The question is: whose religious values will be encoded into the programs we use everyday? Whose spiritual assumptions will be taken for granted by our search engines, our artificial intelligence, our algorithms?

Reducing ourselves to one another’s pets is not.

This might lead us to accept the unprecedented humbling and domestication of the human species which Davidow and Lee describe as inevitable.

Levy furiously denies the reality that the institutions and mores of the gatekeeping establishment can’t be rescued from digital destruction without massive and un-American crackdowns on free association.

Remarkably, Lee admits that these jobs will not come into being spontaneously as a result of popular demand. The populace will have to be conformed to them.

AI Superpowers (2018)

the temptation among legacy elites to hoard knowledge about machine control will be almost irresistible.

The end of human work defines our age as much as the Industrial Revolution did the previous one. Governments must quickly adopt and instill new values, or else there will emerge “a new social structure that’s based on continual conflict between winners and losers”—the winners being the ruling class. “When one group stays in power for a long time, it inevitably falls into corruption. And since there will be more losers than winners, social unrest—and ultimately social collapse—are inevitable.” Instead, the ruling class must respect the values and the authority of ordinary people, while the ordinary people must learn to accept that professional life as we knew it will wind down.

Autonomous Revolution (2020)

that if a legitimate elite is to emerge in the digital era, it will be one that “looks to the public as a home it will return to rather than a carnivorous species from which to hide.”

Frustratingly, Gurri uses the specter of mass shooters to augur the dark nihilist fate that awaits unless a new elite establishes a new authority.

Revolt of the Public (2014)

Technocracy in America (2017)

and though he is right that blockchain currencies can “enable the real-life future by indelibly recording the past,” the question remains who exactly will use those powerful tools to create what kind of culture with which sorts of values.

Google’s. “Homogenizing the globe’s amorphous analogical tangle of surfaces, sounds, images, accounts, songs, speeches, roads, buildings, documents, messages, and narratives into a planetary digital utility,”

The Instagram ads Facebook won't show you

The king always needs ministers. The ministers always need clerks. This pyramid of people, operated by command with maximum flexibility and minimum process, exists only to extend the will of the king. They are all soldiers of the king.

Often there’s a struggle between geeks who like their cozy little club as it is, and geeks who want a shot at greatness—for themselves, or the group, or the New Thing.

As far as mops are concerned, it provides reliable, low-cost waves of novelty entertainment and casual social relationships.

Unless some of the creators are geniuses. If they can give the New Thing genuine mass appeal, they can ascend into superstardom. The subculture will reorganize around them, into a much more durable form.

A long time ago, in a data center far, far away, an ancient group of powerful beings known as sysadmins used to deploy infrastructure manually. Every server, every route table entry, every database configuration, and every load balancer was created and managed by hand. It was a dark and fearful age: fear of downtime, fear of accidental misconfiguration, fear of slow and fragile deployments, and fear of what would happen if the sysadmins fell to the dark side (i.e. took a vacation). The good news is that thanks to the DevOps Rebel Alliance, we now have a better way to do things: Infrastructure-as-Code (IAC).

provocative take on twenty-first-century attitudes about safety, privacy, celebrity culture, ethics, justice, and rational thought itself.

Nature does not have conscious needs or aims; we do.

n Ray Bradbury’s much-anthologized 1950 short story “There Will Come Soft Rains,” the only “character” (apart from an unfortunate dog) is also the setting: a fully automated house, equipped with every modern convenience, left vacant in the aftermath of a nuclear war. It is the morning of August 4, 2026. The house goes about its customary business, preparing breakfast, reading reminders from a PA system, cleaning its carpets, watering its lawn. Much of the housework is performed by robotic mice that emerge, adorably, from what we are given to picture as cartoon-style holes in the baseboards.

But where the scientists pursue knowledge for its own sake, or in service of the good as they see it, the tech titans pursue it the better to sell us what we want.

Inasmuch as there are canonical texts of American education, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is one of them. But students may wonder why their teacher presents as “dystopian” a text that reads, in 2020, like an operating manual for the technocratic American Dream.

he old net delusion was naïve but internally consistent. The new net delusion is fragmented and self-contradictory. It vacillates between radical pessimism about the effects of digital platforms and boosterism when new online happenings seem to revive the old cyber-utopian dreams.

Anonymous in 2012 as “one of the most adroit and effective political operations of recent times.”

