You wake up to the sound of your smartphone's alarm clock. You grab it and click snooze... "5 more minutes", you think. But once those minutes pass, you need to get up. You grab the phone and take it to the bathroom. As you evacuate, you scroll through your recent feed. You get out for your morning exercise and synch your smartwatch to register your performance and vitals. You get home, jump in the shower listening to the latest news, podcast or gossip. At breakfast, you finish watching the previous night streaming episode or, you may check your emails, your calendar, messages or post replies. You may also synch up your activities with your siblings and partners. As you transit to your office, you keep updating yourself through your phone. You may call a friend and arrange for an unexpected dinner at the trendy local restaurant or make arrangements for a doctor or lawyer appointment. You may, as well, just listen to music or take pictures of the sun shining through the leaves of a tree. At the office, or place of work, your calendar and emails synch again in order to give you a clear picture of what you need to do. A meeting at 10h, a yoga lesson from 12h30 to 13h30, lunch at 14h, plumber call at 15h30 and at 17h you need to send that pdf presentation. At 18h sharp you need to leave to pick up your partner's dress for the dinner that night, at 20h15. Returning home, you scroll through the feed, boost a couple of sharp posts and update on the latest comments. While washing and getting setup for dinner, you play "cool dinner" suggested playlist and find yourself whistling to a track you love, that played just at the right moment. As you and your partner leave for dinner, you enter the restaurant's coordinates and find the fastest route. It will take 13mins, enough time to park and meet your friends outside. It is a lovely night, 21 degrees, 18% hummidity and 4% of clouds. Once in the restaurant, you scan the menu with the QR code. You make your meal and drink choices and proceed with catching up with your friends. In a few minutes, you are trading podcasts, showing videos or pictures. Ocasionally, a notification will pop up for an email, post reply or latest shopping deal and the natural "excuse me, i got to take this" occurs. In the end of the meal and after a delicious gastronomic experience, spite the clumsy waiter spilling half of the sauce in the floor, you decide to give the restaurant couple of stars. You drive home, again through the fastest route and land on the sofa for a late night chill. There is that latest episode, night show or movie to keep watching and you can crash on the sofa, your smartphone is already set for tomorrow.

While certainly speculative, i think this is a sort of reality that many are living. With the advent of the smart phone (also known as cellphone (a cell as in prison)), all sorts of apps have emerged to make our life "simpler, easier, more efficient". As all sorts of home and office appliances become interactable through our smartphones, these became essential tools of survival. Planning and organizing became paramount in a world running out of time. The idea of an adult without a smartphone is certainly close to unconceivable in our modern western world (there are always exceptions).

At some point smartphone became mediators of reality, technological enhancers and expanders of all experience. They have clearly extended the scope of our actions and influence. We record, archive and track our experiences, memories and tasks in digital form. We may know at any moment, our heartbeat, temprerature, location, company and nearby outlets, among millions of other parameters. But, while this is definitely impressive to someone that grew up outside this framework, it has become more and more a reason to pause and think this through a few times, maybe a lot.

For now, i think that this simple device impact in our life, is, among other things, reducing us to self-pretending robots. Not in the pure mechanical sense, but on a cultural-psychological level. As we, fragment all aspects of experience into apps, it feels like, we are mostly reducing our behaviour to what the apps can register and whatever the app can't register is dismissed or ignored. In a reverse twist of irony, many are now living and behaving to the beat of some app. "I did 1000 steps", sent 12 emails, researched 4 presentations, brought 5 new customers and got 3 potential investors interested. Our life is looking more and more like an assemblage of appendages measuring and analising our performance in order to find points of optimisation, that will ensure objective relevance and social-economic meaning, like souless machines or selfless robots.

It is no wonder than, that comparing human animals to machines has not fallen into the ridicule that it actually is. Quite the opposite occurred, we often here of "faster than human" machines that can perform immensely "better" than any human or humans combined, without any of the "human-error" risks. We hear of machines that hold all "knowledge of humanity" as some sort of technologic supreme entity that renders puny single humans intelect meaningless. Well, we hear a lot of things nowadays, but it does not mean they make any sense. For me, any comparison between human animals (or any animal for that matter) with machines is the first mistake and entry point to a world of misconceptions and, in my case, for an early nap ;) I also think that these "comparisons" serve mostly a marketing narrative more than an actual scientific one.

