Advertising is the dominant form of our time. It has embedded itself, implicitly or explicitly, in every form across every medium. It acts as an additional dimension of expression/interpretation, tracing a network of ownership interests, narrative/cultural associations between disparate expressions and myth-making that exists entirely separate from yet deeply embedded the communicated intent/proposition of another expression.

It is embedded in the sense that it is integrated and co-existant, but also because it is layered inside the nuance of a separate expression. The expression could have existed (albeit not commercially) without the advertising, but not vise-versa.

The advertisement, then, is a parasitic strain of culturally dominant narratives that exist within all other expressions. It relates intangible values (coolness, hipness, newness, profundity — even rebellion) to existing systems of exchange, implying (and making available) a venue for the realization of the ideal suggested/offered in/by the expression. For it is in ideals, in intangible values, that narrative finds its strength: The rationalism of mythology. The dream that because it can be thought, presented, dreamed and hoped, it can therefore exist free of the associations and connotations that bring them to action.

Ideals cannot exist separate from idealism (Plato was right and wrong; forms exist in potential-space but cannot exist without that conjured potential-space), and idealism requires mythology. Mythology is the foundation and process of ordering — without the conjured potential-space, there is no order to strive towards so mythology becomes the template, the map, the communicable notion of a potential. It must be interpreted, but as long as it is defined from a position of authority, the privilege of interpretation is left to the very constructors who conjured the myth.

Advertising is the new church. It enables certain mythologies and suppresses others. It lives in everything, but there is no consensus as to how it makes its home. Only one thing is certain: There is no contradiction in the myth that advertising facilitates rather than being dependent on production and exchange. It is understood as expressing/promoting value — but more than that, it constructs it.

Experience never adheres to the structure provided by narratives. The inciting event suggests determinism, the possibility of a single set of circumstances giving birth to an identifiable set of consequences.

In a sense, even the butterfly effect, that staple of chaos theory, is hard determinism: The notion that the fluttering of the butterfly’s wings can be understood or considered to be even partially responsible for the tornado suggests not chaos, but orderliness. An absurd orderliness, perhaps, but an orderliness nonetheless.

The narrative about the butterfly has a clear arc: It features a protagonist, an inciting event, an (implied) middle and a conclusion. Thus, the metaphor takes on the formalistic trappings of determinism — it locks even chaos to a linear continuum. Only through abstraction, a leap of faith, can the meaning be discerned.

Mathematics represents our capacity for ordering.

On plane. Wolfed down over-priced, under-cooked English breakfast before getting on plane, only to find it held due to incompetent late passengers. Ample leg room but narrow seats. I expect to stay off the airplane food.

We met the ********* guys and now owe them lunch. Things shall be swell.

* * *

45 min delay thus far. Impressive.

Notes from The Social Network

• Sex, sex, sex, sex, money, money, money
• Geek culture as intellectual bastion?
• Gender stereotyping
• Programming as arcane art/alchemy
• New reality hemmed in by the old
• Very predictable to anyone (academic?) under 30
• Suggests autistic/non-communicating hunter/prey relationship between men & women. Very predictable.
• The men program & the women do languages/social sciences/PR. The men may also have ideas that the women don’t understand but admire
• The best/only valid sex is random, spontaneous & result of wish for social mobility/association with career/success.
• Traditional nerd/jock jew/WASP lines are drawn between values/social roles
• Pretty simplistic & manipulative stuff.
• - Admiration and “social fear-of-exclusion”/golddigging is seen as glamorous, potentially sophisticated. All relationship between men and women exists in terms of male desire for sex (and status) and women’s desire for prestige and inclusion.
• This is not the NEW world. It’s the OLD values of a DEAD WORLD being injected into the nervous system of a zeitgeist that WILL reject hierarchy.
• The film is cutlike cut like a trailer.
• The reality is OLD. Is this a period piece? Possibly. Very fake — world is not at all like this. NOT AT ALL.
• Legal system/business practices/ethical frameworks appears strange and non-sensical. Old world power-structures that exist only to trip over new.
• Paranoid world view.
• Interesting, but perhaps too insubstantial.
• Tries to sum up my time without understanding that it’s not a TIME. It’s … a disillusionment with ALL time.
• Youth is wasted on the young.
• It’s very strange to see obvious and completely observable “reality” presented as arcana. As something that is only half-real because it is a product of youth mentality, a TIME that will cease as the generation grows into fuckwittery & AGE.
• Age doth not fucking exist. Only boredom and fucking constraints destroy beauty.
• Disruption is not bravery or innovation, it’s an expression of fear and social dysfunction. There is nothing wrong w/reality, there is something wrong with INNOVATORS.
• Innovation is REACTIONARY social process.
• BULLSHIT! This is actually boring.
• Strength is reactionary. STrength is basic regression of potentiality.
• Fucking temper models again.
• Experience IS change. All is change, without change there is only absoluteness, fronzen as crystal.
• Instruments never measure STATE they measure CHANGE ACROSS INTERVALS
• A small interval is called a moment.
• Time is change, instruments define the intervals. The cross-section is “perceived” or rather DESCRIBED time.
• Language records change as both as history and IN ITS FORM.
• Without codification there is no time. But life, genes, DNA is PERCEIVED/DESCRIBED as codification. BUT NO! It is spontaneous. Codification arises from intelligence, from ordering.
• Can ecologies codify OR ONLY CHANGE?
• Is evolution equal to change?
• Are ecologies encoding evolution?
• Or is every agent ordering own change?
• NOW GO QUANTUM AND RE-READ.
• Now that we have language, it is inextricably linked to perception.
• Perception w/o language is NOT SOCIAL.
• Is life the act of sharing information as perceived? Is codification the exhaust of life? Or its engine?
• Does life have meaning w/o communication?
• Is a rock alive if it talks?
• Is a tree dead if it stands alone?
• Perception & semantics are one and the same. Language is short-hand metaphors describing shared experience.
• All communication is metaphor
• We see what say. We say what we see. In the beginning was the word. Before the light was thw word.
• THE WORD LIT THE TORCH BEHIND THE EYES OF MAN.
• We see the world only in terms of how we describe it. This is why abstraction is hard. This is why we are always wrong.

