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Author: Patrice Riemens
Date:  
To: Bricolabs
Subject: Re: [Bricolabs] Tecnoshamanism book - open call!!
+1 !

(for the mail-readable text. It's content shall be analysed in due time
soon by our in-house star chamber ;-)

Cheeeeerz, p+5D!


> Asbesto,
>
> You are beyond hardcore! :)
> Here is plain text:
>
> big hug! Rob
>
> Trolls' purses are the mischief
> Rob van Kranenburg
>
> Angry Samson
> by Robert Graves
> (1895-1985)
>
>
> Are they blind, the lords of Gaza
> In their strong towers,
> Who declare Samson pillow-smothered
> And stripped of his powers?
> O stolid Philistines,
> Stare now in amaze
> At my foxes running in your cornfields
> With their tails ablaze,
> At swung jaw-bone, at bees swarming
> In the stark lion's hide,
> At these, the gates of well-walled Gaza
> A-clank to my stride.
>
> origins
>
> "Use cunning and deception as weapons, for in the circumstances deceit is
> no more then prudence, - Pope Innocent III to Arnold Amaury, head of
> Cistercian order of monks who who the religious leader of the Albigensian
> Crusade against the Cathars. (John Kekes, The Roots of Evil, Cornell
> University Press, 2005, p.13.)
>
> There is no more center and the sacred tree is dead. – Black Elk
>
> In most, though not all, stories of origin, - human origin I talk about,
> there is a child near the water. This makes sense, as we grow and live and
> be born in water. Sometimes and in some stories – aletheia as told by
> Heidegger , for example – there is an open space in the woods. These
> spaces harbor the notion of ‘becoming’. That without which nothing
> could exist. And guess what, there may be only one. For without becoming,
> no time, no space and no grasp of any kind of dimension. Flat it would be.
> This notion is quite real. It lives. Without it no life would be. One
> could therefore say that it has a stake in the developments it has
> facilitated, engendered, helped to bring about and has witnessed what
> human beings have been up to for their time they have spend on this
> planet, earth. Not a disinterested party, our friend ‘becoming’.
> Lately we have been having late night conversations and I have been told
> of her worries. Her voice is much thinner lately. She coughs sometimes.
> How it pains me to hear becoming herself coughing. What have we come to?
>
> For you an RFID tag on a t-shirt or can of tea is still an object + an
> RFID tag. You know that an NFC (Near Field Communication) tag/sticker can
> talk to your phone with an NFC reader (for example all LG phones
> currently) as the last four digits point to a web page and your phone is
> always on so it goes an collects that page to show you allergy information
> or where it came from or who made it. But your kid won't. For them the tag
> has become a 'quality' of the shirt. It is normal for them that shirts
> trigger information on a device. It is 'natural'. Now what will happen if
> only money-makers are in that link from the tag to the device/phone? Any
> story told through that link will be seen as 'real'. As real as the shirt
> or the can of tea. And that is how power has for centuries scripted
> reality.
>
>     This time that reality, as Baudrillard shows us in his Agony of Power,
> becomes 'integral', as there is nothing but that reality. Well it does
> not have to be like this. You can be in that link from the tag to the
> phone as well. We can open up the entire chain; from open hardware,
> software, NFC, to Sourcemap.com, open data, to open media. It may not be
> that less bad, but at least there is a chance that it will be more
> diverse and more and different stories can be told. And as we know the
> larger the group the elite can draw from, the more internal valuable
> conflict and diversity that leads to resilience. Elite? I hear you
> thinking? Are we the elite, as in ‘am I the bad guy here’? Yes, and
> we have to live up  to this or forever disappear in a few lines of text
> that no one - we can not kid ourselves - will be able to trace back as
> all our idiosyncratic qualities will be filtered out.

>
> We cannot go back, nor go to live in a world without this connectivity.
> You would cripple and handicap an entire generation and within ten years
> you would not be able to fill any managerial nor innovation position with
> a local person. You would only hire Cloud professionals and will be paying
> throughout this technological cycle of Internet of Things that will last
> around 15 to 20 years before it will be immersed in the combination of
> nano and bio technology.
>
>     "Bert and Tom went off to the barrell. William was having another drink.
> Then Bilbo plucked up courage and put his litle hand in William's
> enormous pocket. There was a purse in it, as big as a bag to Bilbo."Ha",
> he thought, warming to his new work as he lifted it carefully out, " this
> is a beginning!".
