I tried out a new App called WalkCast today developed by oio studio.

They bill it as a “Story Telling Engine,” which is definitely more snappy than saying it’s an: AI powered – location based – narrative non fiction – podcast generator?

It’s quite a fun little app. I’m reposting their marketing video below, as I can’t seem to link directly to it:

How it Works

The app grabs your location, searches the web for information about where you are, generates a narrative text summary, and spits it out as audio. On the about page, they hint that there’s a lot more happening behind the scenes, but essentially that’s the experience.

Imagine it as a series of intelligent agents—curator, editor, and host—each with a distinct role in the creation of every story. The curator digs deep into your surroundings, finding facts and points of interest. The editor weaves these into a dynamic script, sometimes adding creative tangents and surprising twists.

Finally, the host—our AI-generated voice—delivers the story, always in the perfect tone. This loop continues as long as you keep walking, transforming every step into a suprising moment.

In the end, here at oio we’re on a mission to create products and tools for a less-boring future, and waiting for someone else to do it just wasn’t an option. So we built it ourselves.

I recently made an episode of 301 about Googles NotebookLM where I self inserted an AI version of my own voice into the ‘podcast’ it generated about my own work. I’ve also written about the weird issues that we are going to have to confront in the medium term.

But never the less, personality driven front ends for AI systems are an emerging UX paradigm and and WalkCast fits right into that space and have made something quite compelling. But having tried it, I also have some problems with it.

My Immediate Challanges

I went for a walk with the app this morning and experienced it twice (each session lasting about 7–10 minutes). The best way to describe it is that it felt like being ‘inside Wikipedia.’ The infosphere was narratively augmented over my direct physical environment.

For the first five minutes or so, it really does feel like a Location-Specific Experience. But as you continue to use the app, the narrative presentation about the place you’re in starts to feel flat.

One issue was the repetitive structure of the narratives. Each experience followed the same pattern: first, some facts about the immediate location, then a zoom-out to a broader area, followed by a tenuous metaphor. For example, I listened to a story about Seething Wells that morphed into a spooky ghost tale, which then swerved into an NPR-style metaphor about jellyfish (yes, jellyfish!) and tunnels, before zooming out to Surbiton and ending with another odd connection to fungi and arts and crafts. It was weirdly disjointed.

This brings up a bigger issue: narrative nonfiction ≠ story. A good story has structure, pacing, and a sense of direction, but WalkCast lacks that. There’s no feedback loop responding to the user’s actions or movement. Even museum audio guides provide more agency than this app by letting listeners control what they hear and when. I was expecting something more interactive—perhaps a ‘choose your own adventure’ vibe, where the app could suggest going left to learn about X or right to hear about Y.

Improvements

One of the key elements of augmented/spatial narrative design is that is that the audience is not just a witness to the narrative but are inside of it. WalkCast fails because there’s no story to be inside of, there’s no sequence of events, no sense making. It literally is just Wikipedia being pipped into your earholes.

A key insight that Rob is that when you are designing these sorts of experiences, there’s a tension between augmenting places and augmenting the player. And WalkCast should have a think about which paradigm they are working in what they have right now is a sort of location-portable / or site agnostic design. But there’s probably more value in remembering Rob’s second rule: the most important reality you are augmenting is the player themselves.

The experience could be massively improved by ditching the weird metaphors editorial and instead just refetch the user’s location as they walk. In a dense city like London, almost every street has an interesting history or a Wikipedia page. Updating the narrative in real time as you walk would create a more engaging and immersive experience. WalkCast needs to decide if they want to lean into narrative nonfiction or develop true stories. AI powered Wikipedia for your ears is going to get old really quickly.

I do however see huge potential in WalkCast, its a really fun little demo/toy. I’m looking forward to seeing how it and similar apps evolve.

The post WalkCast.FM appeared first on thejaymo.net.

This blogpost is the sort of thing I would usually post on my Tumblr. But it got a bit long so was upgraded to a blog post.

1. The Aliveness of Swing
   1. Time
   2. THE TIME
2. Songs are Worlds
   1. A Tale Is Alive in Its Telling.
3. Blurred Lines
   1. Living Worlds
4. The Future

A note to musicians and especially jazz fans: I did Music at undergrad level and have my Grade 7 in Music Theory. I am trying to explain things without resorting to technical or terms implicitly understood by people who make music. (The video eschews them too, which is why its so good).

The first 90 seconds of this video contains some of the best musical communication and education I’ve ever encountered.

Breaking down these 90 seconds has cracked open various thoughts I’ve had over the last few years.

The Aliveness of Swing

Time

We usually think about time time as being about the ticking of a clock, the date, the year etc. The forward momentum of past becoming the future. The present being the name for the bow wave along the flowing river of time that carries us along.

For all intense and purposes let’s call this Machine Time.

I’ve previously written about Clock Time, this sense of machine time, one-thing-after-another-time is known as Chronos.

In the case of the video, Time is described as in musical terms. A time signature, the number of beats in the bar.

At 0Ms 14Secs the bass begins playing and the host then counts of the beats out 1,2,3,4

You can hear the location of the bass notes in relation to the clock/beat.

1+3.

Chirillo process to play, you begin to feel a bouncy sensation. The rhythm is created by the interplay of bass and guitar.

All four beats are now filled by the two instruments.

The word ‘presides’ in the previous phrase above is a good term.

To Preside means ‘position of authority in a meeting or other gathering’ or ‘be in charge of’. These instruments preside over 1+3 and 2+4 respectively. They don’t own or control them. The musicians are merely stewards over these particular beats in the bar. They preside.

They are the rhythmic anchors of the song. Now that all four beats are filled they create the sensation of ‘Up and Down‘. Literally the Up and Down Beats.

The pianist begins to play.

Ignore the melodic nature of the piano and chords being played by all the instruments. Focus on the rhythm of all three instruments at once.

Listen carefully to how the piano dances around, across, inside of the 1+3, 2+4 rhythmic world established by the Bass and Guitar.

I hope you can still feel the ‘up and down’ sensation, but the piano re-shapes whats going on. All 4 beats of the bar are filled up but the rhythmic emphasis now moves and slides around.

You know what this shuffle is … you’ve heard it, I’ve heard it, we’ve all heard it million times before.

The ’tiss, tiss ta tiss’ on the ride cymbal.

The shuffle, also known as ‘The Spang-A-Lang’. Is the foundation of swing, the heart of Jazz.

Rewind the video and listen again.

The drummers entrance gives me chills every time.

The Spang-a-lang adds a new internal logic to the previous rhythms played by the previous three instruments. The rhythmic interplay between the three instruments is totally transformed.

The music has come alive.

It’s swinging.

THE TIME

The spang-a-lang introduces the swing. The song is now alive.

This is Kairos, THE TIME, or right timing.

Kairos is the product of resonance between interconnected intangible elements in the present. The feeling of things unfolding.

I hope that you can hear, but more importantly feel whats going on.

The bass and guitar have 1+3, 2+4 covered. The piano dances around.

But the spang-a-lang sits between the up and down motion of the rhythm.

It’s the beating heart, the internal logic of swing.

A set of rhythmic coordinates around which, the rest of the sonic world turns.

What an understated turn of phrase.

“The unlegislated devision of power”

No one playing here has control. No one legislates. Instead the musicians preside over different elements of the rhythm.

Between them there’s unspoken agreement, together the rhythmic interplay is greater than the sum of its parts.

Jazz is often called a social technology.

The use of unlegislated to describe the power dynamics within the ensemble should also bring to mind political relations too. They are free from legislation.

I don’t want to go into much detail here, but Jazz is the creation of an egalitarian worlds.

When jazz musicians talk about their experiences playing and improvising inside of their bands world you have to belive them.

Songs are Worlds

All songs are complete self contained worlds. Some are more alive than others.

One of my favourite podcast episodes I’ve made was about the sonic geography.

The goal of any artist or musician is to bring an idea, feeling, emotion, whatever, to life.

In the video above you can clearly hear the moment that the world comes alive. The moment the spirt of swing arrives.

Swing of course is a style, a vibe. It’s a living intangible thing. It’s hard to describe but you know it when you hear it.

Vibe of course is alive in many other genres of music, Reggae, Blues, Samba whatever.

The spang-a-lang doesn’t even need to be on the drums. Listen to this 1946 recording of Django’s Tiger by Django Reinhardt – you can hear it in the rhythm guitar. The swing nevertheless is alive.

A Tale Is Alive in Its Telling.

Swing is brought into existence by musicians. Whilst playing, they are all feeling and experiencing that alive thing – the sprit of the music.

It’s mysterious, miraculous even. Swing is conjured somewhere collectively between them.

In turn, that feeling is communicated – or a better – shared with the audience (if there is one). A recording captures and shares it too.

Again, all art seeks to capture and communicate a feeling, emotion, thought.

A similar thing happens with stories and narratives:

Whats the difference between a story and a tale? Here’s a quote from Huw Lemmey

Tell me a tale. Don’t write me a story. But tell: tell meaning to reveal, to divulge. In story-telling, the stories already exist; the richness, the innovation, is in the manner of their revelation.

A Tale Is Alive in Its Telling

Rituals also create worlds- they produce a kind of alive-ness that is felt and experienced. Rituals crate space and deepen our awareness of alive-time or THE TIME – Kairos.

And just as you can resonate with the characters in the sky, the positions of the characters resonate with you. You have agency in the cosmic story itself as you are part of that story in the witnessing. This is story as ritual. Alive in its telling. It has it sacrifice (being alive), meaning and resonance. 

This sort of alive time is the measure of experience.

It’s my belief that the Metaverse – the spaces we create there, and the experiences we have there – will be judged by their aliveness.

Blurred Lines

Any mention of Blurred Lines, at least in my circles always evokes a ‘fuck that song‘ response.

Regardless of what you think about the songs lyrical content, I really do urge people to have an opinion about its vibe – what it brings the song life – and the consequences its wrought.

The Blurred Lines lawsuit resolved back in 2018, was one of the most shocking copyright decisions ever.

Up until 2018, in the eyes of the law: everyone knew what a song was: Chords, Melody, Lyrics.

The Blurred Lines Lawsuit charged that Blurred Lines infringed the copyright of Marvin Gaye’s Got to Give It Up.

Yet, Pharell and Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines has diffrent chords, diffrent lyrics, a diffrent melody AND a diffrent rhythm from Marvin Gaye’s Got to Give It Up

They sound absolutely nothing alike apart from the share sonic pallet:

What they both do however is feel the same.

The Blurred Lines groove, its vibe, its aliveness, communicates the same feeling as Got to Give It Up.

