the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit. On this particular day a wealthy German tourist is driving through the town, stopped at the local hotel and placed a €100 note on the desk, telling the hotel owner he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night. The owner gives him some keys and, as soon as the visitor has walked upstairs, the hotelier grabs the €100 note and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the €100 note and runs down the street to repay his debt to the pig farmer. 

The pig farmer took that €100 note and cycled over to pay his bill at the feed Co-op. The Co-op guy nipped out, donning his cap to pay his €100 bar tab at the pub. The publican immediately slipped the money along the bar to the local prostitute as she had also been facing hard times providing "services" on credit. 

The hooker then rushed to the hotel and paid off her room bill to the hotel owner with the €100 note. The hotel proprietor then placed the €100 note back on the counter to the wealthy traveller hoping that he wouldn't suspect anything. At that moment the traveller comes down the stairs, picks up the €100 note, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money, and leaves town. 

No one produced anything. No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now out of debt and looking to the future with a lot more optimism. 


And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the bailout package works.

British Raj

I wouldn't post this if it wasn't first class interview material. Nobody likes to be lectured and Raj Patel has a gift for conveying a lot of information, in a compelling manner with admirably restrained finger pointing yet candid picture painting on possibly the most important subject for our species. 

Even if the subject matter isn't quite of interest, please watch it and let me know if my judgement is awry. One caller goes on a bit long but in fact has something very revealing to say about how Corporations use monoculture to send prices crashing then buying up the land on the cheap.

Ontological Interpretations of Quantum Theory & Damn Fine Drugs

When I was younger I collected the entire encyclopaedic weekly publication of The Unexplained. My father must still have it I guess. I disappointed myself by failing to buy one or two issues out of hundreds so it's technically incomplete but actually it's a good primer on much of the unexplained which gripped me as a lad. 

It was all there. UFO's, spontaneous combustion and the like. I was a bit obsessed by it but then completely dropped interest until I think about 5 years ago when I started to question the veracity of 911 and then once again I was lurking about on some very unpolished websites where in one memorable instance I realised the content was so well researched but looked shabby so I emailed the author to beg him to stop using Times New Roman and to justify his columns as I do on my posts. You can take the boy out of advertising but you can't etc etc. 

Incidentally that site is now an' alt news-source' bible but I don't to want link to it because I think the onus is on all of us to not judge a book by it's cover but to assess information by it's internal logic, and qualitative dimensions such as credence, syntax and tone, not to mention supporting evidence and most importantly open receptive minds. That's a journey each must make for themselves. A resistance to heat is needed too. Fingers get burned all the time.

I'm not sure if that specific surfing pattern led to Doug Rushkoff but I definitely was introduced through his podcasts to Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson where I pretty much inhaled what I thought were all McKenna's available speeches online.

From there I learned a lot about entheogens, and ethnobotany of shamanism and all the other stuff that is pretty much thousands of years of history that contemporary living doesn't like to have a grown up conversation about. I think it was Timothy Leary who said "LSD is a molecule that causes insanity in people who haven't tried it". This is actually the case. People with no experience have virulent views. But let me tell you it's not the same as saying just because I've not been to Iraq doesn't mean I don't know what it's like. I'll elaborate more on that in a later post.

My own use of LSD when I was 18 or so, and later on when I was doing my degree were quite remarkable in so much as I had authentic revelations of a lucid nature about me myself and I. In my mind it seemed as revealing as modern therapy over extended sessions though I've never actually done that but listened to people who have. I'm not talking about flippant issues or fuzzy new age camp fire singing topics. 

No, I'm talking about the raw stuff of life. Sexuality, ego, morality and virtue etc. This isn't an attempt to suggest some sort of intellectual closure or elevated superiority. On the contrary I did too little and insufficiently strong enough doses to squeeze my way through the basics. I use that word 'squeeze' because the single most misunderstood point about effective-dose hallucinogenic experiences is that they are not necessarily fun. They can be extraordinarily hard work but there's gold at the end of them. They are most often powerful, boundary-dissolving ego-stripping processes.