>     It was! Trolls' purses are the mischef, and this was no exception." '
> Ere, oo are you" it squeaked, as it left the pocket, and William turned
> around at once and grabbed Bilbo by the neck, before he could duck behind
> the tree. (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, p.34)

>
> vulnerabilities
>
> “We would certainly be happy if we could all get along well together and
> unite all the forces of anarchism in a strong movement; but we do not
> believe in the solidity of organizations which are built on concessions
> and assumptions and in which there is no real agreement and sympathy
> between members. Better disunited than badly united. But we would wish
> that each individual joined their friends and that there should be no
> isolated forces, or lost forces.” – Errico Malatesta
>  
> At Clemson University Nathan Weaver set up an experiment to figure out how
> to make it safer for turtles to cross highways. He “put realistic
> ­looking rubber turtles, no bigger than a saucer, in the middle of a lane
> on a busy road near campus. Then he got out of the way and watched as over
> the next hour, seven drivers intentionally ran over the turtle, and
> several more appeared to try to hit the defenseless animal, but
> missed….One in 50 drivers ran over the dummy turtles. In itself that
> ratio might seem –although still awful (and not taking into account
> drivers aiming for but missing the turtle) not alarming, “but consider
> how long it take a turtle to cross the road and it becomes plain to see
> that road-­crossing for turtles on any semi-­busy road means guaranteed
> death.”
>
> I have always missed this particular kind of intelligence as being
> instrumental or maybe at some point even decisive. Yet the fact is that
> this intelligence has particular technology that ensures that by each
> small unkind and selfish act it is not an equally small consequence but -
> due to the fact that the infrastructure (road) forces the tool (car) to
> follow a particular path - is able to destroy totally that which is its
> opposite (slow, vulnerable, purposeful).
>
> So, although we disperse, diversify and are tactical, we can still be
> destroyed utterly as in all earlier iterations (from Cathars to 60s,
> anti-globalization, Occupy, WL, etc). Therefore we need to work on an
> autonomous trajectory that escapes potential and probable retaliation.
>
> Who’s we?
>
> The Chrysalids, John Wyndham
 (first published around 1930): “When I
> was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city - which was strange
> because it began before I even knew what a city was. But this city,
> clustered on the curve of a big blue bay, would come into my mind. I could
> see the streets, and the buildings that lined them, the waterfront, even
> boats in the harbour; yet, waking, I had never seen the sea, or a boat.
> ...”
>
> On April 1 Olga Sjeremetjev was summoned by the NKVD for questioning in
> the police headquarters Petrovska street. After waiting two hours, she was
> invited into a small damp and smokey room and asked to sit across a man
> whose face was hid in the contours of an army cap. He asked the usual
> questions. In between were long pauses. No one said anything. She could
> hear the conversations in the adjacent rooms. People were crying as they
> were told to pack and leave Moscow in a day, or in two days. After what
> seemed to her an eternity, he handed her back her passport, told her she
> was free to leave and maybe she would consider changing her name?
>
> In her diary she writes that she took a tram home, happy to be breathing
> freely. As she rode through town she kept wandering what the point of this
> interview had actually been? What purpose does it serve? How does it
> enable the state to move forward and what does this cost?
>
> I would say that I can relate to that and I want can be -temporarily- but
> part of this kind of ‘we’. The kind that is able to act, undergo, be,
> act, question and reflect on the meta axioms and requirements of the
> situation. At any time. Whether friend or foe.
>
> But I am fine with saying ‘I’, not we, if necessary.
>
> In a review of the August-September 2006 Waves Conference, also in RIXC,
> Riga I argued that two things were becoming painfully clear. “First: the
> need to organise in some way or another is paramount as the pre-network
> schemes for influencing government and company policy through public
> debates and scandals no longer works as there is no more public in the
> network, only audience going from one daily scandal to another: either we
> assist policy to ensure that at least some public space survives, or we
> build our own parallel systems. And the second: while technology is
> becoming cheap, malleable and potent enough to create parallel
> infrastructures how do we organise the avant-garde conceptual power to be
> focused on real, concrete, discrete local and everyday objectives?” I
> said basically the same in Dortmund: “In a digital environment – no
> memory loss, intricate data-mining, serendipity as default – the
> question is: “What might be deemed wrong by whom in power three years
> from now?” surely quite a different set of assumptions. So what to do?