So a case was put to the public, Pharell and Thicke were judged according to a jury of their peers. They lost. This was later upheld in their appeal to 9th circuit judges.

It was established that “Got to Give It Up” is “entitled to broad protection against copyright infringement liability because musical compositions are not confined to a narrow range of expression”

Pharell and Thicke infringed on the Gaye estates copyright because they made something that feels the same.

At university studying Philosophy of Arts, all I ever talked about and wrote about was copyright. If I was still in academia I’d be wondering what is it about the culture of late capitalism, the nature of our ‘reality’ that lead a jury to be convinced that you can copyright the intangible. I blame DnD.

Culture has been totally blown apart by this ruling.

What even am a song now? (As Gordon White would put it).

Living Worlds

Ian Cheng describes ‘Worlding’ as

The art of devising a World: by choosing its dysfunctional present, maintaining its habitable past, aiming at its transformative future, and ultimately, letting it outlive your authorial control.

A World Runner(s) job is to steer a world towards more aliveness.

Other Internet stressed the role of VIBES in their essay on Squad Wealth.

I think the musical demonstration above shows that the ensemble are very vibe rich indeed.

Moving on, writing about DAOs last year Kei Kreutler said:

DAOs are less technical protocols for governance and more high stakes game worlds that interweave.

We should aim for rough consensus and running worlds.

Rough consensus and running worlds.….

It’s interesting. Richard Bartle, the godfather of all online worlds, wrote in his book Designing Virtual Worlds back in 2003 about how one should judge an online world

You can only judge a world in its totality.

I have been on Twitter 14 years and I judge it to have failed in bringing an experience of something alive into this world.

What is brought into being, what is made alive by the component parts of the world? What is experienced by the user.

If the metaverse is a medium…

Can you copyright a world?

The Future

Strains of weed make people feel a certain way – Indica vs Sativa etc.

One makes you feel one way, another makes you feel a different way.

Currently you can’t own a strain of weed – or have copyright over the way a drug makes people feel.

But the 2018 Blurred Lines ruling says you can now own the intangible. Which means boy howdy are folks in California trying to change this state of affairs.

Imagine a world where one type of chocolate makes you feel the same way as another brand of chocolate. What sort of lawsuit madness are we going to get ourselves into? Imagine being able to copyright the feeling or difference between Rayon and Silk? No new shared cultural grammars would be possible.

This is a weird post I’ll admit. Going though 90 seconds of musical education brings us though Ritual, Folktales, Pop Songs, DAOs and Virtual Worlds and Weed, but it’s all connected somehow in my mind.

The big battle – the cultural fight that we are all participants in right now – will be about the aliveness of worlds. Both online and offline. We are still in its early stages.

The podcast I’m making this week is going to be about this subject, but the same lens will be on machine learning, image generation, copyright and AI models.

Can you own? copyright? control? a vibe? can you stake a claim on the ‘aliveness’ of a thing?

Can you own how software makes people feel?

The post How The World Alive, Swings appeared first on thejaymo.net.

June 12, 2021

|

Narratives 📖 | Permanently Moved 🔊

S04E23

Author J David Osborne guest hosts 301 this week. He talks Darksouls, Petscop, Gulags and Narrative strategy.

Subscribe to his podcast No Country co-hosted by Kris Saknussemm

Support: https://thejaymo.net/support/
Webshow: http://comeinternetwith.me
Website: https://thejaymo.net/

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

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The Dark Souls Method

J David Osborne posted the script on his blog at brokenriverbooks.com

You can read it here

Support JDO’s podcast No Country on Patreon

The post [Guest Episode] The Dark Souls Method | 2123 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

September 4, 2020

|

Narratives 📖 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Puppets 🎎

S03E35

Performance in its execution becomes something more than the individuals involved. Siblings, Community, Bread and Puppets, SHEDx, Italian Dinner Theatre and Solarpunk.

You can now support the show at https://thejaymo.net/support/

Links:
Siblings: https://shop.igetrvng.com/products/rvngnl42
Bread & Puppet: https://breadandpuppet.org/
SHEDx: https://www.thecommunitybrain.org/shedx-home
Teatro del Sale https://www.teatrodelsale.com/en/welcome-2/

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Website: https://thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com
Support: https://thejaymo.net/support/

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

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Wherever you get your podcasts

Theatre, Applied

I hope he won’t mind me mentioning. But I had a wonderful call with the artist, composer, and choreographer Colin Self this week. We caught up and chatted about his creative life and journey. Our chat was affirming. Full of great insight and good medicine.

If you haven’t heard Self’s 2018 album Siblings – You definitely should. 

It’s an album about critical joy. Making kin, ways of knowing and coming together in this time of ecological crisis. Inspired by the work of Donna Haraway. The album is the final segment in a six-part opera cycle entitled Elation. It’s a remarkable work. I privileged to see the European premiere at Unsound. The album is out on RVNG.

The essence of our conversation was about coming together. To make and create things in community. How performance in its execution becomes something more than the individuals involved. This is a topic I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently with regard to #pretgate here in the UK. It illustrates a perceived near zero public sphere. There is no space not oriented toward buying stuff or making profit for someone else.

Colin mentioned the Bread and Puppet Theatre and as a result I’ve been on an internet binge. A bit of their history from the website:

The Bread and Puppet Theater was founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann on New York City’s Lower East Side. Besides rod-puppet and hand puppet shows for children, the concerns of the first productions were rents, rats, police, and other problems of the neighborhood. More complex theater pieces followed, in which sculpture, music, dance and language were equal partners. The puppets grew bigger and bigger. (..) Many performances were done in the street. During the Vietnam War, Bread and puppet staged block-long processions and pageants involving hundreds of people.

In 1974 Bread and Puppet moved to a farm in Glover in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. The 140-year old hay barn was transformed into a museum for veteran puppets. Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, a two day outdoor festival of puppetry shows, was presented annually through 1998.

The company makes its income from touring new and old productions  both on the American continent and abroad, and from sales of Bread and Puppet Press’ posters and publications. The traveling puppet shows range from tightly composed theater pieces presented by members of the company, to extensive outdoor pageants which require the participation of many volunteers.

Bread and Puppet is one of the oldest, nonprofit, self-supporting theatrical companies in the country.

I live in Surbiton and have a v.different, but similar organisation right around the corner.

The Community Brain. They exist to develop community cohesion using the widest range of the arts, education and local history in order to give people and place renewed importance and pride.

They are about utilising people’s natural talents and energies to develop stronger communities and relationships. Strengthening the natural networking and support that can happen in healthy societies creating more resilient communities.

Their concerns (in my mind) are:

• Community
• Public Play
• Myths and Legends
• History & Heritage
• The Future

It is real place making, not as gloss for gentrification.

The Community Brain have a project called SHEDx based at an allotment plot in Tolworth called ‘Farm of Futures’. A project engaging the local community of Tolworth, and surrounding areas. Encouraging people to take ownership of their unused and green spaces. The project has re-greened Tolworth broadway. Kickstarted the first Tolworth Christmas market in many years. And they are helping locals define, imagine, improve and enact the capital F future for their town.

SHEDx is an exact replica of the existing crooked shed that lives at the Tolworth site. A flat-pack travelling exhibition space which promotes allotment culture around the UK. It has squatted outside the Victoria and Albert Museum. And some what improbably won a silver medal at Hampton Court Flower Show.

Community brain also made use of puppets. Made to represent new myths and legends created by the local community at parades and events. You might have seen me tweeting about Lefi Ganderson and the State of Seething.

I’ve also recently discovered the Teatro del Sale in Florence Italy.

The result of a vision by Maria Cassi, its artistic director, and her husband Chef Fabio Picchi. Who the godfather of the Italian local food movement. His life’s work has been championing the Tuscan farm to table movement. He’s a larger than life almost Solarpunk character.

Guests stand in line and go up to a window to collect their food. Its first come first serve so with each dish served there is a raucous rush to queue up.

Anyways.

Teatro del Sale opened its doors in 2003 as a dinner theatre venue and members association. Anyone can eat there but they must sign up for a membership first.

From the videos I’ve seen, Fabio shouts and harrangs the patrons in good faith and everyone is smiling. After the meal patrons have to help clear the tables and reset the chairs to face the stage. After each dinner there is a performance from professional musicians, dancers and actors. It could be anything depending on the night.

What a fantastic idea.

I’ve been involved with some citizen sci-fi as part of my association with Solarpunk and I’ve always talked about food first.

Visionary Mode for me right now is a combination of puppets, theatre, community, music, communal food, drama, farming and the future. Not being discussed. But like SHEDx enacted in every town, place and local borough of every city.

Solarpunk LARPing is just doing the future – today.

The script above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

The post Theatre, Applied | 2035 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

August 21, 2020

|

Narratives 📖 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Sorcery 🧞

S03E33

Folktales, Place, Megaliths, Bluebells, Homeless Children, Angels, Demons, La Llorona, Bad Streets and Landscape.

You can now support the show at https://thejaymo.net/support/

Links:
Medway Megaliths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medway_Megaliths
Myths Over Miami: https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/myths-over-miami-6393117
Bonus Link: The Last of the Monsters with Iron Teeth: https://carcinisation.com/2014/10/04/the-last-of-the-monsters-with-iron-teeth/

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Website: https://thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com
Support: https://thejaymo.net/support/

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From Medway To Miami

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the interwoven nature of myths and truth and place.
About how important the flow model of reality espoused by Gordon White is. for having a larger understanding of the world. 

About how folktales are localised in landscape. How the land wraps itself around a story like a blanket. So tightly that both the story and the place become part of the fabric.

I grew up in Kent. So there are loads of stories embedded in place.

If you drive over BlueBell Hill, on the A229 south of Chatham there are two stories to pick from. The ghost of a bride-to-be is said to try and flag down cars for a lift. Multiple drivers have said they have picked up women and driven them to Chatham for them to vanish when they get out the car. 

The other:

For decades there have been numerous accounts of motorists saying they have driven into a girl who rushes out in front of them. This girl is said to look calmly at the driver before vanishing under the car.

I used to teach forigen students english in the summer when I was back home from university. One of my jobs was to go with them to the airport to see them off.  Driving back it would be just me and the coach diver chatting. One of them told me straight up he’d seen a girl late at night by the side of the road that looked like she was going to step out.

I bring this up not to tell ghost stories in the middle of summer. But because I want to place them in the landscape. The hill is of course covered in bluebells. Blue bells are also fairy flowers. Rung to summon fairies to a meeting. As such. It is expedient to ask the empty air for permission before you enter a bluebell wood. And to whisper thank you as you leave. 

