I know I said I wouldn’t write for a while, but come on…give me a break. I’ve been blogging consistently since January 2006 (not just here—other places). It’s like a muscle reflex at this point! I’ll only be writing a few times a month, but that’s better than nothing!

I was probably late in hearing about the viral video “David After Dentist.” Or maybe not. I don’t really have a sense of “pop culture” anymore. I’ve watched television once in the past four months, and I’ve developed a heightened aversion to the daily news flow. I do know that this has already been on “Tosh.O,” and I think that says something. There’s also the fact that it had 3 million views within the first few days of being online.

Anyways, I mention this video in an essay inspired by the film Inception that I just finished. My first thought: it’s so funny that YouTube is now like America’s Funniest Home Videos, but for the entire world. Second, what a clear image of complete existential horror! Can’t help but laughing, even though (*shudder*) I’ve sometimes felt this way. What I didn’t consider the first time I watched it is that he was probably terrified by the dentist! That experience still scares the dung out of me.

I suddenly find myself wrapped up in a project that could very well become a book. I can’t say too much about it yet, but it’s an exploration the spot where I think we’re stuck as a civilization. The basic idea came to me on July 2, and since then I’ve been working like a mad man, researching and taking notes.

It’s exciting, to say the least! I never thought I would get to this point. Apparently self-publishing the collection of early works, Seeking the Upward Spiral, helped me move to the next level. It must have provided adequate closure to a very dark four-year period in my life.

So now, onward and upward! You may see an occasional post from me, if I have some news to share. And who knows, maybe I’ll post updates on my progress. In the interim, please keep an eye on Supraterranean. We really need submissions! Also, did you see the new Thumpme blog? If not, have a lookie!

About a month ago I was preparing a streaming video player for an event at work. During downtime, the player streams old content from Michigan Television (public TV at U of M that has now been closed). In a pleasant coincidence, I happened to see an interview with Thylias Moss, an English professor at U-M who teaches a class on “Limited Fork Theory” in the School of Art and Design.

I figure you’re asking, “But what’s ‘Limited Fork Theory’?” It starts as a class about digital composition, but then goes way past the limits of traditional college education. As the course synopsis explains,

The approach is thematic rather than monolithic allowing students to draw information from any and all areas of their experience toward investigations of their own devising within a thematic context, this semester: framing systems. Limited Fork Theory is the study of interacting language systems: any/all visual, sonic, olfactory, tactile systems/subsystems on any/all scales for some duration of time.

Then Moss’ website 4orked.com says it

is also a Theory of Everything that not only includes, but also appreciates: imagination, the fruitfulness of dead ends, the possibilities of error, the usefulness of failure, the beauty of the many configurations of the box the limited fork comes out of and goes into, forking, reconfiguring, shaping, folding, unfolding, and bifurcating all the way.

Many paths to many worlds: one limited fork.

I’m impressed that this development has come about at a public institution. Moss was an awarded poet before developing this theory and corresponding practice. But it seems she risked more than her reputation as a writer in pursuing her passion. She was already an English professor when it began, and as she says in the video below, she interrupted the schedule of a semester course to take this new direction!

As she relates, “When I went to class on Monday, I had my students throw out everything. I said to them, ‘I don’t believe what I said when class has started. I cannot continue.’”

Moss posts online under the pseudonym Forker Girl, which she calls “the embodiment of Limited Fork Theory.” I find it especially interesting that she’s not keeping it a secret, like most professionals did with their pseudonymous work in the past. However, I think Forker Girl might be more of an alternate personality than a pen name.

Moss implies that Forker Girl is more free to express “herself,” which brings to mind the way Tyler Durden empowered the narrator in Fight Club. It seems this transition will happen more frequently in the future, as people stop allowing themselves to be limited to one professional role, trying to adhere to an imaginary idea of what’s “normal” for adults.

From Moss’ viewpoint, anyone can partake in this sort of exercise. “Certainly in imagination if no other way, you can allow these things to converge – allow something to happen. And then the role of a person who would be a practitioner of Limited Fork Theory would be to somehow document what happens.”