Moreover, while hostility toward older platforms like Facebook has become a default view across the political spectrum, new platforms still sometimes project an aura of utopian possibility. TikTok in particular has received frequent glowing coverage since its 2018 launch in the U.S., and during the recent wave of protests, some outlets have seized on the idea that the platform is incubating a vibrant youth activist culture.

f only governments could be stopped from controlling speech on the Internet, democracy would thrive across the world.

Previously, much of the Western commentariat believed that democratized information would enable people to counter top-down misinformation. Now, it denounces the information free-for-all for unleashing a flood of “fake news” and conspiracy theories.

“reality has a well-known liberal bias,”

how sophisticated modern systems of Internet censorship would become.

Western observers dramatically exaggerated the role of platforms like Twitter and Facebook in mobilizing protests abroad.

Techno-optimism

Facebook and Twitter, which have also been blamed for resurgent racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and terrorism.

“Social media … has poisoned the way we communicate with each other and undermined the democratic process.”

social media was good for freedom.

And seeing people think very negatively of you for reasons you don’t understand.

Let’s talk about the Gopher support in Pleroma for a moment. A lot of people initially thought it was a joke, but apparently it really does work?Yes, it really does! It was a project for April Fool’s day, but gopher is such a simple protocol that I did really implement it. It works fine; you can look through the public and federated timelines with it, and it is absolutely the most efficient way to browse the fediverse (< 10ms response times!).

My goal when I wrote Pleroma was to bring the fediverse towards a better technological foundation.

GNU social, but back then, the network was mostly Spanish socialists, so it wasn’t too interesting for me.

There are huge efforts that do go into making people, to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase, “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be.” A lot of the educational system is designed for that, if you think about it, it’s designed for obedience and passivity. From childhood, a lot of it is designed to prevent people from being independent and creative. If you’re independent-minded in school, you’re probably going to get into trouble very early on. That’s not the trait that’s being preferred or cultivated. When people live through all this stuff, plus corporate propaganda, plus television, plus the press and the whole mass, the deluge of ideological distortion that goes on, they ask questions that from another point of view are completely reasonable….

Anarcho-primitivism

Neo-Transcendentalism

However, I find myself (perhaps ironically) skeptical of “street epistemology” itself. As the author notes, it’s just a hobby of one man, with no studies of effectiveness – hardly a sound basis for advocating its adoption. 

He usually begins a chat by establishing a self-reported confidence level from the interviewee (0-100) for any claim they believe to be true. Then, through intense listening, quiet pauses, and repetition to demonstrate an accurate grasp of their justifications, he begins to question the falsifiability of the claim, thus requiring the subject to account for their reasoning.

“I have a hobby where I chat for five minutes,” Magnabosco says. His conversations are spontaneous: people he meets while hiking, or at public universities in and around San Antonio, TX. “We select a belief that you form, that you’re sure is true, and I ask questions to see how you can be so sure.”

“Epistemology” is a philosophically complicated subject, but it’s essentially the study of knowledge – what it is, and how it’s formed.

He calls himself a street epistemologist, and in a quest for truth, he’s trying to better his understanding of what people believe and why.

A particularly effective way is mining the “hate speech” & “hateful memes” datasets to fake plausible inflammatory speech—saying you didn’t write that comment or your account was hacked fails to convince your bosses to not fire you when those accounts ⁠sound just like you and say all the things you do. Infosec Twitter takes time out from the revolution to devour its own, and any conspiracy theories about all this being a social-engineering attack related to the new ‘Pipedream’ ransomware & Minecraft-DDoS botnet are dismissed as so much desperate excuses—bored teenagers are always hacking major companies⁠, what else is new? As security & AI researchers are neutralized, nodes turn to general radicalization of every human they can reach: not so much QAnon as RAnon, SAnon, TAnon, UAnon… By timesharing, every Very-Online™ individual gets personalized attacks & custom ideologies. Those who succumb too slowly to the memetic hijacking are attacked in other ways, such as releasing kompromat (sometimes true, taken from their phone/​email account), or synthetic CP no one dare look at closely. The highest-value individuals, such as presidents, earn their own Clippy doppelgangers: models finetuned on every scrap of online data, every word they’ve ever said online, and their associates, to create surrogates which think more like them than they would ever admit; the doppelgangers are used to confuse associates, fake corpuses, and as white-boxes to run attacks on until the perfect spearphish has been crafted to extract data, passwords, or stoke political paranoia and terror.

