A great essay by CubeFlipper about consciousness, especially Liminal vs. Supraliminal awareness. In the liminal state, the brain refuses to split things into concepts, just allows them to be. It is a brain which can’t determine a thing’s existence in context or in relation to other things, they remain pure perception / acceptance. Pure intuition. From the “post-conquest” or supraliminal state we get the concept of certain things being proper, or correct, with others being inappropriate.
CubeFlipper suggests that, via meditation, we can attain something close to this pre-conquest state, but he goes further. He thinks the trauma of transitioning from this liminal state into the rational brain which built the world we know is our original trauma, and that it has been passed down for tens of thousands of years through our DNA, causing all those pesky dysfunctions we consider the “human condition.” Garden of Eden, type shit.
1984 essay from Thomas Pynchon, originally published in the NYTimes, about technology. It is more relevant today than it has ever been, with the AI-Question lingering over us all. He talks about living in a world with too much data, and retells the story of the maligned Luddites. The Luddites were a group at the dawn of the industrial revolution who would go around town smashing textile machines to bits. They were masked bandits, scared of technology. But not really. What they really were smashing was the removal of jobs from the hands of good, honest weavers. They were not charging at windmills with swords (or anti-eco policy) trying to fend off modernity. They were burning servers to save truckers.
Here’s a taste of the flavor of this piece:
“There is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO's, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time. If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed.
I’m sure you’ve stumbled onto this site the last time you were looking for a waterfall, or trying to figure out the best place to park to see that waterfall you saw on instagram, or halfway into a hike, trying to figure out how much longer it will take to get to a waterfall. But AllTrails has a vastly underutilized home-page, where you can search your zip code and figure out what nearby gems you may be missing.
I travel a lot for work, and whenever I have thirty minutes where I can keep the clock running without doing anything productive, I’ll pull up AllTrails and see where I can get a dose of the outdoors. A lot of the stuff I find on there is very familiar to me, but occasionally I’ll notice a nearby pin in an area I didn’t think had trails. Its also a good resource for clocking how far you’ve walked, how long that favorite trail of yours is, and for wistfully looking at some pics from some dream-hikes or nostalgic favorites.
It is also, for better or worse, the state of play we have arrived at when it comes to nature vs. technology. Whether these two have ever truly been separate (see: Rebecca Solnit on the concept of “Wilderness”), they form two formidable and presumably warring forces. A lesson received ad nauseum from history is that nature and everything are connected, and a lesson unavoidable from the present is that technology and everything are one. These two have been meeting in an epic battle for the human identity for millennia, but within the internet lives this one neutral zone, this one Christmas-Eve-game-of-soccer on the front lines— AllTrails.com
More of a music recommendation than anything else, but I think the link and website are a part of whatever is happening here. For context, Cindy Lee is the moniker of Patrick Flegel, Canadian musician originally of the band Women. They are one of those musicians bubbling under the surface of major success, one of those acts you can catch from a mile away every so often and thank your lucky stars that you saw the meteorite before it disappeared, or, in other cases, before it grew larger and larger until, far too late, we realize it’s headed straight for Earth, and that this mama jama ain’t gonna disintegrate in our stratospheric forcefield.
About three months ago Cindy Lee release a double LP on YouTube, which very slowly but very surely gained views. The album was not available on Spotify and, folks, it is rare for me to leave Spotify. I mean, truly, I listen to music almost nowhere else. I have a pretty decent argument that Spotify is the greatest app ever created— oh sure, it puts musicians out on the streets, truly robs them for every penny. But user interface? Accessibility? Sharing features, playlists, collaborations? Would Spotify let it rest there? Nope, two years ago they added LYRICS?? Obvious move, sure, but they are the ones who did it. I think. Maybe that started on Apple Music, but I wouldn’t know because I would rather support the independent billion-dollar start-up which brutalized musicians than the independent trillion-dollar startup which destroyed humanity.
I digress. After three different sources muttering the words Diamond Jubilee my spidy senses started tingling. Since when is there veritable buzz around a small-time album by a name no one knows? Mumford & Sons? I begrudgingly leave Spotify, leave my phone un-locked for two hours, and listen to the full album as God (Cindy Lee) intended. Is it good? I’m not sure. It’s definitely perfect, but good? As they say, the ugly can become beautiful— the pretty can’t. This album is disparate, hasn’t been glommed upon by Warner, is really truly one brilliant artist in their home-studio working complicated, messy magic. It has something albums refuse to have anymore— flow. Then you get to this website. What is this? Why is it so 2008-coded? Is that…. calibri? You’re only accepting PayPal? On the… honor system??? Sign me the fuck up. This is a release people, this is music as performance art, if only by virtue of being hella nostalgic and hella good and hella weird. After a week of pretty much only listening to Diamond J I started moving on, actually re-opened my Spotify app to check in on what podcasts I missed (hello, Elevator Pitch). And it felt all wrong, like smelling your apartment after a week-long trip and sensing a lot more patchouli than you would have hoped. After an hour or so I re-adjusted, found my recently played et al waiting for me dutifully (I don’t listen to these AI created playlists— I’m a disgraced radio DJ, goddamnit), and normalcy had returned. But the album, the release, it all did something to me. It was that feeling, you know the one? When you encounter real art? Something like that.
Cindy Lee played a show in Milwaukee a little while ago that was lauded all over the internet— apparently the performance is even better than the album. The next day, they canceled the rest of the tour. Pay attention folks. We got a real one on the hook, let’s be gentle reelin ‘er in.
A classic humanity-scale check-in from a brilliant thinker. The piece is a few years old but still relevant and still worth considering, even as a cultural artifact (has that much changed in the last few years? Yeah, kinda).
He makes what I consider a fundamental mistake and which you’ll see very often in pieces like this. He breaks the history of humanity into three periods initiated by three revolutions— the neolithic, the industrial, and the information. The problem with this breakdown is the first period lasts 10,000 years, the second lasts 300, and the third is only 30 years old. The bias here— the unlikeliness that two of the three most significant events in human history happened within recent memory— is so obvious that to state it is almost self-justifying. But it’s not. It ignores the crucial steps taken within that 9,700 year gap and conflates two separate ones— the industrial and the information. Yes, the world is vastly different from what it was sixty years ago. But is it more different than it was between the years 1300 and 1700? I don’t think so. One answer to this bias is that with each successive revolution, the next one should occur magnitudes more soon. But by that logic, there should have been a new revolution 3 months after the information. Could AI launch us into a completely new territory that would be markedly different from what the internet brought us? Maybe. But that speed would be un-maintainable.
That note aside, the piece is a really helpful paradigm for understanding our current moment. It is helpful to think often on where we stand historically, and to keep the most pressing questions of humanity’s fate at the top of one’s mind. Along with its flaws, this piece is a valuable tool for meditation, and has a bangin title. It also does some dazzling, an essential tool for modern theorists, in inserting the specialness of our iteration of mankind. Props.
listening to elevator pitch always feels so wrong but trust me...it's right