Note that, this is not exactly new. If anything, our praise of Reason is clearly the paradoxical culprit. Materialism, it's problem child, is it's most palpable philosophical expression. Measurable reality is the only reality, beyond that, there is only speculation and hence, you are only living if you have a measurable beating heart or fit a neatly organized chart. Your soul? a mere result of electrical neuronal activity and once you are dead, so is the soul. On the other hand, Emotions are objectively the problem. They cloud and influence judgement and impair the proper action of reasonable processes and as such, emotions need to be ignored, dismissed and if possible discarded. By lacking objective ways to measure them, emotions have no role in a functional society. We need to learn to put emotions aside and act reasonably... like robots.

In the end, smartphones and digital interfaces express this obsession with all rational aspects of life. This obsession with optimization, enhancement, improvement of only the aspects that can be expressed and measurable by apps. Everything else is left out and a sort of robautism emerges. Are you there yet?

 

 

An exploration of ideas that reflect on openness and relativity as forms of approaching the self and the other(s). 

All is seed


Novalis


A simple, yet, largely incomplete, description of a single
moment can set us through a spiralling journey through
human understanding. The seeds are all around us everyday,
everywhere, in any given moment.
On a rational basis, each item presented on the left,
represents one of these seeds. It provides the ground for
speculation, analisys, comprehension. What is time? What
is a Homo Sapiens Sapiens? What is an adress? What does
it mean to be single? Musician? Caucasian? What is music?
What do all these notions imply? How far do they reach into
the collective mind? Do they represent truths? In wich
settings have they flourished? Are they obvious? Do they
work?

 

The characters of this essay are part of the alphabet. A 
collection of abstract symbols, that set in accord to rules,
form the basis of information to be traded among Human
beings . The English language used in this context (to
exchange information between human beings that have
different “Mother Languages”) is not stable or fixed. It is
the result of centuries of world wide dissemination. In fact,
it represents, partially, the history of the cultural trades,
generated by those which use it (considering that some
words were lost and others added).
The english language is an oral system of communication
which means to trade information. It´s visual reference is
based on the latin alphabet. However the characters itself
are not by themselves enough to ellaborate a long and
meaningfull    visual monologue. One will need other signs
called punctuation marks.
The visual shape of the character as a few structural
shapes that indentifies it and, yet, there are millions of
different visual options (fonts) to present a visual message
(what is communicated).

 

As in the case of the latin alphabet or the english language,
one moves across multiple areas of human existence and,
eventually, faces the constant mutation of all things.
Language has not evolved from... to.... Language mutates...
as anything around us as ourselves.
Constant motion, inevitable change.
Cosmicly, the universe is an enourmous flux of energy
and matter and, apparently, Mankind is not a result of
“evolution”, but an example of the many forms that matter
can assume. We are, undoubtfully the most complex “unit”
known. This, for many is the argument to explain that we
were “generated” by some “higher” entity, and therefore,
ours is not a void existence    but a meaningfull one. Yet ,
of all beings, we are the only that pays taxes.
Our body is in a constant flux of energy. Not from    a
point to other but , simultaneasly, in multiple directions.
Performing severall tasks at the same time... like now.
While typing these ideas, i breath, think, move the fingers,
listen , look... all simultaneasly.    Our senses, help us to
perceive the surrounding envirnoment, enabling us to
interact with it. Eating reading, sleeping,talking, moving
and many other tasks are done with aid of these five, highly
complex, senses which, represent different dimensions of
the world. Sound, Light, Time, Smell, Space could be their
Physical translations. But, spite their incredible performances
(that are not yet fully understood) these perceptional
devices are limited. We can only perceive a limited scope
of light radiation, a limited scope of sounds, smells, a
limited range of of textures...