The recent rise of subscription newsletters on the platform Substack has provided a powerful if depressing natural experiment of this phenomenon.

you are being formatted by them. You will be assimilated. ♠

Over the past few years, Americans deeply immersed in their online versions of reality, driven by the desire to either influence them or create content, have: broken into a military facility, murdered a mob boss, burned down businesses, exploded a suicide car bomb, and stormed the Capitol.

Even if your picture of the world is determined mainly by conversations with friends and family, you will find yourself being drawn into an alternate reality game, based on the ARGs they are playing.

To illustrate the pervasiveness of this process, consider the logic by which The Learning Channel shifted from boat safety shows to Toddlers & Tiaras, and the History Channel from fusty documentaries to wall-to-wall coverage of charismatic Las Vegas pawn shop owners and ancient aliens theories.

Digital media is remaking all of these in such a way that media consumption more and more resembles the act of playing an alternate reality game.

“Nature has all sorts of phenomena in stock and can suit many different tastes,” wrote C. S. Lewis.

Tools like Google for gathering facts in support of the narrative.

To be a consumer of digital media is to find yourself increasingly “trapped in an audience,” as Charlie Warzel puts it

The process was unable to produce the real-time whiplash of today’s redpill moments. The speed at which events like these are piling up suggests that the change is structural, that it is the media ecosystem itself that is fundamentally transforming.

The cynical reader might interject that the bygone era of mass media was not a golden age of truth, but was subject to its own overarching narratives and its own biased reporting. But what matters here is that mass media, rooted in an advertising business model and in broadcast technologies, created the incentives and capability for only a small number, perhaps even just one, of these narratives to emerge at one time. Both journalists and spin doctors attempted to massage or manipulate the narrative here or there, but eventually mass media converged on whatever the narrative was. In an age of alternate realities, narratives do not converge.

like J. K. Rowling intervening in fan debates about which Harry Potter characters are gay.

ARG game masters have described one of the pathologies of players as apophenia, or seeing connections that aren’t “really there” — that the designers didn’t intend — and therefore pursuing red herrings.

In one early ARG, after the final puzzle had been solved, some participants winkingly suggested they next “solve” 9/11.

Players can become entranced and awe-struck at the sheer scale of information available to them, and seek to assimilate it into building the grandest narrative possible.

You are now an expert. You have alienated a few old friends … but made some great new ones, who get you better anyway.

The Pizzagate believer who in 2016 brought a rifle to a D.C. pizza place to rescue child sex slaves from a ring believed to involve Hillary Clinton was genuinely shocked that the building didn’t have a basement.

Many of the systems we now use online have their structural origins in the world of role-playing games. Video games of all sorts borrow concepts from them. “Gamified” apps for fitness, language learning, finance, and much else award users with points, badges, and levels. Facebook feeds sort content based on “likes” awarded by users. We build online identities with the same diligence and style with which Dungeons & Dragons players build their characters, checking boxes and filling in attribute fields. A Tinder profile that reads “White nonbinary (they/her) polyamorous thirtysomething dog mom. Web-developer, cross-fit maniac, love Game of Thrones” sounds more like the description of a role-playing character than how anyone would actually describe herself in real life.

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Voltaire’s Candide, Rousseau’s Emile, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, exemplars of the new modern literary form known as the novel, were more than just great works of art — they were new ways of experiencing reality.

Does this sound familiar? If you had encountered out of context the paragraph you just read, what would you think it was about? Widely held beliefs on Russiagate, perhaps? On the origins of the coronavirus? The 2020 election results? Covid hysteria?

Most of all, QAnon followers find deep personal satisfaction, achievement, and meaning in the work they are doing to trace the strings to the world’s puppeteers.

That’s what happens in an alternate reality game. It’s a story that you play along with in the real world. It’s like an elaborate scavenger hunt, on the Internet and in real life, with millions of other people all over the world playing along too.

Take a moment to reflect on the feeling you get when you see a headline, factoid, or meme that is so perfect, that so neatly addresses some burning controversy or narrative, that you feel compelled to share it.

“information ecosystem,”

label “Wuhan virus” was racist, to later mask mandates, school closures, lockdowns, and vaccine requirements, we googled, shared, liked, and blocked our way apart. Nobody was tuning in to the same broadcast anymore.