But there’s more. On top of the hill are two monuments. One dedicated to the crew of an air ambulance helicopter that crashed there in tragic circumstances in 1999. The other are the standing stones known as the Medway Megaliths. The most famous of which is Kit’s Coty Constructed circa 4000 BCE. Three standing stones with a 4th laid across the top. It’s a name that falls down to us meaning “Tomb in the Forest”. From the Ancient British *kaitom, later *keiton, meaning “forest”. 

All this weird off on one stretch of road in the south east england. Given the flow model and the landscape I’ve always felt it pretty clear that bluebell hill is a place that likes to remind the living that it exists.

Now lets zoom 7000 kilometers west from Medway to Miami. I want to point you towards one of the most amazing articles on the internet. “Myths over Miami” published by 1997 by the Miami New Times.

It tells of the shared complex spirit culture between children in the city’s homeless shelters. 8 year olds explain to other children that Angels “Eat light so they can fly,” that they hide in empty buildings while they study battle maps. “There’s a lot of killing going on in Miami” one kid called Andre says. “You want to fight, if you want to learn how to live, you got to learn the secret stories.” 

On Christmas Night 1996 God fled Heaven to escape a demon attack, his palace of blue marble smashed to dust. Leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell. What’s more remarkable is that children in shelters across the country reported being awakened from sleep. Alerted in dreams by dead relatives. 

The children go on to explain that One demon is feared even by Satan. They know her by two names: Bloody Mary and La Llorona (the Crying Woman). She weeps blood or black tears from empty sockets and feeds on children’s terror. 

The homeless children’s chief ally is the Blue Lady. She has pale blue skin and lives in the ocean, but is hobbled by a spell. “The demons made it so she only has power if you know her secret name”. The folklorists interviewed are baffled by the origins of children conjuring Bloody Mary by chanting her name before a mirror coated with ocean water – a theft from the Blue Lady’s domain – in a pitch-dark room. Perhaps they should have asked a local mambo.

Embedded within the landscape of the city is of course the river that drains to the everglades. Here’s what the kids have to say.  On “One side, called Bad Streets, the demons took over” . “The other side the demons call Good Streets. Rich people live by a beach there. They wear diamonds and gold chains when they swim.”

I won’t spoil the rest of the article but there’s much much more. If you read it, it will blow.your.mind. This is the world of the vulnerable homeless population or at least it was in 97. I would argue a far more real world than “the party in the city where the heat is on” as Will Smith once sang. 

What does Myths over Miami suggest about the fabric of the city and story. With runesoup eyes on I wonder about land, the place, the people. There are also the hurricanes to consider of-course too. It’s interesting.

The post From Medway To Miami | 2033 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

April 10, 2020

|

Christianity ✝️ | Narratives 📖 | Permanently Moved 🔊

S03E14

A whole lot going on in this episode! Further explorations on ‘canon’. Protestantism, Atheist Boomers, Aliens 3, Frozen, Jesus Fan Fiction and the great 1054 Rage Quit.

Links:

Craving Canon: https://thejaymo.net/2020/04/10/136-craving-canon/
1926 – On Ritual and Storytelling: http://permanentlymoved.libsyn.com/301-1926-ritual-and-storytelling
2006 – Clock Time vs Plot Time: http://permanentlymoved.libsyn.com/301-2006-clock-time-vs-plot-time

—
Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Website: https://thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

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Craving Canon (Redux)

So earlier today I posted a 5000 word post on my blog titled Craving Canon. I explore canon, toxic fandom, solarpunk, narrative, cultural fracking and other problems I perceive with story worlds in 2020. Do check it out.
I spent most of the week writing it. I think it’s an interesting discussion and would like to hear other people’s thoughts. But only via a non social medium please. Ain’t nobody got time for a hell thread on twitter.

One of the things I explored and alluded to in the piece was that people craving canon in stories and appealing to higher authority (the franchise owner) has deep roots in our culture. Specifically in my mind protestantism. However secular it may think itself western society is deeply influenced by its nearly two millennia of Christianity.

Many years ago I used to work with an Atheist boomer who was the sort of insufferable fellow who’d get upset if someone said ‘Bless you’ after he sneezed.

One day he said something about ‘The blind leading the blind’ and I replied. “You know that’s from the gospel of Mathew right?”. He went ballistic. Either I’d caught him at his own stupid game or I’d made him feel like a hypocrite. Either way it’s illustrative.

After the stars (see episode 1926 – on Ritual and Storytelling), Christianity is the other dominant story form we have in the west. And like the stars one we all participate in. Some parts of the Christian story like blind leading the blind are so ingrained in our culture unless you know, you have no idea. Now this is also a fairly recent phenomena even 50 years ago I suspect almost everyone would have known that a “Wolf in sheep’s clothing” is also from Matthew, or “Rise and shine” is Isaiah, or that “The powers that be” comes from Romans 13. 

But friends who didn’t grow up religious certainly don’t. All the useful parables, moral and emotional that the biblical stories contain are unknown to them. So when these same themes show up in movies they miss them.

I mean there’s nothing subtle about Ripley’s Christ-like attributes in Aliens 3.
She falls from “the heavens” to help the prisoners; they deny her role as their saviour; then she sacrifices her life to save theirs. She even does it with her arms out for goodness sake.

I finally watched Frozen last year and it’s one of the most Christian movies I’ve ever seen. Like Satan, Elsa craves freedom, is cast out and creates a frozen Hellscape. And her little sister is a Christ-like redeemer who is wounded for Elsa’s sins, then freezes to death to save her sister and then gets resurrected. Nothing subtle about that either.

The thing that really interests me about Christianity and our culture is just how late the quote unquote canon comes into existence. Early Christianity is my favourite. Books are the hot technology. 

The cool thing about early Christianty is that church wasn’t so much unified as a collection of communities all over the roman empire. All working from their own set of books. Which of course means the first quarrels about doctrinal unity or rather canon became intense around the 3rd century. 

Because Christiany has an eschatology see episode 2006 on Clock Time vs Plot Time. It emerges with a sense of history, and as a formalised religion it relies on the books that record that history. The stories of Jesus and his disciples are central to the project.

The heritage of Judaism was also vital to early Christianity but it was very much an open question which elements should be integrated into the new doctrine and what should be left behind. See Paul’s letters on circumcision and seating arrangements during shared meals for example. 

Gordon White is fond of calling the materials in the dead sea scrolls Jesus fan fiction. I mean in The Gospel of Mary, you have Jesus speaking to Mary in a vision explaining a spiritual path back to him. Wild stuff, and yet the process outlined is not unlike Saint T’s Interior Castle.

Two of the Gospels themselves seem to be delivered from the mysterious Q source. Probably taken from the early Church’s oral tradition. But after 300 years of fan fiction and world building however those in authority thought that something had to be done. 

If you’re a nerd like me  then you’ll know that the Nicein Creed was formalised in AD 325. Essentially excluding all the gnostic fan fiction weirdos. The first catholic canon was fixed at the Council of Rome (382) and everyone was happy. Rough consensus and running code. Things then get a little wobbly with Athanasian Creed in the 5th century ultimately resulting 500 years later with the Orthodox rage quitting having had enough of the toxic fandom.

Fictional worlds that are loved by millions, but controlled by one single authority produce the urge of craving canon. Because it reproduces the effects of the most recent change to our collective cultural story world. They skip the messy first 300 years of early Christianity, ignore the next 1000 and go straight to a protestant position that the highest authority is the Bible alone.

The above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

The post Craving Canon (Redux) | 2014 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I read a really interesting post over on io9 this week by Editor James Whitbrook: Our Fascination With Canon Is Killing the Way We Value Stories

As the pop culture we love becomes increasingly dominated by vast franchises of interconnected worlds and stories, so does it become dominated by one, singular question from diehard fans: Is the thing we’re about to consume canon to everything else we’ve consumed before? It’s an attitude that’s turning our love of stories into some bizarre, archival competition.

Our Fascination With Canon Is Killing the Way We Value Stories

The piece is a short sharp blast of very fresh air. Whitbrook covers a lot of great points in quick succession which I would like to explore in some more detail. I’m also writing this to distract a little from you know *gestures at everything*.

Whitbrook addresses how some franchise fans use the concept of ‘canon’ to assess if a piece of media Matters or Not. How the concerns around canon influence media commentary and the media ecosystem. How concerns around ‘canon’ breed a toxic attitude amongst fans that ‘leads to things like “filler episode” becoming a derogatory term for stories that don’t advance the larger ongoing plot of a narrative’. It also brings up ‘fandom’ gate keeping by overvaluing facts and information (lore) rather than narratives and emotional responses.

It’s brilliant and a must read if you are interested in story worlds and media.

You’ll notice that if you visit the article the original title of the article was ‘Craving Canon’ and is still visible in the page metadata.

It’s an interesting turn of phrase, given the subject matter. I can see why it was changed in the main headline. There certainly ARE people who crave canon, and use it as a yardstick to measure media produced in/about a story world.

Canon of course is a Biblical term. A set of texts (or “books”) which a religious community regards as authoritative scripture. Western culture however secular it may think itself is deeply influenced by its millennia of Christianity. As we’ll come to later appealing to Authority is a human behaviour that drives much of the obsession with canon.

Canon as a term in literature originates with Sherlock Holmes. The Sherlock canon consists of the 56 short stories and four novels written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
In this context, the term “canon” is an attempt to distinguish between Doyle’s original works and subsequent works by other authors using the same characters.

Canon of Sherlock Holmes (Wikipedia)

If you have been following along for a while, I’ve written (well I say written, they were actually scripts) on fandom, narrative, and problems with where we are with story worlds in 2020 quite a bit.

I’m going to repost links to the full podcast episodes incase anyone wants to take 10/15 mins to get up to speed. If not, then I’ve quoted myself here and there quite self indulgently.

[Media property name] Isn’t Your Friend

People feel so strongly about what happens to characters in fiction worlds owned by gigantic mega corporations because they identity with them. But unlike humanity’s entire history of storytelling, characters that capture the collective imagination in 2020 are owned and controlled by corporate interests. Which means they have no _agency_ within the mythos. In a literal sense people who consume the stories have no ownership over them.

“Deep engagement with mythos should give people agency within those realms. But when our entire cultures narrative is privatised – what can people do apart from fold it into the culture war? We should really start to think about antitrust laws for culture.”