> If a ‘no’ is a loss of energy, though a balance to the industry, if
> sparking a debate is a loss of energy, though a process of education large
> numbers of people, I can only see one course of action that takes all
> scenarios (utopian and dystopian) seriously and that is building our own
> mixed reality nation. This gives sense and purpose and positive energy to
> our young hackers and idealists. Poets, after all, are the true
> legislators of the world.”
>
> Reiterating it again: “At this very moment in time when technology has
> become cheap, malleable and potent enough to wire up our own streets, who
> cares about this bunch of people drawing neat nice lines on worthless
> paper? How productive it could be to get all this conceptual power focused
> on real, concrete, discrete objectives. This is not about alerting the
> public any more. There is no more public. People just go from one scandal
> to another and could not care less if 12 cameras were installed in one
> afternoon. This is about us. Saving us a place “a space” where we can
> breathe, discuss, think and dream manic dreams. We have two options:
> either we assist policy to ensure that at least some public space
> survives, or we build our own parallel systems. We start Mixed Reality
> Corporation with about 200 locative artists and become the new Microsoft
> of the 21th century ourselves instead of helping through all our wonderful
> unscalable stuff IP become wiser and feeding the machine with all our
> lovely ideas. Things are serious. This is not a game. Time to organise.”
> (WHEN WIRELESS DREAMS COME TRUE, Mute)
>
> That is why I founded Council, theinternetofthings.eu. To be a strong
> potential building block in this open strategy. If and when there is
> momentum. If there is, ok. If not, then not. I can not force things.
> Especially not ‘smart’ things :)
>
> On the cover of the first issue of the group’s publication, Black Mask,
> in November 1966) is printed Black Mask’s original manifesto : “A new
> spirit is rising….The industrialist, the banker, the bourgeoisie, with
> their unlimited pretense and vulgarity, continue to stockpile art while
> they slaughter humanity. Your lie has failed. The world is rising against
> your oppression. There are men at the gates seeking a new world. The
> machine, the rocket, the conquering of space and time, these are the seed
> of the future,which freed from your barbarism will carry us forward. We
> are ready -- LET THE STRUGGLE BEGIN.”
>
> Nestor Makhno, 1926: The Russian Revolution in Ukraine (March 1917 - April
> 1918): “The fact that we libertarian communists or anarcho-syndicalists
> failed to anticipate the sequel to the Russian revolution and that we
> failed to make haste to devise new forms of social activity in time, led
> many of our groups and organizations to dither yet again in their
> political and socio-strategic policy on the fighting front of the
> Revolution.
>
> If we are to avert a future relapse into these same errors, when a
> revolutionary situation comes about, and in order to retain the cohesion
> and coherence of our organizational line, we must first of all amalgamate
> all of our forces into one active collective, then without further ado,
> define our constructive conception of economic, social, local and
> territorial units, so that they are outlined in detail (free soviets), and
> in particular describe in broad outline their basic revolutionary mission
> in the struggle against the State. Contemporary life and the Russian
> revolution require that.”
>
> So we need to organize the unorganizable. I have been trying quite a few
> times and failed until now. But all is iteration and I am constantly
> finding new allies. And I keep losing old connections like shedding skin.
> Growing up I suppose.
>
> political, personal, spiritual
>
> I did know this, Kandinsky said to art critic Sadler who asked him if he
> had foreseen war as his paintings were so ‘warlike’, that there was a
> terrible battle going on at a spiritual level. It was that battle that led
> me to paint this.
>
> The key element is that normality has been defined so strict that a lot of
> human behavior is falling outside of it, or at least people that have less
> to none filters are feeling as if they do not belong ‚here’. Probably
> everybody at one point or another has these feelings of estrangement, but
> I believe that there is a group of people that feels like this on a daily
> basis and as a default.
>
> They have no boundaries and find it difficult to create or have a notion
> of ‚self’. They have to deliberately make markers on and around such a
> ‚self’, but the truth is that they don’t really understand that need
> to pull strict boundaries between ‚self’ and ‚others’. They have
> grown up believing in a way that there always is a camera on them, or
> always someone or something present. The concept of ‚alone’ to them is
> non existing. In my opinion this is easily explained through the notion of
> the tribe.