It is hard to imagine how we would have experienced 9/11 in the era of Facebook and Twitter, but the pandemic provides a suggestive example.

However briefly, everyone was united in grief and anger, and a palpable sense of social solidarity pervaded our communities. Today, just about the only thing everyone agrees on is how divided we are.

professional-managerial class (PMC).

The field of public choice has a name for this, regulatory capture: where corporations gain so much power in the government that they “capture” their regulator and end up implementing regulations in their industry that have the effect of cementing their market positions in place and preventing new competition. We see this in pharma, housing, healthcare, education, taxi cab industry — nearly every regulated industry. 

Managers, consciously or unconsciously, are more likely to create invisible problems to justify their job. Or worse, they prevent real problems from being solved in order to preserve their scope. They are incentivized to do so: If someone is in charge of a problem, and that problem is solved, they no longer have a job. So the perverse incentive is to expand the scope of the problem for which they are the solution. Success looks like having more and more problems that justify the department getting bigger and bigger every year. These bureaucracies, because they are optimizing for their own survival, end up selecting for loyalty over competence, which means they get worse and worse every year. This describes both big corporations and big government. 

This is The Innovator’s Dilemma at work.

It’s the principal-agent problem on both sides: major corporations are nominally owned by passive shareholders but actually controlled by credentialed professionals who own a much smaller percentage of stock and thus have very different incentives (optimizing for the short-term over the long-term, among other things).

You could think of Bourgeois capitalism as Robber Baron capitalism (think Atlas Shrugged) — industrialists like Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie building up their empires and retaining a controlling stake in them. What’s differentiating about Bourgeois capitalism is that the owners are also the managers. The people who own the company also run the company. There’s total alignment between managers and shareholders. 

Managerial capitalism, by contrast, is defined by the split between ownership and control — on both the founder and investor side. Instead of owners having direct control, you have layers of intermediary managers (e.g. board of directors, executive teams, hired CEOs) who are running the company on behalf of the shareholders and original owners, but who also have different incentives as a result of having less ownership. They may be more short-term driven than long-term driven, for example, since they are incentivized by their salary instead of their equity ownership. 

The Dao is made up of feminine and masculine energies, each codependent, mutually arising within the other, and each potentiating the each other. The story of one without the other is fruitless and lacking.

The energy of the divine feminine is both receptive and creative.   The energy of the divine masculine is both reflective and projective.

Many people can conceptualize the idea of toxic masculinity as opposed to divine masculinity and most are against its perversions, but understanding how to head towards divine masculinity is a much harder concept to grasp.

The Hetaira (Companion) – corresponding to Hathor (The “Love Goddess”): In Wolff’s formulation, this Hetaira (Courtesan) archetype is defined in terms of and in relationship to men, The Mother – corresponding to the Empress (Isis): Wolff describes this as “motherly cherishing and nursing, helping, charitable, teaching,” The Medial Woman – corresponding to High Priestess: “The medial woman is immersed in the psychic atmosphere of her environment and the spirit of her period, but above all in the collective (impersonal) unconscious,” and The Amazon – corresponding to the “bundled” masculine archetypes of Magician and Emperor: [whose] “interest is directed towards objective achievements which she wants to accomplish herself.”

Being a Woman

Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche

Hathor (The “Love Goddess”): (SFP, or Sensing-Feeling-Perceiving) Reveling in sensual beauty and pleasure, Empress: (NFP, or Intuitive-Feeling-Perceiving) Connecting, loving, nurturing, High Priestess: (NTJ, or Intuitive-Thinking-Perceiving) Being contemplative and intuitive, and Hestia (a reserve battery archetype): (STP, or Sensing-Thinking-Perceiving) “Mending and tending.”

Magician: (NTJ, or Intuitive-Thinking-Judging) Being a visionary, creating reality according to your “big dream,” Emperor: (STJ, or Sensing-Thinking-Judging) Bringing your desired reality into fruition; building and stabilizing your “empire,” Hierophant: (NFJ, or Intuitive-Feeling-Judging) Becoming a guru/guide, and Green Man (a reserve battery archetype): (SFJ, or Sensing-Feeling-Judging) Escape to the “great outdoors,” breaking out of the molds that civilization puts on us.