I know a lot more now since reading up and listening on the subject of entheogens, DMT, Ayahuasca and Psyclocybin which living close to the New Forest in my youth, I've also had the blessing of trying. The latter is particularly satisfying in nature. The splendour of the complexity is profound and actually between you, I and the internet I'd eaten a dose Psilocybin when I did a bit of creative planning and got this tattoo on my chest. I don't recommend tattoos under hallucinogens. I can't imagine you would but if you really need to I have something to share that might help. But it's too private for here.

So getting back on track (as I obviously wanted to get that out of the way). I've been fascinated with Terence McKenna's experience of a transdimensional voice that shared something with him, under I think the effects of Psilocybin or DMT. (Very different durations those two. One is 3 to 5 hours. The latter 5 minutes or so.) I've been fixated on this voice not because it's necessarily real but because what it said is so compelling, so disruptive. The Logos said to him:  'What you call human we call time'. 

If we cut some big bang slack here i.e Pretend like Big Bang that it's so big and so bang that whatever the rationale it's a voice from somewhere else as opposed to borderline insanity; this actually makes a lot more sense if one were to consider the ontological interpretations of quantum theory. i.e The notion of for example trying to imagine a message being conveyed between say the 8th and 3rd dimension. It's simply not possible while shackled to three dimensions and a fourth of linear time.

OK that's a bit hard to convey without dipping in to string theory so I'll try and explain using dream analogy. Ever noticed that time is on a different level in dreams. It's not like that whole narrative you managed to remember takes place in a time anything like the way it does in a waking state. Some suggest it all happens at once. Or parts of it do. 

Think about that. 

It's part of the reason dreams so often frustratingly dissolve by the time we've hit the restroom in ten or 15 steps for our morning ablutions on awakening. It's frustrating but it explains why so much is lost or not even remembered in the first place. How can we lose that which we never recalled? The transfer doesn't compute into sentient space time. I'm sorry it doesn't. I don't make the rules...it just doesn't.

I've written another post about this sitting in drafts trying to explain what I've learned so far on this so I should finish that little fella off first, before going on and on here but I just wanted to finally share a story here because this post is about time.

I ask lots of people the same question about time. There's a reasonably consistent linear relativism argument which is always nice to hear articulated, because it's a conclusion I've reached too, in the past. It's quite exciting to hear a prior self-determined logic conclude by forcing it's way out from another person's voice as if proof that quite complex hypothesis can emerge from separate sources. A bit like magic.

 Some people call it 'great minds think alike'. I say great minds thinking alike is randomly meeting down the pub or something. This other stuff is more 'Have you ever thought that wearing sneakers inside super size Wellies keeps your feet dry and keeps a spare pair of footwear to chill out in the Saloon  without carrying anything seperately? Only to look down and see you've both done exactly that. OK that's a terrible analogy but if you have a better one I'll use it. Promise.

I digress. Let's wrap up. 

The thing is, I asked my friend Marcus Brown my usual question about time and he said something I've never heard before. You know, I don't really want to share it, but if you like ask him yourself for a robust explanation that time apparently really is speeding up outside of the oft concluded explanation I've just written about. 

I like Marcus explanation: It's allegedly stupid, but empirically bright. 

If that doesn't wet you're appetite to watch the video above then I've no idea what you're doing down here anyway and I've clearly just wasted too much of your rapidly diminishing time.

New York Romanticism

Via Marbury

Christopher Hitchens

I swear I wasn't going to do this and that I even started to write, but thought I'd be boring all three of you shitless so I canned it originally. However everything being seemingly connected I have to come back to it because Christopher Hitchens is in the news for debating Tony Blair on religion, so if you can indulge me, I'll just throw in those few thoughts on Christopher Hitchens that I fretted about at first.