In a second video Moss demonstrates how even taking an abstract photograph can fuel her inspiration. “…there is no rule to the orientation of [the photo.] You see, as we turn it, we get other ideas. Other possibilities emerge. From this we get to experience and understand and analyze those perspectives denied to us based upon the limits of human perception.”

There’s a synchronicity in this story as well. I discovered Limited Fork Theory about the same time I was reading Aldous Huxley’s Heaven and Hell, a survey of tools used to induce visionary experience throughout human history — everything from precious gems to religious fasting to mescalin. To Huxley, what makes an experience visionary is the extent to which it transports a person beyond those “limits of human perception” that Moss mentioned.

Just as nicotinic acid can stop the visions caused by lysergic acid or mescalin, according to Huxley, “another inhibitor of visionary experience is ordinary, everyday, perceptual experience.” (p. 87) A person’s visionary power is defined by his or her awareness of the experience, voluntary control over it, and ability to express it to others. “For most of us most of the time, the world of everyday experience seems rather dim and drab. But for a few people often, and for a fair number occasionally, some of the brightness of visionary experience spills over, as it were, into common seeing, and the everyday universe is transfigured.” (p. 93)

Huxley makes it pretty clear that psychedelic drugs are only one way of activating the visionary mind, and a very temporary and undependable way at that. It seems that an increasing number of people today are looking for a way into the mental netherworld without having to depend on chemicals. Or stated another way (by fellow blogger Kaliptus), drugs can guide and educate us, but they are misused if the only purpose is “to get fucked up.”

The underlying goal, as Huxley puts it, is to “become capable of experiencing consciously something of that which, unconsciously, is always with us.” (p. 106) And it should be noted that, while some people are more inclined towards visionary perception, the potential exists in the psychological make-up of all human beings. “At the antipodes of every mind lay the Other World of preternatural light and preternatural color, of ideal gems and visionary gold.” (pp. 114-115)

There’s still an air of impossibility when discussing this topic in the Western world, partly because, as Huxley points out, “familiarity breeds indifference.” We live in a flashy, distracting world, and what lies outside of physical perception is almost totally omitted from popular education (whether in school or at home). That’s why it’s so exciting to see someone like Moss at a public university. The students in the video seem absolutely enthralled by the class. I’m hoping this points to a coming trend.

LINKS:
4orked.com
4orkology.com
A Limited Forker Girl’s Tines
English 414 at U of M

WikiLeaks has been all over the world news headlines this past week after the Daily Beast reported that Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning released 260,000 classified documents to the controversial journalism network. Wired.com has followed up on story with reports about Manning’s conscience and WikiLeaks’ intention to provide him with legal help.

In related news, the Guardian reported on Friday that the FBI is looking for WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange, in hopes of preventing him from publishing those documents. But WikiLeaks has not yet confirmed that they actually received 260,000 internal Army documents — maybe because the U.S. government seems so concerned about the situation. Manning also claimed to have leaked the 2007 Apache helicopter video that I discussed here in April.

Apparentely The New Yorker chose a really good time to publish a 10,000-word feature about Julian Assange. The story “No Secrets” by Raffi Khatchadourian was published on 6/7/10, the day before the news broke about Manning. I’m extremely interested in Assange and the WikiLeaks organization, but I was still surprised when I got sucked into this article. Assange is a fascinating character — the type of person who you don’t usually hear about because governments hate him so much. But he’ll likely be an important figure in the time ahead, so I wanted to present excerpts from the story in a convenient run-down.

On the hope for a new “scientific journalism” and their approach to the Apache helicopter footage:

If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.’ Because Assange publishes his source material, he believes that WikiLeaks is free to offer its analysis, no matter how speculative. In the case of Project B, Assange wanted to edit the raw footage into a short film as a vehicle for commentary. For a while, he thought about calling the film ‘Permission to Engage,’ but ultimately decided on something more forceful: ‘Collateral Murder.’ He told Gonggrijp, ‘We want to knock out this “collateral damage” euphemism, and so when anyone uses it they will think “collateral murder.”’

