Pixel Persuasions of Digital Exiles
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🔊 “Bright and early for their daily races, going nowhere, going nowhere…”
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A Prelude of Preferences
Salutations, to those who have recently subscribed, and thank you for trusting the recommendations of fellow writers, who are also friends and classmates of the probing mind:
, , , andReasons for writing inevitably consists of aesthetic enthusiasm, impulse and conscientious purpose. I’m not famous, and have no desire to compete in rankings of the most followed. While monetary rewards are of course welcome, I share my thoughts, because I wish to actively participate in the churn of everything. Rather than complain silently that it’s the worst of times because of the worst people, I decide that this has to be the best timeline, because not only am I in it, there are friends and family who I love, that I’m grateful to be co-existing with. Imagine if others might think this too: Because I am here, this is the best timeline, and I wish to make it so, for me and for others.
I’m acutely aware, that we’ve probably reached saturation point with numerous podcasts and newsletters. Yet I cannot be content with resigning as a passive ‘non-playing’ character, mainly because I genuinely love playing games. There’s joy to be had, with these digitally typed attempts to make sense of the 21st century’s metamodern maelstrom.
I am often hesitant about choosing ‘a side’, since I believe the intertwining of threads is better at forming stronger and textured truths. It occurred to me recently, that The Left, in Italian, is la sinistra which has sinister undertones, and in Spanish, the Basque origins of la izquierda means a ‘crooked hand’. Meanwhile, The Right is about having dexterity with a destra, and being direct with la derecha. Surely the invitation is to synthesise the manoeuvres of both the crooked and the straight? Between clowns and jokers, maybe it’s wiser being stuck in the middle, where one can explore the points of intersections.
To further clarify my specific drive, I’m averse to the dangers of mob rule chaos. My duty as a cultural ecologist is to be studious about the patterns of societal relationships, and draw out connections, so that any observations may be additional pathways towards less detrimental groupthink conclusions.
Once more, thank you for having me on your electronic radar. I deeply care about the educational environments that curate the conditions for collective individuation. I hope my words provide delightful insights and soulful resonance. Watch out for juicy weblinks to elsewhere also!
Confinements of Belonging
Do you remember the first, or last time, you saw an actual elephant with your own eyes in the real world?
I’ve not gone on any safari tours, and I don’t recall if I’ve been close enough to touch, smell, or hear a real elephant. My visual memories are filled with fictional ones, such as Disney’s animated movie Dumbo, and books with Babar and Elmer. My flatmate however, has an epic story about being commissioned to photograph Princess Stephanie of Monaco for Vanity Fair magazine. The protocols were secretive, and he was sent to wait at some grassy field he was chauffeured to, without much clue of when or how the royal highness would appear. Like a true fairytale, he was surprised by the majestic arrival of the princess herding two elephants she had rescued and adopted.
This seems to be the story of elephants in news coverage - orphaned, separated from their herd, with animal rights activists always campaigning for their rescue and protection in sanctuaries. I only discovered the tragic story of Mali, ‘the saddest elephant’ who died in November last year at Manila Zoo, a shabby enclosure smaller than the Philippine’s private golf and country clubs. Of course, there are still real elephants to be seen in many nature parks of the world. I contemplate on this topic, because I published a piece on the professional preening site (LinkedIn) about the idiom of ‘The Elephant In The Room’ - the expression for when there is an obvious problem or difficult situation that people do not want to talk about.
My provocation was entitled: Rogue Elephants will ruin the parades of naked emperors — There are many messy issues that are ignored in all sorts of meeting rooms, and I wanted more honesty about the various analysis paralysis of human crises. This is the bitter diagnosis: The Western Discourse are definitively the victors, and everything that it left behind in tatters is merely trying to ‘catch-up’ to the standards of Civilised Society.
There is no way to get back to any idyllic before times, where-ever that even is, since they are constantly shifting aspirations. The plans for better futures are also tainted by controllers of God, Gold & Guns. Many are condemned by impositions of hierarchies anchored on the Gross Domestic Product. In summary, it’s really down to the winners of the money + power monopoly, and there is no escaping the superstructure of extractive capitalism.