Media property name] Isn’t Your Friend

There has been a sanitising effect on stories. Copyright, the ownership of stories, and the desire for profit has had a disastrous effect on our collective mythos. Whilst I pick on Disney in the episode, the same is true all across the board. Disney profited from the conversion of powerful and dangerous folk tales in to children’s stories.

The meat of this episode however is an attempt to explain why I do not like any of the new Star Wars movies.

“I tapped out the day they announced they were going to blow up the canon.

I’d been suckered.

It was all a waste of time, energy and money. That a corporation can blow up a huge fictional universe in order to sell a new one to other people was gualling. I thought it would all be there forever and suddenly it wasn’t. I’d been betrayed by a corporation and I decided never again.”

Media property name] Isn’t Your Friend

One of the things that really interested me in Star Wars as a kid in the early 90’s was that Star Wars was the fact it was one big coherent world. I used to pour over the Dorling Kindersley Visual Dictionaries. Basically I loved the canon.

I remember reading with fascination in the Star Wars monthly magazine about the guy who worked in the Lucas film archives. It was hard to believe that there was a job solely devoted to knowing everything there is to know about Star Wars. Advising on the history, lore and viability of licensees ideas and deals.

I learnt about the various levels of canon.

• The word of God (Lucas + the movies) or G-canon.
• C-canon or Continuity canon: Material from the Expanded Universe including books, comics, and video games
• S-canon was Secondary canon (stuff that wan’t very good like the infamous holiday special

There were more types, but you get the point. Canonicity in the Star Wars story world was officially nuanced with various levels of ‘truthiness’. Nuance seemingly being something that has dropped off the map now most discussion has moved online.

Check out this 2008 interview with Leland Chee. The ‘Holocron keeper’

To Star Wars fans, Chee is the Keeper of the Holocron, arguably the leading expert on everything that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. His official title is continuity database administrator for the Lucas Licensing arm of Lucasfilm—which means Chee keeps meticulous track of not just the six live-action movies but also cartoons, TV specials, scores of videogames and reference books, and hundreds of novels and comics.

Keepin’ it canonical: Leland Chee, continuity database administrator at Lucas Licensing, maintains the Holocron — a vast FileMaker database that’s consulted to make sure that any new elements added to the Star Wars franchise fit within the existing mythology.

As I explain in the Episode. I felt Disney’s decision to ‘Blow up the canon’ and restructure it to better suit their corporate intentions was an insult to people who had stuck with, and had obsessed over the franchise during the wilderness years. By people I mean me, personally. ‘Facts’ about the universe was one of the things that drove the franchise forwards for decades between the original trilogy and the prequels. The stormtrooper banging his head, other bloopers, the Wilhelm scream. Even the total nerd world of what different length light sabres came with which model of Obi Wan on which card variant with what stickers.

Product knowledge aside. Disney blew up a world I had read about, obsessed over and cared about deeply. All that effort, all the time (and money) was worthless – so I tapped out. [Media property name] wan’t my friend.

I’ve seen the new films obviously, but I have no emotional attachment to them, or in fact the older movies.
As I’ve grown older I don’t even like films as a medium any more, or TV for that matter. The Dark Knight ruined contemporary cinema in 2008. Speed Racer was the much much better movie that year.

Spider-Man’s MCU No Deal Webxit

In the Spiderman Webxit episode: I re-articulated some of my thoughts from the episode above, talked about toxic fan wars and for the first time explored the idea ‘Cultural Fracking’ .

A term which funnily enough makes an appearance in this months Lightspeed magazine by way of Andrew Dana Hudson. He is interviewed about his Voice of Their Generation short story that involves the movie titled ‘Detective Pikachu vs. Predator’

In the interview Hudson sums up cultural fracking succinctly:

“Cultural Fracking”—the capitalist process of endlessly extracting new value out of the sedimentary layers of meaning that comprise mass culture from the past.

ADH – Lightspeed Magazine (Issue 119)

I explored Cultural Fracking in more detail during my talk at Unsound Festival 2019 in Poland. I’m dropping an edit of my transcript below as I’m also trying to write about Cultural Fracking for Holum Press. This blog post seems like an excuse to construct a first draft.

Today everyone knows or gets Simpsons quotes. Even if they haven’t seen the episode that they come from. Or people get that “I’ll be back” is a reference to the Terminator even if they wen’t born at the time of the movies release. Meaning from a time Pre-internet. When there was a high chance that everyone was exposed to the same media. And so society/culture shared memetic grammars.

One of the challenges that a company like Disney faces in the age of the internet is that is becoming harder and harder to make money from them. The reason being; Franchises were created in a media environment where everyone would have been exposed to them and would therefore have shared the cultural grammar.

What’s happening today is that companies sell narrative/stories as a commodity. To extract value from them media organisations have to continually return to or frack the sedimentary layers of meaning. These elements of shared grammar in mass culture in order to continue to make money.

Their business model relies on selling to mass culture. So any new product has to continually reference something from a time when everyone shared the same mass culture still existed. In order for a mass cultural product to be attractive, it is required to meet the shared expectations of the audience.

It’s not that all the reboots, remakes and nostalgic mashups like Ready Player One are unoriginal. It’s that under the logic of a capitalist cultural monopoly, commodity owners have to continually frack the past from a time when a collective cultural grammer still existed to still make money.

SOLARPUNK – Life in the Future Beyond the Rusted Chrome of Yestermorrow

What I’ve just spent the last x mins talking about is people feeling emotionally invested in multinational conglomerates business deals about whether one character gets to appear in someone else’s story. neither of which the folks that consume those stories own.
…
Perhaps Marcuse was right, class consciousness IS all about aesthetics.

Spider-Man’s MCU No Deal Webxit

At the beginning of One-Dimensional Man Marcuse writes, “The people recognise themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment,” meaning that under capitalism (in consumer society) humans become extensions of the commodities that they buy, thus making commodities extensions of people’s minds and bodies.

Perhaps I have belaboured the point about story ownership. But its something I feel strongly about, and also the only thing missing from Whitbrook’s piece. As the points it raises dovetail so well with thinking about copyright and ownership of cultural property.

I think the reason people value content set in a story world as ‘canon’ is precisely because it is owned and controlled by one entity.

The owner of a media franchise represents a single sovereign source of truth for that story world. And we know that if there is an entity that gets to claim ‘truth’ of a story world or reality, then it will be appealed to. Again we bring up ‘people of the book’ Christianity, The Bible, and its different relationships to the apocrypha and the gnostic gospels etc.

But the Idea that a single entity gets to say what stories are and aren’t True/Canon in a story world (aside from the church) is a relatively new one.

This is not how stories have worked throughout the rest of human history

Tell me a tale

Here’s ol buddy ol pal Huw Lemmey writing in his newsletter Utopian Drivel on Storytelling last year ($) on Arthurian Legend and Robin Hood:

As an aside, I’m really looking forward to Dev Patel in A24’s Green Knight. I also look forward to (dread) the angry online nerds ranting about it for presumably racist and ill informed reasons. Also I will seek-out folks trying to apply canon rules to the mythos.
I also wonder how folks are going to handle Dev Patel as Sir Gawain launching into the MRA style rant he has in the castle about how he should “attack of all women for their deceptiveness and treachery” (W.Neilson Trans. 1999).

Ursula Le Guin writing in her forward for Tales from Earthsea in 2001 also says something similar to Huw Lemmey in 2019. Of particular note is the argument that characters have to be made safe (sanitised) due to corporate ownership, and how they are treated as commodities.

There are however some story worlds in 2020 that don’t operate with arbitrators of truth. I would be interesting to draw up a 2×2 of worlds in the popular imagine and classify them by the amount of agency fans of the series are perceived to have. This might be fun, but it is an exercise for another day.

In the meantime I’ve picked two off the top of my head that still operates as a story world open to audience agency.

The Canon-thulhu Mythos.

It seems you can’t shake a stick at anything on kickstarter made by fans right now without a bit of Tentacle or Eldritch horror falling out. Creeping horror our environment and collective psyche aside

There are two reasons for this:

1. Lovecraft was extremely generous with his own works and actively encouraged others to borrow ideas from his stories, particularly with regard to his Cthulhu mythos. By “wide citation” he hoped to give his works an “air of verisimilitude”, and actively encouraged other writers to reference his creations, such as the Necronomicon, Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth. After his death, many writers have contributed stories and enriched the shared mythology of the Cthulhu Mythos, as well as making numerous references to his work. 
2. Lovecraft’s work/mythos is out of copyright. Most of Lovecraft’s works that were published in the amateur press are most likely now in the public domain.

The Lovecraft story world IS a collective property. A world in which stories are collectively told. The same characters can come round and round again in different formations, with different emphasis. Without fear of corporate reprisal.

It also (to my mind) seems to be treated differently from the canon craving world of Sherlock Holmes. There IS a list of lovecrafts work, but as a fandom (eugh I really hate that word) they prefer to focus on the ‘Greater Cthulhu Mythos’. A poster on reddit a few years ago craving canon asked the following question.

Q: New to the Cthulu Mythos, how do you decide what’s canon or not?
Isn’t anything not written by Lovecraft technically just fanfiction, no matter how well known? What distinguishes the accepted books from something on fanfiction.net?

This line of thinking was quickly disabused and diffused wonderfully:

A: The Cthulhu Mythos is a shared universe. While Lovecraft’s work is indisputably at the center of it, he was constantly sharing ideas with other writers and encouraging them to join in. It grew from there, and continues to grow.

I personally don’t concern myself with what’s “canon” or not at all. What’s important is how entertained I am by what I’m reading.

I personally don’t particularly like Lovecraft (I know I know) and its world, I’ve never really seen the attraction. But I have always liked seeing the world re-conjured and remade with every person that plays in that world. whether it be RPGs, short collections, film, art, or whatever.

The Cthulhu Mythos’ popularity in 2020 (in my mind) however has nothing to do with the enduring themes of the world itself, and can instead be almost solely be attributed to the lack of copyright in the later part of the 20th Century. And most importantly the lack of permission needed to explore/play in its story world/mythos.

Grimdark

In my estimation, since the D-day explosion of the Star Wars Expanded Universe. The story world of Warhammer 40k owned by Games Workshop is possibly the biggest coherent story world of any franchise in the world.

It is of course owned by a single entity, but as a company they have a very laissez faire attitude towards canon. They approach things with an eye toward what is true ‘In Universe’. Given that in the world of 40k there’s 10k years of history, most of it lost. Means that its ALL myth, rumour, and unreliable narrators. As fans, who read the books, and rulebooks etc. We know more about the universe of 40k than its inhabitants.

