JoseMurilo :-)

#WalledGardens: "we have an intermediary [Google] that sits between audiences and advertisers and publishers, who runs a rigged market that allows them to skim off huge amounts of money, and the publishers themselves have been hollowed out into other creatures… and are themselves not necessarily committed to the public interest, certainly less committed than they have been historically" Cory Doctorow

Eye of the tiger by budu_83 on Flickr.

Link: http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/2013/09/bg-297-when-everything-happens-now/

The Present-Shock of Digital Culture (excerpts)

Douglas: On the one hand, that could be healthy. If you were really in the now, if you were truly in the present that might be glorious but for most people it doesn’t take the form of a genuine presentism. It takes the form of what I’m calling present shock which is a state of being constantly distracted or panicked or interrupted. It’s the always on state of having your cell phone strapped to your body and having it vibrate or ping you every time somebody updates you or email you or tweets about you."

Geeks: Just how you got initiated into the kind of mysteries of consciousness, I guess.

Douglas: Honestly, I was initiated through theater, which is an underestimated practice because it’s gotten so crass, commercialized. It’s about watching some soap opera actor show up on a stage. But I was very interested in theater from the time I was five or six years old, the whole idea that some people would be on a stage pretending while other people are sitting quietly not.

...

Theater was really it. Then, in college, I guess my theater artsy friends exposed me to psychedelics, which was a big second step in it, because a psychedelic trip, in a way, is like an Aristotelian tragedy. It’s like going through the poetics or something.

...

Then I read Krishnamurti, and I don’t know if he counts as Buddhist or not, but I read him and I was reading this book of his. It was right at the point where he said, he’s really sick of people saying that all paths are fine, because if all paths are fine, it means then no paths are fine. I got on this whole thing of like a path of no path, oh, you mean, I don’t have to do any of this? I just stopped altogether doing anything.

...

Digital technology came around and I thought, “This is great. Now we can work in our own time, from home, in our underwear. We’re not going to have to go to some job and punch the clock. I can make stuff. I can write at home. I can make software at home and sell it, or shareware, or do whatever.” The programmed nature of digital time was going to let us do things on our own clock.

but then...

Digital technologies, which could have let us transcend the time is money reality and return to real time, to real human time, to socializing, which could have, instead of just leading to a new dot com bubble and VC and start ups, and this insanity, could have freed us into much more of and Etsy Burning Man like, real time, peer to peer economy, where we’re just trading with people for the stuff we need.

Geeks: It seems like there’s a very big collective delusion going on, in the way that I’m hearing you describe this. I’m curious how does one, or how do we, break out of that kind of delusion? Not just disrupting the book industry, but disrupting this whole way of thinking? Man, this is a big question.

Douglas: This is what I’ve been doing with all my books, since the beginning. I wrote “Cyberia” in ’92 cancelled in ’93 then published in ’94 because they realized that the Internet was actually going to happen saying that this new plastic vision of reality, this notion of designer reality is coming. It’s going to affect us on all different places.

It’s coming partly because of psychedelics and partly because of new digital technologies marrying together in a revival of Tao, Buddhist, and ancient spiritual outlooks that that was going to come. I ended up writing all these books that applied that insight. This sort of “Reality is open source insight to business and finance, and Judaism, and kids’ culture, and all these different things. And democracy and government.”

Then I realized that we weren’t even applying it to technology. People were using the net and all these things without realizing the open source origins of it without seeing that. To me, the core insight of the cyberdelic era was that reality is a series of programs or a whole lot of it is that we can reprogram.

You should be able to go out in the city streets and see, “Oh, New York is a grid pattern.” That’s designed by somebody. That’s not a given circumstance of nature. That’s a bunch of choices made by people. If you can look at the things that humans are calling sacred, and realize they’re only calling them sacred and inviolable because those things are not. Those things can be questioned.

Then you look at money and say, “Why do we use money this way? Who invented this kind of money, when did they do it, and what did they mean?” You look at everything as up for discussion. That’s the most valuable thing that we can do. And yet, ends up political only because there’re a lot of things that they don’t want to discuss.

If we want to discuss, “Look. What if the problem with the economy is not that people aren’t willing to work hard? What if it’s that the kind of money we use actually is structured to extract value from people and store value in corporations? What if that, actually, is not a good kind of money?

What if we invented something else, whether it’s Bitcoin or Time Dollars or a peer to peer system? We’re not allowed to talk about that. That threatens people, so it’s being willing to have those discussions. That’s where the Judaism part comes in, because Judaism, at least originally, was about that. It’s “Can we talk?” “Can we have the discussion about anything?”

The internet of things as portals, subjects and oracles: turning an environment into an ambient data utility http://t.co/OWdTUotHGF #IoT