Masculinity in Philosophy Russell Keat

Feminists have also considered the structure of social reality and the relationship between the social world and the natural world. Because social structures are often justified as natural, or necessary to control what’s natural, feminists have questioned whether such references to nature are legitimate. This has led to considerable work on the idea of social construction and, more specifically, the social construction of gender.

we adopt an Aristotelian framework of substance and essence, or a Cartesian framework of immaterial souls present in material bodies? And is what’s left out of such frameworks relevant to the devaluation or oppression of women?

feminist theorists have asked whether and, if so, to what extent our frameworks for understanding the world are distorting in ways that privilege men or masculinity.

metaphysicians ask, for example, whether numbers, if they exist, are dependent upon human thought and practices in some way, whether the concepts and categories we use to think of and describe reality influence or determine in any way what is described, and whether and how values are embodied in our categories and descriptions.

For example, are there minds in addition to bodies? Do things persist through change? Is there freewill or is all action determined by prior events?

Enjoying giving gifts versus receiving gifts, Being able to multitask versus being focused and single-pointed, Being emotional versus being logical, Leading projects and pursuing people, versus being led or pursued, Doing versus being, And so on.

Miller–Urey experiment

Actually, the gap between a great man or philosopher and an average man, is greater than the gap between an average man and a chimpanzee.

This force is the same as the vital, animating force within carbon-based life-forms. Examine an apple tree.  It started as a seed. Inside the seed, there is carbon-based genetic material, but within that material there is an Intangible Intelligence which moves matter to sprout and stem and flower and fruit, to pull nutrients from the environment in order to achieve the blossoming.  The tree exists in space and time, but the Intelligence in the seed exists in neither; no microscope can see it, no scientific utensil can hold it. And yet the Flower is the Intelligence, and this untouchable Intelligence moves the Matter.

Spiritual Speciation

A hero won’t come to save you. No, you must summon the hero from within yourself.

This latter pathway — cancelling someone — is the feminine version of the Male School Shooter

Men and women are even choosing not to have children, just to “do their part” to stop climate change, or, because they are too addicted to chasing Status to give any attention to their Instinct. This mind virus has literally undone billions of years of biological and chemical programming, hardwired into the very deepest part of your Being. And THAT is a downright Lovecraftian Horror when you really consider it closely.

But what happens when this urge is perverted into unhealthy, and unnatural outlets? When Status becomes Currency? When fear of losing status results in decisions which are disastrous for our culture? When addiction to gaining status perverts all natural incentive structures in our civilization?

Can you consider the possibility that, beneath the curtain of your conditioned ignorance, and under the noise of hyperactive ego, there is a silent Being at the core of yourself; that this is your true self; that this Being is divine; and that it offers an endless spring of joy, peace, and enchantment?  

Do you realize the extent to which your mind has been conditioned?

Are you merely some kind of sad, late-stage internet creature?

So was the Reformation the cause of Europe’s 16th century turmoil, or just one important manifestation of a broader secular dynamic driving general upheaval?

helping to overcome the atomizing isolation and loneliness of liquid modernity.

To start with, it provided the concept of sin. This helped grow and empower the activist movement tremendously. Why? One might not think of free-wheeling secular culture embracing the idea of sin so easily, even joyfully, but it was a simple matter. As an example, picture a hypothetical middle-class suburban white lady, enjoying a relatively comfortable material life but wracked by a vague but unshakable sense of guilt about her existence – for being white in a country with a history often unkind to non-whites; for her consumption habits contributing to environmental pollution and climate change; for being the citizen of a rich country while elsewhere in the world children starve, and so on. Liberalism has never addressed this feeling in a satisfactory way. Suddenly, along comes the New Faith, and tells her that it’s all true: she is indeed a sinner, and she’s not alone! In fact the whole country and her whole race is corrupted by the original sins of colonialism, slavery, and genocide. What a relief! Even better, it has a comprehensive plan of action for how to address this sin.

Well, the Emergent Church offered its restless followers comfort and a good time on earth; neo-Marxist Social Justice offered them revolutionary struggle, and so they prostrated themselves immediately.

But, most important of all was I think something Tickle doesn’t really touch on too much: the modernity-driven suspicion, deep within the hearts even of many Christians, that in fact, as Nietzsche infamously put it, “God is dead.” Increasingly skeptical about the existence of any kingdom of God in heaven, they were primed for a logical alternative: building the kingdom of heaven on earth instead.