 

World Laboratories aims for a Principle:
Cosmic Humbleness.
We are ignorant beings that are, still, discovering what
we are. Thousands of years of existence have not been
understood. There is, indeed, an enourmous cultural diversity
in Humanity. However, there seems to be somekind of basic
approach that seems to permeate our societies. We can
assume that killing another human being is not wellcome
in any human society. But the pattern that lays on the path
of life, differs culturally, on how to live the righteous living.
We can assume that any society is far from have found
the more adequate approach to life. The constant existence
of conflicts, the natural “suffering” that seems to be life, the fear of inter-relationship, the fear of the outside world
carries us through a path from community to unity
(individuality) in our aging process. Even though we live
in a society, our life is more of an ego trip, than a communal 
experience. We live fragmented from our physical bodies.
Our houses are fragmented into functional areas, our social
life is a flux of institutional fluxes, from school to university,
to job, through hospitals, theaters, beaches. Our tasks are
also fragmented, since one operates determined tasks
accordingly to the place we ocupy. We    also live mentally/
psychicly/ spiritually fragmented dettached from our physicall
existence. Our present moral values of family, love, friendship
do not seem to be appropriate to human beings. I mean,
divorce, batterings, child abuse, rape are an example of
situations that may represent the clash between the
assumption of these values. I believe that it is due to this 
incoeherence that our societies still fall short of peace and
effective community organization.

 

We now speak of a “constant flux of information”. This
flux has generated what McLuhan referred as the Global
Village. Now, more than ever, we are more aware of our
world diversity. Apparently, the political margins of countries
is beggining to receed (there were times where there was
no such thing as nationalism). This is more evident if we
look at the flux of people around the world (travels), than
at the political organization of societies. It is also curious
to note that Trance culture (or the psychadelic culture) is
based more on common approaches than on common local
origins. |In some way, some may point out, that a Trance
Party may be a tribal celebration within the Global Village.
We know we share 99,9% of DNA information with every
other human being. We have acnknowledged the influence
of the environment on the individual but, intentionally or
not, our existence also influences the environment.
We are not fragmented.
We are part of eachother.
We affect one another.
Individualism, on the other hand, is a base assumption
of Economy. Each individual has the right to Possess/Have.
“my car”,    “my house”, my job”, “my wife”.Property, Ownership, are key responses of materialism/consumism
to the Darwinian natural aggressive environment . Security,
Protection, Safety and Confort are both appealing and
rewarding by ignoring/avoiding conflict or adversity. The
ego needs,supposedly,    to be continously fed with ego
differentiators, enhancers, developers. Thanks to technology
we are able to “perfect” our existence, we can live longer,
be immune to certain diseases, travel faster, know more
people, speak more times. We live in quantity, we become
statistic addicts. The majority equalness, the importance
hierarchy, the meaningfull way. The more the better.
Todays fascination for technologies    has created a curious
fictional view of the future. In the future, there will be no
Nature. The “incredible” technological boom as allowed
men to surpass, it´s very own nature. In Futuristic Worlds
men lives surrounded by men-made life supporting devices.
Curiously, aliens are either reptile-like (barbaric enemies)
or brain extended beings (usually dumb and friendly).
This way, nature was the by product for us to exist.
Our cultural folklore that ranges from music, tv, movies,
newspapers, etc. is made on this assumption. We are
Superior.. Our fairytales appeal for technological supremacy.
By being able to generate nuclear reactions, Man is already
“playing god”.
However, and since technology represents an extension
of ourselves (the wheel an extension of foot, the electric
circuitry an extension of our nervous system), we are only
intensifying ourselves, we are not “taking the bull by its
horns” and gaining an amplified awareness of our existence.
We are becoming Technodependents. An unexplainable
great percentage of scientists believes in god, a system of
belief that fails easily, when under scientific questioning.
In fact, one cannot forget that believing in God is accepting
that men is Superior, a line of thinking that is coeherent
with Darwin.
Man is an evolutionary species and technology is the
proof that we are on superior stage of evolution. With
technological “improvenessness” one can raise the stakes
for a better living. Therefore the Educational process, being,
now, extended to constant “updates” through the working
life (conferences/ workshops). One has to “evolve for the better” continuously, to avoid obsolency or malfunction.
Evolution/Improvement/Development are Darwinian
concepts that support modern economy. It is not strange
to talk about “Wild Capitalism” or “predatory” or
“monopolistic” when talking about market economy. Wall
Street is an “highly Competitive” place. Competition is the
key to evolution “ one must fight to achieve anything”. By
improving oneself one increases the chances of reaching
better life standards.
Everywhere we look, we find multiple unresolved issues,
from psychological to cosmic events, our existence is not
yet    explained, understood. It is important for us, human
beings to “see with eyes unclouded”, for us to re evaluate,
re analyze our “achievements”, our “evolution” (that might
as well be “egolution”). The present worldwide contortions 
presents us with the keys to it´s solving if we aim to look
at them with the least prejudice possible. The “artist” is a
person that seems to avoid the acceptance of rules. If able,
to expand it´s creativtity into the public tissue, the artist,
becomes a social “shaman” or a social doctor... if understood.
If we assume that we all have multiple existences. Being
that, we are all doctors, friends, parents, economists,
philosophers, etc. in some degree. we are also “artists”
and we can expand our creativity into one another as a
communal trade. We can cross-fertilize eachother like
different cultures have been doing between them. With
this we arrive to the meme. As i understood, this recent
term that considers the idea as a virus. The ideavirus.
Although virus might seem like a bad thing from our
common understanding, the expression is mainly referring
to the virus behaviour. Well, the Virus behaviour is the
behaviour of all living things... The flux of life. Given the
appropriate environment and life spreads quickly.
The same with ideas. And, in our western world, ideas
spread, visually, through the huge mass media corporations,
that rely on visually emmiters under the assumption that
“seeing is believing”.
The giants are , of course, TV, Press (Newspapers,
magazines), the internet and the movies. All visual sources
of information.
The content of the newspaper and the Tv News, claims
to “show” the whole truth, “reality”. And as presented by
both, we live in a “wild world”. Once again our darwinian agressive world. So we would do better to “stay confortable
at home watching television”. In the western world We can
also assume that 80% (just a guess) of the population
spends their evening watching TV. “Relaxing quietly after
a days work”, seems the most reasonable thing to do but
in fact, according to some studies (i must find the reference)
our attention span drops quicly after    a short period of time
(i must find the reference). They referred also an experiment
(i must find the reference :o) where they took the Tv sets
from several families, in order to test the influence of the
Tv. The results where disastrous. Most families raised their
rate of conflicts very significantly and there were those
that asked to quit the experiment.
Anyway, in a paying world, Tv is free in most countries.
Even the pay Tv/cable Tv is not unnafordable for most of
us.So we are left with “comercials”... the Advertising world
which supports mass media in general and are the public
reach from the market. As noted by John Berger
advertisements share a common message: “if you buy me
your life will improve”. The ego is an
“evolving/improving/fine-tunning” device. Thousands of
years of technological “evolution” has made possible for
man to “shape” it´s environment. “Never seem before”
“special features” “were developed just for you”. It is curious
to note that, the latest advances in visual techniques are
, most often presented first in the ads.
Ads are the most condensed form of communication.
 Altough it´s primary goal is to sell a product, the
 advertisement appeals to an idea in which the product is
the tool. Therefore, the ad is, presumably, the best vehicle
 for the meme.