It is a privilege to enjoy the organic reality of any remaining original wilderness, and it is a luxury to intellectually debate highfalutin preoccupations. People are mostly racing to make money and enjoy pleasurable pastimes. Our options for retreating into ‘the natural world’ are relegated to scheduled and hard-earned holidays or vacations. Cultural consumption and content tourism isn’t abating. Millions are far too embroiled in their personal dramas to scrutinise the hegemony of systems.
With regards to whatever urgent global problems we should all be concerned about now, for example - the Environmental, Social, Governance and Sustainability goals, the nitty-gritty is really fundamentally about survival: Eat, Sleep, Get to Do X, then Repeat. Beholden by bills and expenses, who genuinely has free time to untangle impossible polycrisis situations?
Like the elephants, we cannot just be non-labouring creatures peacefully allowed to roam free at large. Condemned to perform within panelled cells, we’re always shuttling, restlessly swapping diversions of work, home and leisure. Our success is measured by earnings; our bodies are products that require validation by testimonials of spectators.
Except we don’t even have to physically be in rooms anymore. Yet achievements must be seen in order to be valued, so we’re obliged into publishing the status of merits to acquire an audience and income. Constantly verifying our human cognition to security bots with chained devices, we are captives of our storytelling screens.
“By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. This is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions.”
- The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis - Understanding Media (1964)
The ultimately invisible mega elephant in rooms where people discuss ‘global problems’, is The Room itself - the ‘free space’, with its ‘wireless fidelity’. We are constantly displaced by the omnipresence, of an electrical neuro-system we call the worldwide web. Now here, now there, now everywhere.
The nature of our habitations, nurture the framing of our habits.
While early sceptics of the camera obscura warned us that the ‘dark chamber’ would capture our souls, the box is not entirely abysmal. All is not lost, for where there’s a will, there’s a way - even if ‘main character energy’ is the cliché, it only guarantees that humans still want to take control of their destinies.
It’s probably sacrilege to suggest that humans have become gods, yet if we were made in the image of some great architect-type, then it also follows that the material things we make, are made in our own images too - a hybrid of all that is divine and profane.
If there is no returning to the garden of Eden, and we are eternally dislocated in dystopia - a question persists: what are we doing with the fruits from the tree of knowledge?
The deluge of ubiquitous discontent can be overwhelming, yet for those who stay with the trouble, we have to separate treasure from trash. What logos do we worship? How do we manifest our ‘reasoning’ - if we follow traditions of Λόγος to mean words, thoughts, principles, or speech.
We need to tune in to more than meets the eye, and remember the elephant’s appendage, so that we extend our vision beyond the length of our noses. I propose that the potent answers remain in the realms of The Arts & Education.
Here are providential pomes that offer artistic formulations:
🔴 DOCUMENTARY: Debating the Wonder-Panic cult - The Wizard of AI by Alan Warburton
🔴 PODCAST: We live in mythic times, do catch up - So You Want To Be A Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers by The Emerald
🔴 ONLINE COURSE: The book always comes too late, but the prophecy is very alive 60 years later. This book club starts 15th April - Andrew McLuhan Teaches Understanding Media Intensive Part One: Tools for Engagement
🔴 POETIC RHYMES: I explore the definition of people as exquisite automatons, and wrote a mouthful of rhyming verses - CV of Autonomy.
“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is
a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” - Marshall McLuhan
Attention Detention; Hyperreality Delusions
More than a panopticon prison, our lives unfold through prism projections. If we are what we behold, our personas are manufactured by The Technological Gaze. We’ve yet to properly process how TV + Video Games + Internet + Mobile phones have forged mass narratives of being, let alone the incursions of A.I.
In this pomegranate brew, there are seeds of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, echoes of Plato’s Cave, glimmers of Through The Looking Glass, and a rabbit’s foot-notes that digs into bibliographies which return us to the old chestnut that ‘your perception is your reality’.
Onto practical circumstances then.
I previously reported about my endeavours in re-training the perceptions of first year college students: Back to the Drawing Board - given my petite frame, I’m no Atlas who can carry the weight of the educational crisis. I do get frustrated by the Sisyphean uphill struggles of teaching teenagers who are easily bored and addicted to their ‘smart’ phones.
Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy birthday, happy birthday…
Made to feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen, sit and listen…
Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me…
Hello, teacher, tell me what's my lesson
Look right through me, look right through me…
The failings of various institutions aren’t news. So it goes, that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, and yet what has the gnarly global village done? Here are some ghosts from the past that examine how economic + entertainment industries hijack the role of educators:
“Okay! Yes! We’re bored! We’re all bored now! But has it ever occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing, created by a world totalitarian government based on money?”