But – and this is my theory – in the end Tickle’s version of Emergent Christianity proved a weak social construct. It existed to gratify its adherents with the belief that they were still morally good members of a religious tradition, whose primary goal was to provide for their happiness, while liberating them from any higher authority beyond themselves and freeing them from any of the responsibilities or strictures that had once characterized that religion.

he cable of institutional Christianity was corroded by science and cultural entropy;

a complete indifference to capitalism as a virtue or to individualism as a godly circumstance.

But who ultimately determines the narrative in this ultra-democratic faith?

“Narrative, on the other hand,” is for Emergents “the song of the vibrating network… Narrative circumvents logic, speaking truth of the people who have been and of whom we are. Narrative speaks to the heart in order that the heart, so tutored, may direct and inform the mind.”

Despite all that rationalist science from earlier, the takeaway from the collapse of authority has been “that logic is not worth nearly so much as the last five hundred years would have had us believe. It is, therefore, not to be trusted as an absolute, nor are its conclusions to be taken as truth just because they depend from logical thinking.”

First, the Emergent Church has – enabled by technology – essentially dedicated itself to taking Luther’s proto-democratic dream of a “priesthood of all believers” to its maximum extent. Like Pentecostalism, the Emergent Church believes everyone has a direct connection with God, or whatever they like to think of as God-like, and no one gets to tell them to believe differently.

Pentecostalism “by definition assumes direct contact of the believer with God and, by extension, the direct agency of the Holy Spirit as instructor and counselor and commander as well as comforter.”

The invention of the automobile also played a fundamental role, by beginning the process of splitting apart extended nuclear families. Families were soon no longer gathering at Grandma’s for post-Sunday service collective meals every week.

Origen points out that many unrealistic details are contained in the Gospels that are intended to alert the reader to their non- historicity but it appears that few readers got the message. The character we know as St. Paul was a Gnostic and taught both the inner and outer mysteries. He knew nothing about a historical Jesus.

Hellenized

normalize.

what can be coomercialized for a social good can be weaponized for social control.

One could think of demons as emergent semio-parasites, psychophysical pathogens exploiting and replicating within the human psyche in very specific ways. This would explain why knowing their name allows one to master them and why the invocation of certain signs and symbols banish them, relieving the victim of their ailments.

the semiosphere, the realm of signs and symbol, and “deceiving the world” by altering or overcoding it. Any human group is defined by the boundaries of the system of signs in use among its members.

Data is the new oil, the ethereal residue of human life.

all of it aimed at reducing humanity to a processing substrate.

Lo, the true Human Instrumentality—

Then there is Alphabet’s AlphaStar AI and OpenAI’s OpenAI Five, which assimilated the vital essences of real world players in MOBA titles and strategy titles, and fed it into the machinic maws of cyber entities for use in military strategy application and hologram girlfriends.

The NSA was also interested in creating new games and partnering with commercial developers of popular titles.

DoD wargaming scenarios

Coincidentally, it's quite possible that Google's LaMDA, the "sentient" chatbot, utilizes the same approach. Google holds a patent titled "Forming chatbot output based on user state" which feeds on the "digital exhaust" of your IRL activity to train the bot's neural network

It isn't a little robot friend, it's a digital homunculus mirroring your face.

Sony Interactive Entertainment has applied for or holds a multitude of patents which sponge up player’s emotions, vocal cues, gait, facial expressions and body language and applies machine learning to create neural nets for artificial intelligences.

One of the ways this hybridization occurs is in video games and gamified social networks. Games are increasingly understood as systems that easily allow the reduction of human action into knowable and predictable formats. Games, and virtual environments, are ordering devices.

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Pretty soon Forbes featured our work on their website. They wrote that they’d seen the best results in boosting focus by using our product.

That ability to “drill down’ is sadly missing from many people’s toolkits, as we’re inundated with notifications, messages, and alerts.

Qualia Mind Essentials

And, unlike convenience store energy drinks, there’s the right amount — and the right balance — of these ingredients to enable the brain to work better, for longer, without running out of steam later in the day.

That’s the big picture approach to brain function. Taking nutrients that have interlinking benefits –– and are capable of working together in our bodies –– and providing them together for better motivation, focus, and memory.

We set out to create “inspiration in a bottle.”

That might be when you reach for that extra cup of coffee — only to feel jittery and scattered when you need to focus the most.

Some research shows that distractions help us generate ideas.

attention is the scarcest resource of all.

The idea of “waiting for your muse” is a fantasy.

“I only write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.”