I think he's a complicated man. I first became aware of him as a supporter of the Neocons when I was trawling through the Project for a new American Century's archives, and building my personal shit-list of people who I think are deeply venal. That also included Francis Fukuyama who added his name to the cosigners of PNAC fan boys, though it's now probably evident that it's more a case of the end of Fukuyama than the 'End of History' as he originally claimed, although to be fair Zizek think's we're all Fukuyamaists now if seen through the lens of neo-liberal economics. That point is debatable, though getting back on topic I find it hard to be totally binary on Hitchens because he's clearly an educated and interesting guy and unlike most British thinkers, is easy on the eye.

So I was schmoozing around on Youtube earlier, and the highest viewed clip on a search of his name, is the one of Hitchens going through the waterboarding torture process. That's when I realised I wanted to write about the man. Whatever I may think of his jumping ship to the right when in his earlier days he was a staunch socialists/leftist I admire a person who takes the trouble to find out for himself what something actually feels like rather than the armchair theologian debates on what constitutes torture by people who are mainlining on corn syrup and day trading in their pyjamas. 

I was particularly shocked to observe and later watch Hitchins describe the overwhelming sensation of the amygdala's adrenalin-release of fight or flight kick-in. You should watch at least the first 30 seconds of the video if you want to hear a pro Iraq invasion supporter articulate why water boarding is in no way fucking around. Then if you really want to dig into the obnoxious but moral relativism details of the act I'd read Fox News explaining why Khalid Sheik Mohammed was not actually waterboarded 183 times, but was mostly put through dummy runs of it even though Hitchens explains above that he had nightmares of the experience after only one girlyman waterboarding session in the film above. It's extraordinarily sobering.

So even though I think Christopher was somewhat ungallant when he debated Tariq Ali over here just last year, by resorting more to mild calumny than debating, it seems evident that the two men are of a similar generation and seemingly rely on an independence of thought which often finds them with more in common than not. That's a good thing.

So I think I can let Hitchens slide a little there. I also can't condemn a man for changing his political ideology when if you were to ask my Mr Carter, my physics Teacher at St. George Roman Catholic School if I were a solid socialist he'd laugh in your face and explain I was the most annoying of Conservative pupils he probably ever had. 

I was young, what can I say. 

That old trope about being a socialist when young and a conservative when older is for people who stopped evolving intellectually. Even though I have some unorthodox ideas on infrequent uses of hard core sandboxed capitalism to give the State sector a kick in the junk once in a while.

Then there's religion and Hitchens. The man is practically Richard Dawkin's atheist rottweiller security. Don't get me wrong, I'm particularly despairing of pretty much all religions but I find the absence of the awareness of God particularly troubling in lots of people when for me that subject is both not up for debate and yet at the same time is beyond our ability to fully comprehend. Or to quote James Ellroy; "If you're still an atheist when you get to my age then you don't know shit". Not that Elroy and I have all that much in common. But really, if the educated world are debating the subject what the fuck are we thinking of doing with the illiterate poor. Think about that one.

But I can let Hitchens slide on that one too. All in all it's probably that Neocon thing, though I definitely would like to paint the town red with the guy and score some tail if I were up for that kind of hedonistic life..wait a minute.

Anyway, on a more sombre three chord guitar riff, Hitchens is now afflicted with cancer and unlike say the Bush family and the rest of the war profiteers I wish him only the best of health and yes, a miraculous recovery as I think the world is a better place...generally speaking. But getting back to the second reason for this post, his debate earlier against Tony Blair about religion had him saying a line I'm very glad to know because it's a simple but scientific point for any of us interested in a better world for the impoverished and hungry. He said:

"The cure for poverty has a name, in fact. It's called the empowerment of women"

It's for this reason I felt compelled to come back against the far less important topic of waterboarding which I thought was a good one in the first place. But I didn't want to get too political.

The New Bolivarians

It's funny how things are increasingly connected. I've mentioned I like Oliver Stone's work and that the person I most like listening to and reading at the moment is Tariq Ali. Well I recently watched both of them in a video clip as they worked together on Oliver Stone's "South of the border" documentary about American Imperialism in South American, so I downloaded it last night to check it out.