Every political movement mimics the lifespan of a sun.

I learned to lie before I was even a child. I can’t know if it was my parents, television or the kids & adults at kindergarten who taught me — all I know is that I was not very old when I learned that no-one wanted to hear sincere thoughts, only those that reflect what they want to hear or that they expect you to have.

My parents, although I am sure they loved me, demonstrated that malice lies not in intent but in uncritical reaction. What I thought, how I acted, was always measured against what I thought was expected, what perceived boundaries dictated the permitted idea space of their care and love. Anything that contradicted this soft but relentless authority would leave them aghast.

(Comic books and cartoons provided a strange middle ground — they are associated with children and childish innocence, yet their content is so often subversive; all their signs and words are little semantic möbius strips that curl around each other like schools of shimmering fish)

My teachers, although I am sure they meant well, taught me only that ignorance stems not from lack of experience but territorialism. Territorialism comes in many forms, from pissing on corners to allowing certain types of ideas or behaviour that one sees as valid within a domain or as defining it. The tyranny of school is that it forces children to act like children are perceived and expected to behave according to adults who consider themselves educators.

(But if the playfulness of cartoons — the lack of fear for boundaries, the liberty that characterizes Warner Bros. and Disney cartoons — is reproduced outside the scope of passive reception, it is no longer childish. It is dangerous; you have failed a test of whether you can distinguish the domain rules of “fantasy” and “reality”)

This taught me to lie about everything. I lied about what I liked, modulating my behaviour to adhere to the perceived expectations of my surroundings. My real emotions, or my real potential emotions, would have to remain guarded, dream-stuff, masturbatory fantasies, closeted like horny nuns surrounded by steeples.

I learned that ceremony and ritual often determine the scope of accepted/expected feelings and how they are communicated. Certain sensations and expressions are reserved for particular occasions so as not to devalue the occasion of the expression (not the feeling, only the expression) and thus honour the intent of the ceremony with exclusivity.

(But all ceremonies and rituals are fantasy, even those commonly labelled reality, whether gala opening nights, elections, charity fund raisers or a visit to the hairdresser — all value is perceived)

I quickly grew fearfully comfortable in this twilight truth. Comfortable in my ability to presume, in my efficiency and accuracy in limiting my own sincerity and honesty to the point where I was simply a darkened mirror, a nod and a smile. Around me, the world moved in similar patterns, always feeling and saying different things, well-meaning authorities maliciously demarcating their territory and ridding it of other fantasies.

Now we all lie all the time, especially when assessing exchanges of values, for those are the most fantastic examples of territorial realism. An authority has told me that my labour is worth a certain amount, and I shall pay a certain proportion of my accrued abstracted labour for an item that an authority has determined is worth a particular proportion of an average labourers income. These values are non-negotiable, so they must be absolute — that way they reflect and embody the virtue and value of Certainty.

(Certainty can only be constructed in relation to authority, although authority can be distilled into symbols that can reinforce itself more effectively through disembodied aggregate power. After all, that which does not exist need struggle all the much harder to prove its tangible value.)

I eventually forgot that I lied and that lapse of mind hid from me that all others lie as well, for we see ourselves clearer than we see others although we believe they see us clearer than we do. This way I came to adopt and cherish what I never believed so that my act could be convincing and attract other liars to celebrate it as per my presumptions concerning all of our realities.

The guilt eventually shattered the fantasy like a mirror and I passed through, gazing at last inside the mirror and finding only I. I never saw sign of fantasy and reality again, instead I move as a pane of glass through a hall of mirrors.

(What’s up, doc?)