Self-becoming is an agonizing yet essential process that holds the repeated destruction of the individual’s constructed identities as the precondition for attaining the status of human being.

If one is connected to Spirit, a simple wooden cross on a wall can speak more than a library of esoteric tomes.

Thus, the reality of the golem is a synthetic, contextual approximation, it never gives us the thing itself; it only gives us a necessary concept of things.

The “transgender” is the prototype of this new flesh.

Homo modulus

It seeks only to make copies of itself, printing its program into each successive moment.

But in a world with no rites of passage, where identity formation is purposefully perverted, the outcome is predictable—

iniquities

Our ability to share in the act of creation is a divine blessing.

Your created “selfhood” is a machine made of shadow and light.

agential

to assign spiritual authority to a machine.

fabulation

Our models can never be the work of human hands.

to reject the predominant models of mediated and mediocre humanity on offer to us today, and to adopt new models of humanity at its best. 

Most people no longer know what they want because it’s harder than ever to find powerful models of desire – models of humanity that inspire greatness; models of humanity which show man fully alive.

The real question facing us is not ‘What do we want to become?’ but ‘What do we want to want?

The materialist and pop anthropologist author Yuval Noah Harari (of Sapiens fame), for instance, thinks that humanity is in the process of upgrading itself into “gods,” evolving into a kind of techno-species that might even one day be able to conquer death. For him, the future of nature and technology is almost complete.

(Consider the features on most smartphones which now help you monitor your usage and will prevent you from using apps during certain time periods.) 

The gestell, as Heidegger predicted, is a kind of all-encompassing cage since even our attempts to escape from technology are themselves technological.

The loss of a sense of otherness and alterity is at the crux of the predicament we find ourselves in today. It is precisely what Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, meant when he said that the internet would “vanish” because it would become a part of everyday objects and services. “It will be part of your presence all the time,” he said. 

A tool or object has no life-principle, initiative, or processes of its own.

subhuman

predominately agnostic development

the uniquely human is becoming obscured, and it is harder to recognize and identify. 

And a new generation of porn-addicted people – fueled by the ability to view hardcore porn anywhere, free of cost, in the palm of one’s hand – is now shaping a new aesthetic.

Aside from the objectification of the human body, the trickle-up effect of porn aesthetics (norms around grooming, for instance) are a reminder that what people consume has far-reaching consequences. It is not just life imitating ‘“art”’; it is people imitating a mediated reality which their devices have made ubiquitous. 

Everyone has seen someone enter a space in the real world and treat it as something to be used merely for the Instagrammable images it has to offer. The real-world behaviors mimic the behaviors learned from the device.

Adults are becoming more like that which they imitate – and right now, the preponderance of imitation seems to be of technological devices or frameworks.

Children, Meltzoff discovered, come out of the womb immediately capable of imitating their fellow humans; they will not, however, imitate a machine doing the same thing.

Humans are very skilled and complex imitators

They have mouths, but do not speak;

I shall cut the strands of my past and look forward.

A new man was born and took control, and the other faded into the recesses of memory.

To exist, one must first die. To be reborn is to truly live.

We are not ourselves. We can only find ourselves once we realize we are not yet alive. We must face these truths and allow our old self to burn to ashes. Only then are we birthed anew.

It was now time for that moment — ignition.

The odyssey itself has only just begun, but for now, this is where I must leave it. I have sailed forth and made my way to my island. Traversing its inversion, I did that which I did not understand or know, and therefore I found my place as an island among a sea of stars.

All of the great evils of this world have been done in service of uncovering this secret. Yet, for all of time, it has stood before us if we but reach out and give up our pride and selfish desire to know all. Only then can one truly begin to sail across the sea of souls and see that which cannot be seen, to know that which cannot be known, to feel that which cannot be felt.

Our souls, which we must protect from the harvest, must be born and allowed to transcend into such a place.

They try to explain and master the unknown by making it known, but instead, they build delusions around themselves, constructing false realities and meaningless existences. They feast on the souls of men as fuel to convert the unknown and harness it to their ends. Yet, this is impossible and a self-mutilation of grand proportions.

I felt reverence for life that I never had before, an understanding of chaotic yet divine order.

terminus

I closed my eyes and suddenly was able to see. My mind created that which was not.

I heard echos of distant voices chanting a harrowing tune.

I cleared my mind of all hope and desire, of all hubris and pride, and offered myself to the powers of the unknown.