One of the reasons I'm still engaged in political thinking is because of the unchecked role of the media, particularly in the American Empire's politics. I have always kept a lazy eye on South American politics and particularly on Hugo Chavez and so it was a gust of clean fresh air to learn more about the man than I've ever managed to accumulate before. Most importantly it blew away some of the demonic myths circulated by the American propaganda machine.

I think it's self evident that the leaders Oliver Stone interviews here like Lula, Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez, Fernando Lugo, Rafael Correa all come across as principled and decent men with countries that the U.S has fucked over at one time or another. Most surprising though is the modesty of Raul Castro and of course the inclusive societal vision of Hugo Chavez. Fox News make their usual retarded (for profit) contribution with one host confusing cocoa with cocaine in an attempt to demonize one of the most inspirational political figures of the 21st century. 


The U.S. elite has a lot to fear if the increasingly powerful Stateside Latino lobby catch on to the reality that democracy isn't about filling the pockets of the rich but instead about providing as much as possible to as many as possible.

As an interesting aside I learned last night that John Lennon's Power to the People was inspired by his interview with Tariq Ali in the sixties for The Black Dwarf. Tariq Ali is a very interesting guy.

The Bolivarian Revolution name comes from the 19th century Simon Bolivar who led many South American countries to freedom from the Spanish Empire. The latest country the U.S. has fucked over in South American is Honduras. Hardly anybody in the U.S. knows.

Google On My Blog

Checking through Google Analytics recently I noticed that Google had returned to visiting my blog. There was a time when this happened quite frequently and I posted about who  visited this blog most over here. However in the last month, I've notice that they've returned again a few times, and on one occasion spending upwards of 20 hours on this blog. Or did somebody land here and then head home for a nice snooze? 

Naturally this couldn't be because the content is so compelling though I admit the Which one is the ladyboy post is a cracker if only because you all voted a lady friend of mine in Hong Kong as being a transsexual. This is proof that none of us really know shit from shit, though why this and others would be of considerable interest to Google remains a mystery to me. 

I haven't even written my anti American imperialist post yet. But I will.

The Future Of Advertising Isn't Advertising

View more presentations from William Owen.

Thought provoking presentation by William Owen of Made by Many that references a withering attack on advertising over here that's worth having an opinion on unless keeping your head down and sucking on the FMCG teat till it runs dry is your game.

Jon Stewart - Rachel Maddow

Watching Jon Stewart interview a Republican politician a couple of weeks ago I was struck by his grasp of political detail. It occurred to me that if Congress were a place where the American people were taken care of these days that he might be considering running for congress one day like Al Franken did. What's notable about this discussion is how grown up it is compared to the dribble being peddled by the so called professionals.

Rachel and Jon both disagree a fair amount in this interview, in a way that highlights the soft balls thrown to interview subjects on the right by Fox News.Some time back I caught an American philosophy lecturer point out that for real news go to The Daily Show or The Onion which says to me that there's a problem in the way that news media works in the States. I don't think Jon Stewart realises his remit for satire doesn't include the idea that his viewing audience may have changed since those black and white days of comedy and news as distinctly separate. Either way it's reassuring knowing that discussion of this caliber still exists and that fine people engage in it. Stewart's comments at the end are both gracious and human.

I was initially going to post this to my tumblr as it's easy to get sucked into political discourse and start becoming irrelevant, but as I had a few things to say on the matter I've posted it here.

If that hasn't tempted you to watch this than I should point out that Stewart takes a wholly contextual view of waterboarding and war crimes that may or may not be wrong but is interesting as an example of a mind not interested in binary thinking. It may not be correct but it is evolved.

Disavowal - Zizek On Intolerance of Tolerance & Only Foreigners Should Vote

Al Jazeera has to be the only media outlet giving people like Slavoj Zizek (who can talk for hours, his friends call him Castro) at least half an hour to discuss some of the most important challenges of our times. Zizek's deconstruction of tolerance is why I'm leaning towards his somewhat humorous reframing of a Stalinist mandate to fix things. 