Whitbrook again:

It’s an attitude that has become predominant not just within fandom circles itself, but in the media commentary that has developed around these fandoms and the blockbuster franchises that dominate our popular culture. Critics and fans alike are now less interested in actually interpreting a piece of media thematically or to engage with why they liked or disliked it, but instead to pick it apart and break it down to the base components of what are, essentially, its pure, unflinching facts. Google Star Wars or the Marvel movies and you will likely see as many articles and videos with headlines like “X Confirms Y is Canon,” “X Questions Answered By [New Media],” or “X Things We Learned About Character Z in This New Book/Movie/TV Show” as you will critical essays about these stories, if not more.

Our Fascination With Canon Is Killing the Way We Value Stories

The concern with canon of course is present in the Warhammer 40k community online too. So when you read a 40k novel or whatever there’s plenty of published material that contradicts other material. This definitely winds up a certain segment of the fanbase no end. As they expect the world to operate like the MCU or something. You only need to search ‘canon’ in the 40k lore subreddit to see how obsessed some elements of the quote unquote ‘fandom’ are.

One of the most important points in the io9 essay I think is the following:

But this craving for it above all else is a toxic attitude, not just to the way we talk about pieces of media from a critical perspective, but in fan circles as well. The hunger for facts above all else leads to things like “filler episode” becoming a derogatory term for stories that don’t advance the larger ongoing plot of a narrative or don’t include some shocking new revelation that someone can add to a list. It predicates the gatekeeping act of being a fan that is built on how much you know about a thing over whether you actually enjoy that thing or not.

Our Fascination With Canon Is Killing the Way We Value Stories

Games Workshops world of warhammer 40k isn’t supposed to have a canon. It grew out of a RPG and is a story world primarily concerned with allowing people to play their own games, and tell their own stories inside their world.

As far as I’m concerned: All fan fiction for Warhammer is basically unverified canon. It’s just as valid as the official stuff tbh. All the deaths of main characters on the table top due to poor dice roles is canon. Roboute Guilliman the Primarch of the Ultramarines has died a 1000 times across 1000 tabletops. And he will continue to die over and over again. My Ork Nob from Gorkamorka ‘Ardy Ed Nutter’ was brutally cut down in glorious chaos multiple times, and he was alive again the next week to try again.

There is something horrible awful about folks that like to think their knowledge of a story world is proportional to their love of it. I get/appreciate the tendency. But you don’t need to be a fanatical twitcher to love birds.

People craving canon IS really toxic. In addition to being a tool for gatekeeping, it also prevents people from speculating on, or reflecting on the material. Themes, Cultural Critique or even pointing out that a characters arc is very similar to another archetype or borrowed greek myth is frowned upon by those who crave canon. When you read online posts, or watch commentary on youtube of films etc, it seems that the motivations of characters in a story world are only allowed to exist within their own closed story ecosystem, blind to the context of culture at large.

You are not allowed to say “I think Batman installing illegal and hidden surveillance software on everyones phones in Gotham is extremely bad” without being shouted down. And believe me when I say I have been on the receiving end of the shouting.

I agree wholeheartedly with Whitbrook again when he points out:

It’s an attitude that in turn feeds the equally unruly and constantly growing spoiler culture because a fandom that values pure details above all else puts weight in the knowledge of those details. The need robs discussions about the stories we get of nuance and interpretation, because who cares what you think happened when there’s an answer from the Word of God to that question you might have had? And more sinisterly, beyond the way it shapes our discourse, it’s a craving that further enmeshes our love of a world not to the world itself, but to the masters behind that world.

Our Fascination With Canon Is Killing the Way We Value Stories

I could double the length of this already bloated post by really getting into spoiler culture and spoilers. Instead I’ll point you towards Whitbrook again. and just say.

Spoiler culture is insane.

I really don’t care about spoilers at all. Why does anyone care about them? or not knowing whats going to happen? This 2014 article by Hestia Peppe on spoilers is really great:

It recently occurred to me that the whole thing about spoilers is that they pretty much constitute a gag on critical discussion of narrative in public. This happened at an academic conference panel on ‘sitting with uncomfortable ideas’ in which a popular Netflix series was raised as a point of intersection between two complex ideas and was met with literal screams of “No Spoilers! Please!” and the discussion instantly and by consensus ceased entirely. As someone who’d seen the series in question and was mourning the lost opportunity to triangulate a rather disjointed conversation, I turned to my friend and said, “can you imagine that happening in a discussion of English Literature?”

The Shimmering Go-Between – Lee Klein

I was talking about the plot of the previously mentioned Green Knight movie in the pub (back when we were still allowed outside) and several friends at the table got cross about spoilers. I’m really not sure that you can shout “Spoilers” or spoil about a 14th-century Arthurian poem that has a deep ongoing influence on European culture. I would even go as far to say (IMO) that any hard boiled crime or cyberpunk hero has a bit of Sir Gawain in them. In the poem he has no inward, moral, emotional, and spiritual qualities and there is little evidence in the story that any inward qualities matter much to him at all. Just like ‘DOOM guy’ tbh.

The same also happened to me with Dune. It’s a 55 year old book??? But apparently because it’s going to be a movie this/next year I’m not allowed to talk about one of my favourite books.

In almost all cases, (I believe) narrative and the types of worlds those narratives are situated in are enriched by foreknowledge and pre critique. throughout all of history it would have been the same stories re-spun by someone with a good imagination and loud voice over and over again. Everyone round the campfire or in the pub would have been familiar with stories being told. And in the more recent past it would have been the stories and parables of the Bible. It blows my mind that people don’t immediately see the story of the Nativity In Children of Men, or the Christ Allegory in Robocop. Anyways…

Spoiler culture and the associated ‘post eventum’ craving for facts do indeed rob discussion of stories of nuance and interpretation.

For example going into the new Dune films knowing that the whole damn thing is a critique of power, and the savour narrative would benefit everyone. Especially the hot take discourse that has already even started before the movie has come out about saviour narratives. The author told us explicitly what this story was about.

It’s only possible to consume media like this if you thinking in a post modern mode. Spoiler Culture, and Craving of Canon are in many ways children of Derrida. There is ‘Nothing Outside the Text’. And yet, the ownership of culture as a commodity is still in a Modernist mode.

The rise and rise of Table Top and DnD role play I think is one of the first green shoots in this regard. It is/was a return to collective story telling that grew up alongside Drama’s deletion of the performer spectator divide in the 1970’s to create something that was in fact premodern.

So What Do?

The ownership of culture by corporations and the lack of agency that the people who love and consume that culture in the modern world is a problem that needs solving with some urgency. How do we do that? What does it even mean to have agency in a story world?

I’m obviously going to bang a Solarpunk drum in the closing paragraphs of this #GNDN blogpost. Perhaps fortuitously timed as a small/short response to Paul Graham Ravens recent and extremely thoughtful post on solarpunk.

Solarpunk is a collective ‘memetic engine’. A cultural construct or media tool to power and provide the ‘re-futuring’ of our collective imaginations.

This is narrative as a battleground. Guerrilla war against those who get to tell stories of the future, what kinds, and who gets to own them. Solarpunk as genre (or mode) is an Memetic Engine to spin out new futures int he minds of people who encounter the genre. Designed to self-replicate.

(…)

Solarpunk as a collective is ‘worlds’ first. Possible worlds, desirable worlds, or worlds in which humanity works feverishly to avoid other ones. These are all worlds that we can step into for a moment at any time. It is a set of narratives and stories / books second. The only canon is the tale of the tree you planted, or the cover crop you sowed.

One of the key words in the Solarpunk community is Polyphony. Above all one cannot speak for other Solarpunks, only be in dialogue and occasional chorus with them. Dissonance brings texture to this world.

The solarpunk community as I see it talks about the worlds it creates as being concerned with the “struggles en route to a better world”. It does not reduce climate change to a singular event but understands it as an unfolding process or crisis and opportunity..

Within Solarpunk you will find a diversity of opinion on what ‘better’ even means. It isn’t one total future or world. Its many many local ones.

This frustrates many of its critics. But thats ok. Living with indeterminacy is the biggest feature of all our futures real or imagined. It is not a bug. 

Solarpunk as Memetic Engine – Jay Springett – Unpublished 🙁

I’m not entirely sure that I personally have any concrete proposals other than encouraging others to write, tell and create their own stories. Build worlds with friends and colleagues. Play in them, test them, and discard them if they don’t work for you.

But pick a story world you would like to spend some time in and walk backwards facing it until you reach today. This also includes your street, window sill and community etc.

Or pick multiple futures and worlds that could be possible. Find fellow travellers who likes the destination and and set off together.

Craving Canon (Redux)

Update!

Following a brief DM thread with Matt from xenogothic.com regarding the several off hand allusions to the influence of Christianity on the craving for canon. I explored it a little bit more during this weeks podcast:

The post Craving Canon appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I had written a whole long post on Reality Drift. The TLDR is: 

Five minutes ago you were shouting about Brexit and suddenly there’s literal communists on television asking if billionaires should even exist. 

I thought it was quite funny and informative, but WordPress swallowed it. I’m not sure what happened but I assume its to do with self hosting not being as reliable as .com. I’ve probably fucked up my cache settings or something like that.

On Monday night I went for dinner with the good Ahmet A Sabanci. We went for vegan burgers and drank a few fine beers. The whole evening was characterised by really good/interesting conversation. A real pleasure to meet him!

I’ve also been working hard on this years Nanowrimo. It is a bit different mentally when you have spend the best part of a year writing with daily word counts.
I’m doing something a bit different this year however. Back in 2015 I wrote an ebook about corporations.

It was absolutely wild at the time, written during a manic phases shortly after returning from Transmediale. I said on twitter that I might post it as an ebook online somewhere. Maybe I might use SSR zine as a venue for it. 

I re-read it during October and whilst its full of good ideas, I don’t think that it’s very good. 29 year old me wasn’t very good at articulating himself and tried to adopt some kind pseudo academic prose. What I have decided to do it rewrite the whole thing as part of Nanowrimo. Then in early December I will go back and merge the two documents as part of the editing process. Whatever I eventually put out will a collaboration between 29 year old me and 34 year old me. It’s been really fun revisiting some old ideas etc. We’ll see if anyone else thinks it’s fun when I drop the PDF.

This weeks podcast is actually part of the document. As I wasn’t going to waste my words as part of Nanowrimo on a podcast that wasn’t furthering the main goal! Its slightly strange and disjointed by I hope you enjoy the 5min rant on Temporary Total Institutions

Permanently Moved

Temporary Total Institutions

S2E32
Thinking out loud about how all these things have institutionalisation in common: Asylums, Care Homes, Prisons, Yoga Retreats, Cruise Ships and the Workplace.