There’s too much to get into about the decades of lamentations by teachers, but it is true that the youth are converted much earlier now, to be involved in the adult activities of acquiring money, fame, and power. They crave endorsements and influence like fast food delivered by Uber.
🔴 Sir Ken Robinson, Changing the Education Paradigm (2010)
“The Arts… address the idea of Aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak. When you’re present in the current moment. When you are resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing. When you are fully alive. And anaesthetic is when you shut your senses off, and deaden yourself to what’s happening. And a lot of these drugs* are that. We’re getting our children through education by anaesthetising them.”
Children are subjected to simultaneous diversity, whilst being rigidly trained by institutions to be sequential and linear. They are concurrently overstimulated and desensitised, it’s not a shock they’re frequently confused. To keep up with the Kardashians, they are impatient about how their gadgets and digital paraphernalia can turn them into VIPs, G.O.A.Ts and Yas Kweens.
What are our inner wishes and motives?
If a medium is “an extension of an inner wish and motive” then its message concerns metaphysical values and social effects. What do we get up to, when we wake up? How do we deal with having to grow up, clean up, and show up?
In the DC Comics, The Phantom Zone, is a ‘pocket universe’ where criminals are condemned in perpetuity to atone for their schemes. In The Internet, users who log on are psychic phantasms of their true selves - and anyone can pretend to be anyone: grifters, drifters, shape-shifters. Ambition is a virtue in the Hustlemania of The Entrepreneurial.
The formation of profile identities and striving for community belongings, has always led cultures to build externalised mechanisms. To exist is to make meaning, which necessitates ‘having means’ – the wealth of resources at one's disposal for accomplishing objectives within a timeline.
Leaders prioritise efficiency and demand it of people and technology, hyped by the logic of life coach mindsets promoting purpose and impact. And so, the inevitable judgement that we face, on a regular ‘check-in’ basis, and with the pressured dread of ‘the end’ – is the question of ‘what did we do with our time?’ And what social objects do we point to as evidence of a life that was worth experiencing?
Am I significant? Am I relevant? Do I add value by being alive?
As is often the case with human-made machines, an aim has been to ‘save us time’ so that we might be able to spend it wisely on more cultured leisurely pursuits. However, the same tyranny applies even when we save or make time to do non-work-related activities. We are still haunted by the spectre of worth – was what we chose, still of value and thereby validating our existence?
This article from The New York Times Magazine, reinforces my mission to persevere with initiatives to make life less damning:
🔴 SCREENLAND: Teen Subcultures Are Fading. Pity the Poor Kids
“They have much content but little context — a lot to look at but a very thin relationship to any “real life” anything, like behaviours or gathering places.”
It’s a Mad World, and yet we carry on with dreams and schemes.
What enchantments do we wish to conjure, and what salvific magic can emerge from cursed objects?
If we’re trapped, then so what?
What kind of genie-us consciousness could we choose to become?
What messages would immortal spirits communicate from portals of sentience?
I wonder therefore, that as we continue to reconcile what we do, with why we do it, perhaps what The Artificial Intelligence Internet Of Things aggravates is both the physicality of our bodies, and the meta-physicality of our identities. What if, AI is the counter-environment that awakens greater awareness of spirit and soul? The unavoidable unseen, the Ghost in the Machine, the transforming humans in disguise.
My formal appellation is Regina, and like the prominent regal chess piece, my mind moves freely up or down, left or right, and diagonally. Such criss-crossing allows one to review the conditions of social fields, analyse symbolic structures and significant activities that emerge from various cultural contexts. I value diverse ways of comprehending whatever is within the range of perception through multiple senses. (Backgammon is better than chess though.)
I plan to host interactive online gatherings. Please complete this survey to discover fellow rogues and converse with kindred rebels who are working on reclamation, restoration, redemption, rehabilitation, and recovery of our human becomings.
If your time zone is UTC, and you’re interested in attending a practical learning event, I am organising an online one-day World Building Workshop with Flux Trends sometime in May. Do get in touch about details.
I’m also on the lookout for artists and illustrators who may wish to submit images of a holy hand grenade (pomegranate) for future newsletters.