This is a topic I've been straddling the fence on since I first challenged it in a theoretical sense with Sandrine in Hong Kong. It's not as if the answers are easy, but at least Zizek makes the point that there's an imperative for all of us to be philosophers here.

Update: Zizek on only foreigners should vote is kind of the big thinking I'm attracted to.

Sam Ismail

sam ismail

View more documents from Sick Sam.

More on the background for this document over at Agency Spy and here, here, here, here, here and Sam's side here not to forget George over here.

Chris Hedges - Death Of The Liberal Class

Chris Hedges connects more powerful political punches then I've come across from any other American commentator. Liberal limpness, the power of permanent war, propaganda to Madison avenue, evils of objectivity, Foxes pursuit of emotional consistency against truth, hedonism of power, complicity in one's enslavement, distinction between revolution and rebellion, price of virtue, hope, intellectual ghettos, the rise of fascism and the new deal in the 1930's, moral nihilism, digital tribalism and more. 

His last words in this 20 minute interview in response to the tough nature of this interview: "Why not go down swinging? What's the point of letting them wipe their feet all over our faces?".

Shoulder to shoulder Chris.

Class Struggle

Throw them all into first.

Random Access Memory

If Fox news are airing this I'm inclined to believe as I blogged earlier, that the tipping point is approaching. However it's unlikely to change the most important achievement of 911 which as Zizek points out is a domestically satisfying sense of victimhood. 

It's hard for me to guess with respect to large swathes of the American electorate, if anything changes when one is still a victim even as the perpetrator changes masks? I mean, what chance does history have when memory so often barely stretches from one tweet to the next?

Asia's First Lady - Aung San Suu Kyi

I was cynically optimistic when I read that Gordon Brown's last correspondence as Prime Minister was a hand written letter to Aung San Suu Kyi. I suspect that this didn't happen without some smoke filled corridor meetings attended by the United States and China. Principally with trade deals as the sacrificial lamb whereby everyone benefits but the environment. Thailand most notably signed a reported 8 Billion dollar deal just recently with Burma so clearly they were privy to yesterdays news.

Burma is the place I've explored the most by backpack and skull bustingly long (24 hours +) dilapidated bus journeys outside of Thailand. I spent an idyllic week or so a few years back on one of the most beautiful and peaceful beaches off the bay of Bengal in Burma and took this favourite picture of cattle used by the fishermen to haul in the catch while immersed in the water. It's here and across the country that I got to know a little more of the people. Most importantly that the ethnic tribes of Burma are another Yugoslavia or Balkanisation of S.E Asia waiting to happen.

I'm extraordinarily happy that an historical olive branch as been extended. It's by no means going to be any easier from now on. Indeed it will be harder to avoid bloodshed, but this first difficult step has been taken by the military junta. Which means somewhere inside the General's clique, the story of evolution continues to gather speed with what is to employ  metaphorical adumbrations; a race against extinction. 

Grooveshark

Anyone else sodding about on Grooveshark? Spotify doesn't work in Asia so I've been mucking around with other services. The UX for Grooveshark has improved since I first joined.

Super Social

Just finished  a conversation with the very hip Helena in Athens. We were talking about all things super social (among other things) and I shared the video above with her as I watched it earlier in the week and it strikes me that it's worth posting here.

Mark's book Herd is in my opinion an important one, because like most big ideas, it's not so revolutionary that it's too much for us to digest but is equally recognisable as a tectonic shift in seeing who we are, how we are, why we are and any combo of those such as, why we are who we are. There's also a quite elusive to grasp explanation of group actions that I still think Mark needs a better soundbite for thus far. Here's Mark at the Do Lectures. I think he uses the super social term in this though I'm still gagging to know if he's read Will Self's Great Apes.

It doesn't get more anthropological.

Islamic Crescent?

I don't think the American right gets it. That's fine by me.