—
Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Website: https://thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

I had a whole section on how nightclubs are temporary total institutions. The dance floor as an institutionalised space. Predicable and well understood roles between members of the organisation. DJ’s, Club Goers, Bar Staff etc. The security on the door represent the permeable physical barrier etc I cut it for time. But foolishly deleted it.
Now I’ve made so many changes in the gDoc I can’t find it. I’ve tried to go back and find the paragraph to no avail. Mercury ret in scorpio innit.

Dipping the Stacks

‘Awful Business’ Or The New Gold Rush? The Most Valuable Companies In Esports Are Surging

The first map of America’s food supply chain is mind-boggling

Scientists Now Know How Sleep Cleans Toxins From the Brain | WIRED

The social ideology of the motorcar – Uneven Earth

The Ministry

I’ve had a busy week with PROJECT NOVA. If you follow them on instagram then the back of my head was captured in a story they posted. One person messaged me to ask if it was me. Lol
Been in to the office twice this week. I’m going to spend a few hours this weekend working on a spreadsheet. FUN

I’m thinking about looking for a recruiter that might help me in the new year. If anyone knows a good recruiter for London weirdos please let me know

I’ve also been informed that if you Google my name Google Podcasts seems to think this blog is a podcast feed because I was posting Permanently Moved here as an audio embedded. I’m going to go back and update all the posts at some point with the Libsyn iFrame with the hope it will kill the search result. 

Reading

I’m still plugging away at Playing At The World. It’s a fantastic book.

I read Knights of Macragge. It’s a two part story. Part sci-fi ghost/horror story and part spooky star trek away mission set in the Warhammer 40k universe. It’s a fun read, i always think of ultramarines as British ‘what’s all this then’ policemen type caricatures and because of that head canon some of the moments in this book are funny when they should probably be more ‘horror’.

Music

The new Sunn 0))) EP has basically been the soundtrack to dark early evening tube and train rides this week. Frost is my favourite. But that might because I like the key of C.

Remember kids:

The post Reality Drift appeared first on thejaymo.net.

September 27, 2019

|

Narratives 📖 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Sorcery 🧞

S2E26

This show was a big bite to take, make and chew within one hour but ah well:

Technology and Ritual
Ritual needs sacrifice
Storytelling and Mythos
The story becomes alive in its telling
Our ancestors would struggle to see mythology as separate from ritual

—
Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

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Ritual and Storytelling

When I sat down 35mins ago to make this show I was fully intending to talk about: Meditation Habits, Sacred Time and Sacred Space. But where I’ve ended up is: Ritual and Storytelling. I can already make out the sound of atheists and materialists cringing on the wind.

Whether you like it or not Witchcraft and Astrology are having their moments in the sun. And the least surprising thing about 2019 is Marianne Williamson running for president. 

Until recently I’ve found is that any mention of ritual or sacred has been dismissed as culty or treated with suspicion. But I’ve noticed some quote unquote thought leaders saying things like ‘Technology-as-Ritual” recently. Valley bros trying to think piece up James Carey’s Ritual As Technology. 

As we live through the collapse and are forced to confront the natural world. Subjects like The Sacred and Ritual will have to unpack in our culture in new ways in the next decade. 

Quote unquote ‘Established religions’ don’t have a monopoly on Ritual. Nor do social scientists or anthropologists.

Ritual belongs to all of us. Both collectively and individually. 

By now we all understand that technology neither works nor signifies the same in every place or culture. And If it does. It is often because the environment has been moulded to suit the technologies needs not the cultures. The reverse of Don Norman’s line in Living with Complexity. “We must design for the way people behave, not for how we would wish them to behave.”

Ritual and technology are both manifestations of local desires. They include complex ordering mechanisms. They both signify their beginning, verify and communicate their successful operation.

Ritual like technology is as integral to processes of knowing, doing and making. As it is to the production of symbolic meaning.

Unfortunately. It’s become very common for people use ‘rituals’ interchangeably with ‘routines’.

The entrepreneur dot com has “10 Bedtime Rituals That Help You Reflect, Relax, Sleep and Succeed”. Maybe this is something to do with spicing up copy up in the click bait age that causes this..

But there is an important difference between the two. One of them generates meaning, the other doesn’t.

Given that definition. I can hear you all shout “Then everything CAN be a ritual” and I would agree. But CAN is a word that’s doing a lot of the heavy lifting. One can imbue a routine with meaning and make it a ritual. Whether you SHOULD or not is an open question.

But rituals don’t just generate meaning. They also require one other element. Sacrifice. 

As Will Newsome says:

All rituals have a sacrifice. The default one is time.

Will Newsome

If you go back and look at the bedtime routines with the two tests of meaning and sacrifice. Most of them struggle to be minimum viable ritual.

Because what you find in ritual is an act of meaning that resonates with, and echoes out to the wider universe. That meaning can also flow both ways.   

Reading aloud can be Ritual. Drama. Dance. As can a whole host of things.

An effective ritual creates a two way resonance between the audience and the performer. Black rod showing up in parliament the other week showed the aliveness of resonant ritual.

To Recap:

Like that meme, let’s take a screeching exit at the sign marked storytelling.

Starwars or the MCU is a quote and quote mythos. One that contains warmed over archetypes taken from children’s comics. Going to the cinema to watch a movie meets ritual criteria for many. It generates meaning in their lives AND is a sacrifice of time and money. People resonate with the characters that are being invoked during the movie. The characters however don’t resonate with them.

I’ve said before that deep engagement with mythos should give people agency within those realms. If someone else owns the stories then it’s not possible as the resonance is only one way. 

There however other ‘story universes out there’ that are two way. The most OG of all is the night sky. 

The Night Sky Is A Story Universe

The dance of the stars, constellations, planets and the moon is a vast cosmic soap opera that changes from day. When you pay attention, the sky is alive with meaning. 

You don’t have to quote unquote even ‘believe’ in horoscopes to follow along. There is a whole cast of characters in the night sky that resonate with you personally, assigned in certain ways at the moment of your birth. 

Over our heads is a cast of cosmic characters. Interacting dynamically. A story alive in the present moment that you can watch play out. You don’t need to go out and buy a T-shirt. But you already have a team so you might as well follow along. 

And just as you can resonate with the characters in the sky, the positions of the characters resonate with you. You have agency in the cosmic story itself as you are part of that story in the witnessing. This is story as ritual. Alive in its telling. It has it sacrifice (being alive), meaning and resonance. 

The reason the story in the stars as ritual is important. Is because our ancestors would struggle to define mythology as something separate from ritual. This is the toolkit that all our other narrative tools live inside.

If you managed to follow along, then we should demand a great deal more from the storytellers in our culture.  

It is sacrifice, that generates the meaning, in the moment of the act. The act causes resonance.

The story becomes alive in its telling

The script above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

The post Ritual and Storytelling | 1926 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Last weeks podcast was about ‘cultural fracking’ and how the purveyors and controllers of mass media culture can only continue to make money by fracking the past. Content from a time when mass culture still existed. As their business model relies on their audience being inside a shared reality or shared cultural grammar.

When I murdered Gramchi saying “The new cannot be born whilst the corpse of the old is being constantly ressutated to perform again and again onstage“. I was speaking figuratively. But with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino being de-aged for The Irishman. I suppose… I was also speaking literally too?

So this morning brings the news that Kygo has released a track with the late great Whitney Houston. Now, it’s only because of the video that I find this out the song has been on the radio all summer apparently. Anyway the video is tool that we need to think with further.

Higher Love is an (almost unreleased) cover of Steve Winwood’s 1986 track off the same name. Originally recorded for her album ‘I’m Your Baby’. Her segue into R&B queen from pop queen had already begun in the marketing so it was left of the release.

I’ve listened to the track a few times this morning already. Kygo is obviously the perfect necproducer to take the vocal tracks from 1990 into 2019. After all his Marvin Gaye Sexual Healing remix launched his career back in 2013.

Everything about this Whitney x Kygo track is fascinating:

In the podcast last week I also talked briefly about with the breaking down of our ‘shared cultural grammar’ that has actually caused an explosion in creativity. This new Kygo track is a prefect example of this (remember he did the Marvin Gaye track without permission, the new Whitney Huston track is an opportunity-as-extension of that track tbh)

Observations about the track:

I mean.. It’s a Kygo track – enough said? The tropical Kygo sound I can usually take or leave tbh. I overdosed on it in 2014/5. But it’s Kygo, so you know what you’re get.

He largely leaves her vocals alone in the verses, which I totally understand.
Side note: If you have ever tried to construct a track around Hustons vocals A common challenge on music production forums. Usually with the isolated vocals from ‘How will I know’ – I have two versions of my own attempts from the early 2010’s in deep storage

In the post chorus bridge he pops in with chopped vocals repeating the ‘higher love’ refrain. Plus this section makes it extremely 2019 with all the big room compression going on around the snare.

The track sonically is 2019 obviosuly. If you listen with a good pair of headphones it is kinda clear that the vocal recording was done with different aesthetics in mind. I suspect that he had to work with the reverb.

The tracks great and would be a stand out Kygo track in his catalogue but I really wouldn’t say its that ‘special’ though – Apart from the inclusion of Whitney Houston from the archives. All in all its a great track. I bet he’s really proud.

About that video tho..

The video isn’t just a nostalgic love fest for a time before Kygo was born (1991) – its vocal track is older than he is.. The video directed by Hannah Lux Davis is fracking our cultural grammar.

Go back and watch it again. This time hear your brain ping with subconscious nostalgic Grammer every time you see something you know.

OMG HUGE MOBILE PHONE

OMG SHARP GF 9191 Radio Cassette

OMG AEROBICS VIBES + DELORIAN!!!

OMG FLASH DANCE

There’s loads of other dance refrences from movies etc + many other visual ones. I just can’t be assed to list them all.

Plus, let’s not forget that the video stars Vanessa Morgan from Riverdale. A show that plays with atemporal cultural grammar in a way that is extremely effective – See also its cousin show Sabrina.

Basically I don’t like the video at all.

Nostalgia is an emotion. In the middle ages it was considered a disease. This videos attempt to conjure 90s nostalgia but feels ‘fracked’. Leveraging blatantly transparent (to my eye) cultural cues. It try;s an evoke an emotion from the viewer around the setting, its place and time. Of Whitney in her early ascendancy.

Now, It may be that I was actually alive when all these references were current – so maybe im just old and this is the tropey 90’s setting feels the same way to me as war films about WW2 would have felt to my grandad.

But I’m not so sure.