If we were to accept the “perfect worlds” presented by 
both political and religious options (Christianism/Democracy)
we would either never mutated into vaster ranges of
awareness or we would become consumer robots.

 

 

 

 

Time


17 th of April of 2003 A. C.


18:02h.


> Place
Planet Earth


undisclosed address in Europe > Portugal

>Who


Homo Sapiens Sapiens


Caucasian


Male


Hugo Miguel Amadeu Costa Santos


1,76 m
70 kg


Son;

Brother;

Cousin;


Nephew;

grandson


28 years old


Single


Designer free-lancer


Musician


Writer


Reader


Artist

 


>Setting


Bedroom


Sitted
 At the computer


Listening:

X-DREAM ___ Irritan

t
>Special Notes


Headache

 

 

Reccomended Reading
(incomplete selection of mindcandies)
Cosmos,
Carl Sagan (among others)
The Mechanical Bride,
Marshall McLuhan (among others)
The Chalice and the Blade,
Riane Eisler
Food of the gods,
Terrence McKenna
The tibetan Book of the dead
Intimate History of Humanity,
Theodore Zeldin
Doors of Perception,
Aldous Huxley (among others)
The man who mistook his wife for a hat
Oliver Sacks
Fragments of Novalis
(portuguese compilation of Novalis)
Six proposals for the next millenium,
Italo Calvino (among others)
The Human Zoo,
Desmond Morris
The Tao of Jeet Kune Do,
Bruce Lee
Imortality,
Milan Kundera (among others)
Understanding Comics,
Scott McLoud