>
> From early dawn of men we run in packs and survive in teams of about
> 30-50. In every tribe you would need some people who would go out, look
> around and bring things and ideas back home. These early innovators were
> balanced by other intelligences and ideally there’d be a balance between
> the outer ends of manic boundary less and extremely focused semi autistic
> and the in between skillets that build and maintained a notion of the
> ‚real’, ‚reality’ and ‚normality’ that was able to sustain
> basic humans needs and functions. To each his place in the tribe, ideally.
> If however such a situation arose every body (literally) felt well. The
> seer was listened to and the mason build as he saw fit, thus timely
> shelter from the storm.
>
> From time to time the specialists start to build such intricate elements
> or the innovators bring back home such far fetched ideas that the
> skillsets in the middle start to adjust what is ‚normal’ and what is
> ‚strange’ and an evolutionary process starts changing the Zeitgeist,
> the ‚fashion’, the ‚customs’, in short : the ‚real’. And
> sometimes this process would be a rupture, a real break; war and invading
> tribes bringing such new world views that a new normal was imposed and the
> old forgotten but in stories of grandmothers and the artifacts of the
> time. Once in a while such a rupture became an ontological change as in
> the ‚death’ of God for certain tribes. More often the notion of the
> normal was kept to till it was impossible to keep at the cost of burning
> even more seers as witches, wizards, heretics, Cathars, hippies, hackers,
> or any other minority group it could lay their hands on.
>
> We are now witnessing such an ontological change, a rupture in what we
> perceive as normal. The Internet, Augmented Reality, The Internet of
> Things are all technological toolsets that have been far removed from the
> first tools that men used to chisel stone. The first chivel to be used on
> stone was a stone. it only later became a chisel. But it still fit in
> someone’s hand. The feedback was intense and obvious. It was Heidegger
> who saw that through mechanical engineering and the Industrial Revolution
> it was no longer a hand applying force but a machine and hands overseeing
> that machine. This was the start of the substantiation of the space with
> before that had been of visible mediation and cause and effect. He
> realized that there was nothing we could do, only wait as the famous last
> line in Sein ind Zeit goes. He also realized that it was a particular part
> of the tribe slowly taking up the notion of ‚the normal’. It was the
> specialists who had been crafting and dissecting and splitting things up
> into smaller and smaller building blocks that at first made no sense but
> slowly began to offer the possibility of recreating their visions as a
> layer on top of what the old notion of normal was not hurting it at all
> but slowly perfecting it, smoothing the edges of every perceivable human
> act. They offered convenience.
>
> The specialist intelligence - an engineering toolset - began eating itself
> as it found that it had no more real boundaries. After automating work,
> leisure, administration, governing, it succumbed briefly to the notion of
> the ‚Living Lab’ but soon realized that the last territory it had to
> conquer was the space in between driving to work and back home: everyday
> life and living. Like a grin trying out faces it tried out all human forms
> of organization till it found the space in between where love lives and
> hope and shame and fear.
>
> As this intelligence could always count on the support of the middle as it
> was the perfect middle, the epitaph of normal : who does not want to feel
> safe, happy, secure?”, the first steps towards the ultimate disciplining
> of the body, home, street as ‚smart city’; cameras everywhere,
> automated entrances to public transport, elimination of cash money, energy
> management as a way to fight Climate Change, children playing within line
> of sight of caretakers, banning of smoking (with emerging debate on
> banning it in cars and homes), were not seen as invading a private space
> to such an extent that it was a rupture with ordinary liberal capitalist
> society.
>
> One of the defining qualities of the specialist is that he needs
> protection. As his or her gaze is on the detail, someone has to watch his
> back. Industry and states provided this protection alongside with the
> briefings and the funds. This, however, is about to change. The obsessive
> worry and attention to perfectionist detail has, as we have seen with the
> NSA revelations, lead to an ever growing paranoia of security services an
> pillars of the state that can no longer be stilled by any piece of data or
> any snippet of information. Equally the full monitoring schemes are
> driving the costs of hardware, software and infrastructure so down that
> sharing and collaboration through open source is fostering the realization
> that what the SAP, Siemens and Cisco’s of these world are doing is not
> rocket science. Their bloated balances are the result of decades of
> isolating data in IP, patents and copyright. Yet what have they build
> after WW2 that is so exciting? More planes, cars, computers, nuclear
> plants and stuff for wars that keep blowing up people? Big deal. As it
> turns out these things can be build in different ways.