Notes from Thrilling Wonder Stories 2010:

- A brief history of magic:

• Sleight of hand » Houdini » Copperfield » Blaine » Crowley
• Aleister Crowley » “Magic is understanding/shaping of structure/process” » Players + designers are co-magicians » Synthesis is creation
• Pyramids » Anti-archaeological architecture?
• What would trivial/joyous death as a result of accepting euthanasia mean? How do you invite someone do your casual deathday party on a social network?

- Sefirah:

• Kingship - A glimpse of the future/potential/post-reality? All power-ups.
• Crown - Final reality/creation/circularity/always-truth « Fulfilment?
• Kindness - Growth, not destruction « Receptacle? Femininity?
• “Anger” - Chain reactions » Resonance/chaos/uncontrollable outcome

A game where you are a parasite, hearing the thoughts (narration) of the host, fighting the impulses/actions of the host. A forced travel companion, a mere train of thought co-authoring experience.

“Of course I think my mind is fascinating, I only recently discovered it!”

The map of pasts plus amendments from possible future maps constitute present.

Change cannot be MONSTROUS, only INEVITABLE (since it cannot be avoided, it voids will — Contradiction of will = rape)

I guess this is poetry

Nukes, moon rockets
both propelled contamination
difference: negligible

All contradictions, juxtapositions;
opposing concepts can be unified
by semantics, All separates/opposites
can conceptually be unified by pulling back/zooming out,
presenting process not form/intent/meaning/dream/delusion/separation.

The individuality of intent is
counter-prophetic, wilful avoidance
of participation in externalities

Formalized feeling completely voiding intent through avoiding clarity 

Nostalgia is the only thing winners share with losers. Childhood memories, exposure to glimpses of music or pictures, a gory scene from a straight-to-video slasher spied from the staircase when you were really meant to be in bed.

Those ideas, those associations with close-to-wombness, grow strangely cherished. You can’t help but fall in love with basslines that sound like woollen beats of 80s pop barely discernible over the hum of the engine late at night. Dashboard lights illuminating the outline of Father, arms slowly moving the wheel (pendulum-like), occasional swish as cars pass, on eventful nights the wet thump of a bird hitting the wind shield.

Our kids will stumble across bookmarks, read an e-mail subject line in passing, the complete family album on Facebook, a succession of self-images from first profile at 13 to announcing divorce at 31. Who gets the family album? Just close the accounts, switch names, start over?

Their music will be anything on Spotify, while YouTube provides all the moving pictures. This moment in history is not defined by its content, but its ability to contain, its potential to contain any recorded moment back to some distant data points (digitally restored, delicate colours applied in Photoshop) early last century.

Maybe that “freedom” registers as a blip across socio-cultural ghettos and subcultures where behaviour is already dogmatized, impervious to liberty and self-expression. There’s no clarity about ideals any more, except in lifestyle. Converse is cool. Lady Gaga is cool. Except they’re ironic double-twists even when they’re not.

The uncertainty of the future is enshrined in the cult status of the leading figures, the saints to the subcultures. The status quo somehow stretches on, despite the resistance, despite the contrary ideas. Something’s a new church, frowning upon transgression, layering new meaning upon a stagnant idea. Halls of divinities, hierarchies of angels, cultural gordian knots.

What use is anything but reference when that is the only available means of empowerment? A rich archive of our own history, a potential graph of the century, hitting an event horizon shortly after the millennium.

Circumcision will be succeeded by retinal replacement. Tender laser cuts, infant eyes switches on to the world, a distant computer reserves a thread. Mapping where the eye lingers, storing colours, brands, forming the basis of the commercial imprint.

As the child develops and attaches significance to its environment, the internet eye feeds data and adds history to the moment. Contextual advertising provides education, the ABC taught by jaunty Coca-Cola-cartoons and Kellogg’s mascots.

Wikipedia clouds surround points of interest, interactive graphs and equations overlaying trajectories to demonstrate mathematics, social network readouts floating around people in the street.

The Greek worried that record would restrict invention, like iconoclasts worried that images would reduce God to one. A digital construction parallel to the social, vessel and host of perception and able to infer your intentions through clever number games devised at places with important names. All recorded, little switches flipped in a life-template in that distant computer that shows you what you should see. Nostalgia.

What’s separating our neo-feudal fusion of state and elite from proper, old-fashioned fascism now? We imprison and abuse our dissidents, while public servants and news outlets calls for the death sentence for a foreign citizen who have not committed a crime, colluding with yet other foreign powers to circumvent what democracy remains.

Meanwhile, we fetishize our wealthy and beautiful, erecting flatscreen shrines on our walls so they may grace us at set times on particular days. Some of them are judges — they pluck ordinary people from ordinary lives and let them onto our walls.

There they imitate the wealthy and beautiful, perhaps even one of the judges. The audience pays money to decide who makes the best impression of success, but the judges can secretly overturn the decision. We can’t have just anyone on the walls. People might think they belong there.