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Author: Rob van Kranenburg
Date:  
To: Bricolabs
Subject: Re: [Bricolabs] Tecnoshamanism book - open call!!
Hi Patrice,

Put on the sternest glasses! :) I am always learning from your perspective on things, and I hope this can be the beginnings of a collaborative text,

Greetings, Rob


> Op 29-okt.-2014, om 16:37 heeft Patrice Riemens <patrice@???> het volgende geschreven:
>
> +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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