>
> There is a parallel process running alongside this specialist expertise
> running amok, ocd’ing on itself in ever stronger attempts to gain
> control over the ‚happenings’ of life, as we have seen to the extent
> of defining the ‚normal’ as that sphere where every tiny detail is in
> process and every object on the planet is individuated either in a giant
> Object Name Server (GS1) or in IP to every edge (IPSO alliance) or any
> combination of this together with RFID and NFC resulting in every object
> and item being digitally approachable in the distributed local grid as
> well as in the ‚Cloud’. That parallel process is the awakening of a
> combined and shared intelligence of that other outer end on the spectrum;
> the manic mind. It has been fueled by and has itself helped to build that
> open white line engulfing the planet: tcp/ip where still no King, Tyrant
> or Tycoon can make bytes go faster (at least for the moment). In under
> twenty years any mind capable of sharing has shared and fueled sharing as
> a new default. To keep to yourself the minimum of necessity and share all
> other resources with other so no one needs to be in want.
>
> So now I want to make the case that this sharing is the new default and
> that this is facilitated by that very framework the specialists have
> build.
>
> A Gramscian moment.
>
> Are we going to stand aside, bitch and moan and grumble and lose this shot
> at full traceability and transparency like we lost his notion of hegemony
> to the extreme right wing that is now reaping the rewards of fully using
> it? Or are we going to get together, share resources and build the
> building blocks on the cheapest ecology of hardware, software, database
> storage and analytics ever? Yes, bad magic, yes watered down alchemy. All
> true. But if the we that I outlined is not invested and actualized in it,
> it we will lose the opportunity that we can either at one point break it
> (owning it) or fullfill it in such a way that we leave some notion of
> becoming, so space for real magic to occur or to hide herself thoroughly
> for a while.
>
> Hellekin pointed me to SCIENCE, MEANING & EVOLUTION: THE COSMOLOGY OF
> JACOB BOEHME By Basarab Nicolescu. Foreword by Joscelyn Godwin Afterword
> by Antoine Faivre Translated from the French by Rob Baker, 2013):
>
> “It is natural to define the different levels of reality according to
> our own level, in the way they are experienced by our body and our sense
> organs. We are not the centre of this succession of levels, but the
> natural system of reference. With respect to ourselves, we can recognize
> the existence of levels which are nearer or farther away. In any case, we
> are those who, alone among the other natural systems of the planet, seem
> to be equipped with a capacity for translating this information between
> levels. This capacity for translation, associated with the scientific
> study of natural systems, allows us to pass beyond the modern illusion of
> a single level of reality, an illusion which has as its source the taking
> as absolute the information given by our body or our sense organs (and
> also, of course, the extension of these perceptions by various measuring
> instruments).”
>
> This once human - shamanistic - capacity for translation, has become a
> ‘capability’, a set of functional descriptions of agencies of Big
> Data.
>
> It is not something good or bad. It is the condition of our situation. We
> either play it or not.
>
> ‘In a report in this week’s issue of the journal Science, Dr. P. Read
> Montague Jr. and colleagues at the BCM Human Neuro-imaging Laboratory and
> California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., describe where and
> when trust is formed between two anonymous people interacting via
> functional magnetic resonance imaging in machines more than 1,500 miles
> apart. They found that as the interaction continued, the trust response
> occurred earlier and earlier in the subjects’ interchanges – until a
> decision about trust occurred even before the latest interaction was
> completed.’ [...] ‘The study was made possible by hyperscanning or
> hyperscan-fMRI, a breakthrough that allowed Montague and his colleagues to
> synchronize the scanning of two interacting brains.’
> Trust requires love:
> ‘In a springtime sort of story, researchers say they’ve used advanced
> scanning methods to pinpoint the region of the brain where feelings of
> trust arise.’ .. ‘Turns out those emotions are nestled in the same
> area as the most powerful springtime feeling of all — love.’ [...]
> ‘“Love is a primitive, basic, emotional affective state,” he said.
> “So is trust. Trust is something that a child has for its mother or a
> lover has for a lover.”’
> Yes.
> That is how simple it is.
> Love brings trust. Love negotiates trust.
> Trust builds relationships. Relationships are embodied in people: middle
> men. Love builds trust, trust builds bureaucracy. Love builds trust, trust
> builds boredom.
> Three cheers for boredom.
> Let’s hear it for some peace and quiet.
>
> Stir it up.
>
> Big thanks to J.Period & K.NAAN, The Messengers.
>
>
>
>>> Rob, ASCII please! This is unreadable :(
>>
>> kisses,
>>
>> asb
>>
>> --
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