It ‘feels’ to me and I’m going to use the word ‘fracked’ again that the reason it is so pronounced is A Because the song itself uses 30 year old vocal tracks. B it’s a world contained inside a 5min music video which means all the tricks used to sell you a coherent world that no longer exists are compressed and tightened heightening the compression.

Alternatively, Now I’m running out of steam on this thought – that cultural fracking works as a metaphor at cultural level: Reboots of home alone, starwars, transformers, MCU from 70 year old comic book characters, etc

But becomes a different sort of thing at the low end when crafting a world. On the other hand for example the movie MID90S by Jonah Hill felt far more natural in its temporal setting, and not trying to evoke any forced Nostalgia or profit from shared expectations.

So I dunno.

The post Fracking Whitney appeared first on thejaymo.net.

After writing on the Accelerationist political compasses last week I thought I’d make my own. The above is a kaleidoscopic compass of speculative multispecies imaginaries.

I made it with Dr Christoph Rupprecht from Doshisha & Kyoto University. Consider it an output from the “multi species cities” research stream his department have. (although he informs me ‘Meme’ is not a check box available to him in his system)

Of course it being made by the two of us, everything is footnoted in a document. Literally every square has two or more references to ideas, concepts, writers or thinkers in this space. I also threw in some Gordon White and M1k3y too obviously.

We’ve been thinking about maybe writing a whole essay together but I’m not sure.

Also Huw Lemmey had some nice words to say about Permanently Moved in his subscriber newsletter Utopian Drivel this week :

I would like to write more informally for this newsletter. I’m also thinking about doing a regular five minute podcast recorded outside, on location, which I might well release on this platform. If you have any thoughts about that, let me know — the idea comes partially from @thejaymo’s compelling podcast ‘301 – Permanently Moved’, a personal podcast 301 seconds in length. He writes, records and edits it every week in one hour, and following its development has been so interesting for me, its bitesize format allowing for short and punchy snippets of information.

I’m sure he won’t mind me saying that not every episode is for everyone, but they’re short enough that you listen anyway, following the ebb and flow of his intellectual life on a weekly basis. Having that constant this year has helped ground my own writing, but also I have noticed that I’m becoming a bit of a shut-in here in Barcelona (always a bad habit and function of my mental health), so perhaps a regular short podcast on life outside would, at the very least, be good for me. Stay tuned, and, in the meantime, do subscribe to Jay’s podcast. Three highlights for me have been:

[Media property name] isn’t your friend
Stella Maris
Remembrance

I had coffee with the artist Penny Goring in Kingston today. It was super good to meet her IRL finally despite living round the corner from her and knowing her online for nearly a decade.

Permanently Moved

Pretty pleased with this weeks show. A few folks have said that they were nodding along with the argument about the end of history and how purveyor of mass media culture can only continue to do so by fracking content from a time that it still existed.

Though I did make a whole podcast just because I thought of the word Webxit during the week. Also disappointed in the comic books media for not using it as a headline

Dipping the Stacks

Profile: Bob Kramer of Kramer Knives Is Just Getting Started • Gear Patrol

Dropping Out: Why and How? | Meta-Nomad

I Tried to Live Like Joe Rogan – The Atlantic

NYU professor Scott Galloway calls WeWork ‘WeWTF,’ slams bankers

The Ministry

TBA

Reading

Atomic habits was a little better than first impressions. Had some good ideas that I’m going to take with me.

Spear of the Emperor is hands down one of the best 40k novels. Not for beginners but if you know the universe the lore etc its fantastic.

I’ve finally started reading Dark Emu

I’m finally reading Dark Emu. And its fantastic.

Music

Club music are great.

Also been listening to a lot of this new track by Fire-Toolz. It’s all over the place and extremely my shit.

Remember kids:

The post Salvage/Rescue appeared first on thejaymo.net.

August 23, 2019

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Culture 🏛️ | Narratives 📖 | Permanently Moved 🔊

S2E21

The Disney vs Sony Webxit negotiations. 

Gramsci, Cultural Fracking and, fans being dispossessed of their stories by private interests

This episode follows directly on from 1914 [Media property name] isn’t your friend.

 —

You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

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Spider-Man’s MCU No Deal Webxit

Last week I neglected to mention that my most listened to show by quite some margin is Episode 1914 – [Media property name] isn’t your friend. If you are new around here and haven’t heard it, well, that episode serves as a foundation from which we build todays precarious scaffold of ideas.

So it with my greatest regrets that I must inform you, that people are mad about something on the internet.

This week amongst many other unimportant things brings us news that two members of the corporate cultural oligarchy are at loggerheads over the licensing of Spiderman. 

Squinting from my cave entrance,it appears that 4 years ago Disney and Sony brokered a deal to share the character of Spider-Man (Owned by Sony) that involved Disney co-financing Spidey movies in exchange for a share of profits. So far so good movies apparently. Now. That deal has apparently reached term with negotiations having broken down. Without a deal Spidey has to Webxit from the MCU and people are really mad.

Now, let me be clear: I don’t particularly have a spider in this web at all. I haven’t seen a Spiderman movie since Tobey Maguire battled Willem Dafoe or whoever.

But here’s what the reaction to this news has been like from people that do care.

*Clip of extremely angry nerds*

The key word in that clip is OUR characters.

Previously, I spoke about how deep engagement with fictional worlds should give people agency within them. But when our entire culture is privatised – what can people do when they don’t own it other than fold it into the culture war? 

More sinisterly are the headlines that both Sony and Disney are weaponising the collective outrage of fans to further their contract negotiations. There’s petitions and all sorts of madness going on.

On one side: Apparently fans want to quote unquote storm Sony HQ and ‘bring their boy home’ to the MCU.

On the other, you have the literal stan stans siding with Sony as Stan Lee’s Daughter has fallen on that side of the argument. 

And then you have an important third actor which is the vast swam of Bots Helping #SaveSpiderMan Trend. 

On that front, both sets of fans have speculated that Disney is behind the bots in an attempt to turn public sentiment against Sony. Given the concurrent and ongoing Amazon Brand Ambassador shenanigans it isn’t that far fetched. The contemporary media environment is totally controlled and manipulated.

Perhaps we should be storming Exxon’s HQ and petitioning Brazillian embassies over the destruction of the Amazon. But I digress.

Basically what I’ve just spent the last X mins talking about is people feeling emotionally invested in multinational conglomerates business deals about whether one character gets to appear in someone else’s story. neither of which the folks that consume those stories own.

The solution I offered last time was to roll your own culture and tell your own. 

But it is exactly the telling of, and what kind of stories that are currently being told that we need to interrogated today. 

Sometimes in my more offhand moments I have a recurring thought that haunts me every freaky friday like the night of the living dead, but I have great expectations that hopefully im wrong. 

Maybe Francis Fukuyama was right. 

Lots of folks seem to have noticed that in many respects, the mass culture that we share is stuck. Reappropriating Gramchi I would say that: the new cannot be born whilst the corpse of the old is being constantly resuscitated to perform again and again onstage.

Years ago now Laurie Penny wrote something like “on the internet all cultural history is happening concurrently, all at once” – and it’s stuck with me. 

If you’re into Cool Jazz and want to iterate but don’t step to Jazz Fusion then go for it, fork the genre at 1955 into 2019. Our nice neat cultural historical timelines of evolution and revival are broken.

This shattering of individual interests has actually caused an excess of creativity. It’s not that all the reboots, remakes and nostalgic mashups like Ready Player One (no i haven’t seen the movie) are unoriginal. It’s that under the logic of a capitalist cultural monopoly, commodity owners have to continually frack the past from a time when a collective cultural grammer still existed to still make money.

They have to return mass culture to a time when their business model still worked

And the culture that is being fracked suffers deeply from what Jeannette Ng (ing) said in her Campbell award speech this week: its Sterile. Male. and White.

This requirement of stable expectation kinda holds true in video games where the idea of east/west forever war is fracked as much as shooting nazis. The Richard and Judy book club probably full stops an era of a shared experience in literature circa 2008.

When I was talking about this with sci fi author Andrew Dana Hudson yesterday he observed that perhaps Marcuse was right, class consciousness IS all about aesthetics. 

The use of the word “OUR characters” in that clip is a concrete recognition that the public is being constantly dispossessed of its stories by private interests. Because people recognise themselves in their commodities what we seeing with Webxit is an unarticulated response to alienation.

The only solution is to roll your own culture, it’s hard.

Avoid Imperial Entanglements.

Don’t get mad about other people’s stories.

Tell your own.

The script above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

The post Spider-Man’s MCU No Deal Webxit | 1921 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Jump to the Essay

This week has been a week of difference influences swelling and receding like overlapping waves on the beach.

I’ve had on many hats for a few hours at a time this week.

I had a skype call with a narrative director of a large MMO about doing some work with them, which devolved into a conversation about Games Workshop finally listening to 40 years of customer complaints before we could really talk about the nature of the work.

I was supposed to meet up for drinks with a ‘eerie ecology/film/geography/nonhuman art&research filmaker’. But had to move it to next week.

I also spoke to a VC briefly about maybe doing some strategy work with them, we’ll see how that goes too.

I also went to the Proms on Tuesday as the parents unfortunately couldn’t go themselves. Pretty standard week.

As I mentioned last week I’ve started making music again. This week I spent 2 evenings refreshing my memory on how to build synths from scratch. I was using the principles of subtractive synthesis in Renoise

Permanently Moved

301 – 1920 – Episode 50 (Sprint Review)

S2E20

A nice round number seemed like a good time to review where I am at.

I discuss how the show has evolved, workflow, stats, “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor” and that making this weekly has done wonders for my psychological health.

—

You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Can’t believe I’ve made 50 of these so far. Big thanks to Warren for the idle morning.computer thought which became the catalyst for me last year to start making it.

Dipping the Stacks

Electric Boats Could Be Floating Batteries For Island Microgrids – IEEE Spectrum

Workers Seize the Shipyard That Built the Titanic, Plan to Make Renewable Energy There – VICE

As a shepherd, I know we have not ‘sheepwrecked’ Britain’s landscape
This whole article is basically “as a lumberjack, I know we haven’t over cut” 

German Peasants’ Song – Die Gedanken Sind Frei | Three Acres And A Cow

The Ministry

I started writing the half sketched bones of an essay to clarify my own thoughts that wasn’t going anywhere. As per this weeks podcast about pushing more stuff out I thought I’d flesh it out a bit and post it here

On Compasses and Quadrants

This week feels like the week that the weird Accelerationist political 4×4 compass levelled up out of cave twitter and went into wider consciousness.

The first in the genre I ever saw was on a friends computer at the workspace for “blockchain and utopian conspiracy Trust Support when I was speaking at P2P Web Berlin early last year.

This ACCompass came from Insta about a month ago

And this recent one is the one that has punched though.

I made a kinda-unhinged political compass of acceleration-assemblages. None of these are really mutually exclusive, but pick your preference! pic.twitter.com/4KG2QbTt78— Lilypatchwork (@Lilypatchwork) August 13, 2019

I should note that Lilypatchwork is a “post left is the most left” internet figure. They themselves pointed out the pipeline to this sort of worldview in a recent tweet

post/ultra-left ==> left-leaning u/acc ==> problematic g/acc

Note: G/acc BTW for the un-initiated stands for Gender Accelerationsist (IE: using gender’s own process of decay to destroy the gender class system) It’s like xenofems black goo mirror universe form. Anyway I’m pretty deep in these circles quite a few people have read my conspiracy essay and stacktivism stuff but its not relevant or where I was going – Back to the compasses:

I know many in the Milieu love the 2×2 for reasons that Venkat neatly summed up way back in 2009

The quadrant diagram has achieved the status of an intellectual farce. If you, as a presenter, do not make an ironic joke when you throw one on the screen, you will automatically lose a lot of credibility.

How to Draw and Judge Quadrant Diagrams

I have my own contribution to the genre as part of the Cross-quadrant Working Group when I was writing about Conspiracy Theories, the value of entertaining them, and why everyone needs a bootstrapped postmodern hermeneutics of their own back in 2016

Anyways, the good Ahmet A. Sabancı (in my head I always add the A. to his name) wrote the following in his most recent newsletter

Give Me More Compasses

Jay’s Twitter thread got me thinking about how we’re thinking about the future itself and how most of the mainstream conversation is stuck. Compasses over there names many different possibilities we might face or some of us even facing —maybe not as extreme as a sci-fi novel. I think one powerful side of compasses is the fact that it gives all options/possibilities at once, overloading the mind and forcing you to think about it.

I think that’s something we need more. Not always compasses but ways to push people to think about the futures we might face and start working on it. Although it might seem that all of those futures are far away but when you start thinking about it, you also understand that most of those possibilities are already here and rest is just 5 minutes bus ride away.

Compasses —especially the ones like the one here— with their design and the information density is something perfect for our current social media madness. It interrupts the clickbait and will-be-forgotten-tomorrow news and never-ending outrages with its weirdness and pulls people out of it. Of course one needs to take another step after seeing this but if we’re stuck with the current situation for now, I think best we can do is to make it as weird as possible. So that we can lure people to blogs, newsletters and other dark sides of the internet where real conversation happens. To at least try to break that banality of the future.

The bold points are my own, but also key here and I think speak for them selves.

It is exactly the “all options/possibilities at once” which makes them such fascinating memetic objects. Far more so than the tired pedestrian chaotic alignment charts you see floating around. #ACCompasses are an uplifted version of the 2×2 grid that have ascended beyond intellectual farce into the world of illusion and imagination.

In my opinion, one of the interesting judo moves that the X/Acc scene has been developing the last few years is to use weirdness as a bait/hook for the real praxis (even if the praxis is further speculation for now).

In the Acc world things aren’t weird for weirdness sake. But weird because the weirdness interrupts the clickbait attention feed. FWIW I think Haraway’s “Cthulhuscene” attempted this move in the academic world but largely fell before finished. “Tentacular Thinking” however…. influenced this information/meme dynamic deeply.

I’m inclined to see these compasses as one of the first direct examples of “Accelerationsist Anti-praxis” propaganda.

Anti-praxis consists of two basic principles: making political action as impersonal as possible and intensifying the actually existing processes of liberation and emancipation, without situating our actions within/against capitalism, but following those political vectors which point directly towards a possible exit.

Applying Applied Ballardianism

Mr Bloggy himself AKA Mat of xenogothic.com wrote a good piece late last year on anti praxis

One of the things I think is clear about this form of compass media object is that they rapidly open up new cognitive territory. But they also seize and claim the new territory the moment that you realise that it has formed in your brain. Like laying tarot cards of a kind you have never seen before on the table, and before you can read the spread shouting SNAP and pulling them back.

In the meme theory back channels I frequent this is known as “Ralphing”

Each and every box in those x/Acc political compasses is Ralphing cognitive territory. If just for a moment.

Again some more Xenogoth on anti-praxis this time quoting Land

Here we find the anti-praxis of U/Acc emerging into view. As space-time disintegrates, you have to make yourself worthy of the process. Land concludes:

Any perspective that can actually be realized has already been localized by serial breakages. Nothing begins with the whole, unless as illusion. Today, we know this both empirically and transcendentally. Anything not done in pieces is not done in profound accordance with reality.

I’m running the risk of putting woke words into Land’s mouth here but I think the implications are far clearer here than they have ever been. Expect frequent referrals back to this post in the future.

DISINTEGRATIVE COSMIC ACCELERATIONISM

The ACCompass Meme is an illusion. A whole Ralph memetic object of weirdness that is the summation of its individual Ralphs. One so powerful as to pull you, even just for a moment from the day to day algorymic media madness.

Note for readers who feel they are hallucinating. I highly recommend Xenogoths U/ACC primer

UPDATE: I made my own

Reading

I started reading Atomic Habits by James Clear this week.

It’s not very good at all. I wouldn’t bother with it if you have ever thought about wanting to read it. The whole books reads like an advert for his blog which itself is a vehicle advertising James Clear.

I have of course been inhaling more warhammer 40k books. I read the BobbyG Primark series book, and started Spear of the Emperor but I’m only like 12% of the way in.

Music

I’ve been enjoying Pharmakon’s new track Spit It Out this week. It’s a claustrophobic noise hammer of epic proportions.

Pharmakon is the solo experimental music project of Margaret Chardiet. Her 2017 album Contact was fantastic.

I’ve also been listning to the new Album Collab Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back by Uniform & The Body ITS FANTASTIC

Remember kids:

The post Half formed thoughts On ‘Ralphing’ and Compass Memes appeared first on thejaymo.net.

April 19, 2019

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Culture 🏛️ | Narratives 📖 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Sorcery 🧞

S02E06

Lord of the Rings is better than Game Of Thrones. The significance of sailing to ‘the west’ and its place in the modern collective unconscious

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You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

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LOTR is better then GOT

At the credits of the new Game of Thrones episode this week I loudly declared to everyone in the room that Lord of The Rings was better than Game of Thrones. Everyone disagreed and shook their heads at me. So used as they are to my arbitrary opinions.

So since Monday I’ve been thinking about the WHY Lord of The Rings is better or perhaps more important. So here we go….

Lord Of The Rings is THE definitive fantasy novel, and its impact on the world cannot be overstated. 

The important thing about Fantasy, perhaps the defining thing about Fantasy is that it contains magic. Fantasy re-mystifies the world, it allows us to reconsider or re-see the world through eyes that are completely open to magic and the mythical. A facet of our our culture that has been lost since the reformation and the age enlightenment.

A lot of people will go on at length about the themes and threads of Lord of The Rings. Tolkiens views towards landscape and criticisms of the industrial revolution and just stop there. This reading of the book in my opinion is lazy and boring and also not the main theme of story at all. 

There’s a lot to say on the interactions and synchronicities between Tolkien and Jung’s ideas, and I direct you to the work of Becca Tarnas to read more.

But for now let’s think about the collective unconscious or the imaginal realm.

Fantasy as a genre provides a safe container within which people can explore the world anew with eyes open. In fact the existence of magic in the medium is the clear mechanism that allows people to cross the boundary from quote unquote reality and enter the world of the fantastical.

What Lord of the rings is actually about is – that it is an ending. 

The entire story is about the fading or slipping away of magic and sorcery from the world and the coming of the Age of Men – ‘much what once was, is now lost’ and ‘the world is changed’ as the opening lines of the movie makes clear.

The defining point of the Return of the King is not the moment that the ring is cast into Mt Doom. But the departure of the folks from middle earth in the stories closing pages – when they sail to the west. 

The Dwarfs all sail, the Elves sail, Frodo sails, and Gandulf sails away too. They leave middle earth from the grey havens and sail across an ocean. Leaving behind them the time of men. 

The significant point of the story’s ending is that the characters aren’t dead. They have just gone away, to the west, and we can still reach them if only we know where to look or where to go. They remain alive in our imagination, just over the next hill as it were.

Tolkien installed these figures ‘In the west’ at the end of Lord of The Rings in our collective unconsciousness so they could remain forever alive.

Lord of The Rings is one of the first major works of 20C popular culture to reignite the mind of the pre-enlightenment. Tolkien largely abandoned his work of trying to create a mythological history of England, but instead he manifested a mythic reality into modernity and gave them space within our unconscious to continue to exist. Fantasy – again- is a safe container to explore the mindset of our ancestors.

To safely explore a world where people didn’t travel very much beyond the market, unless like frodo, they went on pilgrimage of their own that would take them well beyond the next hill. 

Secondly the super natural wasn’t even questioned: magic, clairvoyance, telepathy, saints, holy wells, spirits, demons were not held within a safe container of fantasy but very much real, alive and in the world. Observable in the comings and goings in ones everyday life. Our ancestors knew as much about the world around them by direct experience as we do – which when you are honest with yourself is actually very little, and like our ancestors the rest of our world is imagined. What happens in other parts of the world don’t happen to you everything else is imagined.

As much as it probably pains our quote unquote rational mind to admit it – this is the truth. I’ve never been to California, but I can imagine it as a real place that exists over the next hill from the clues and information i’ve received via movies, stories and people who come from there. But there really is no difference between the Los Angeles of my imagination and Minas Tirith. I apologise to residents of the City of Angels for my misapprehension of the finer details of their lives as much as i do to the citizens of Gondor.

There are just as many dragons on the edge of your own world map today as there were for the creator of the psalter world map in 1265. 

You see, when fundamentalists right essays about Lord of The Rings like “But it’s Only Fantasy! How Demonic Imaginations are Changing the Minds of a Generation.” they have a point and see something that the rationalists don’t.

With every iteration of Game of Thrones, HeroQuest, magic the gathering, Conan, and I hate to say it Harry-fucking-Potter, we summon these figures of the Mythical age back to the world of men. 

Tolkiens ‘the west’ continues to build in power every time we draw from it, with every episode of Game of Thrones that gets made, we make the lives of those that sailed out from middle earth and into our unconscious more powerful. And that’s why Lord of The Rings is better than Game of Thrones

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