On Assange’s upbringing and self-directed education:

Assange’s mother believed that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn. ‘I didn’t want their spirits broken,’ she told me. …[Assange] took correspondence classes and studied informally with university professors. But mostly he read on his own, voraciously. He was drawn to science. ‘I spent a lot of time in libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the books I found in citations, and followed that trail,’ he recalled.

This bit shows a prominent aspect of WikiLeaks in its formative stage. Assange was arrested in 1991 for hacking with a group that went by the name “The International Subversives”:

‘Julian was the most knowledgeable and the most secretive of the lot,’ Ken Day, the lead investigator, told me. ‘He had some altruistic motive. I think he acted on the belief that everyone should have access to everything.’

On Assanges’ budding life philosophy and the need for an organization that would foster information leaks:

He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by ‘patronage networks’—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled ‘Conspiracy as Governance,’ which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in ‘collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.’ He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.

On realizing the shortcomings of traditional journalism and mass media:

In some respects, Assange appeared to be most annoyed by the journalistic process itself—’a craven sucking up to official sources to imbue the eventual story with some kind of official basis,’ as he once put it. …in the Bunker one evening, Gonggrijp told me, ‘We are not the press.’ He considers WikiLeaks an advocacy group for sources; within the framework of the Web site, he said, ‘the source is no longer dependent on finding a journalist who may or may not do something good with his document.’

On WikiLeaks’ main objectives:

Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events. In an invitation to potential collaborators in 2006, he wrote, ‘Our primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal illegal or immoral behavior in their own governments and corporations.’ He has argued that a ‘social movement’ to expose secrets could ‘bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality—including the US administration.’

On justifying the potential for damage:

At the same time, Aftergood told me, the overclassification of information is a problem of increasing scale—one that harms not only citizens, who should be able to have access to government records, but the system of classification itself. When too many secrets are kept, it becomes difficult to know which ones are important.

Khatchadourian’s skeptical remarks about the long-term tenacity of WikiLeaks:

But experimenting with the site’s presentation and its technical operations will not answer a deeper question that WikiLeaks must address: What is it about? The Web site’s strengths—its near-total imperviousness to lawsuits and government harassment—make it an instrument for good in societies where the laws are unjust. But, unlike authoritarian regimes, democratic governments hold secrets largely because citizens agree that they should, in order to protect legitimate policy. In liberal societies, the site’s strengths are its weaknesses. Lawsuits, if they are fair, are a form of deterrence against abuse. Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.

On objective and subjective approaches to journalism:

‘It was surprising to me that we were seen as such an impartial arbiter of the truth, which may speak well to what we have done,’ [Assange] told me. But he also said, ‘To be completely impartial is to be an idiot. This would mean that we would have to treat the dust in the street the same as the lives of people who have been killed.’

You can read the entire feature here.

On May 28, WBUR’s program “Here and Now” aired a segment about Wagner’s opera “The Ring” and its influence on comic books. (I’d embed it here, but they don’t let you download the MP3. You can listen at the link. Just scroll down the page when you get there.) Apparently many characters from graphic novels of the 20th century were shaped by Wagner’s four-part work.

This seemed relevant to me for a variety of reasons. I’m currently obsessed with Wonder Showzen, a heady spoof of Sesame Street that came from the Brooklyn group PFFR before they made Xavier: Renegade Angel. In one episode of Wonder Showzen, a child journalist goes around asking people, “What’s a hero?” The goal was to point out that we may be tricked (by movies, news and other media) into thinking that Superman or Iron Man or 9/11 firefighters are going to “save us.”

I’ll try not to wander too much here. It’ll suffice to say that I’ve become very interested in the topic of “heroes.” I wanted to write about this “Here and Now” show because I just finished the book Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. Wilson first published the revised version of his psychology PhD dissertation in 1983. Chapter 17 in the book — entitled “Quantum Evolution — contains a discussion about the modern symphony orchestra interpreted through the book The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler.

The coincidence of the radio show and my reading the book seemed to be a synchronicity (also mentioned in Wilson’s book), a Jungian concept meaning “an acausal and/or holistic principle in nature that acts outside the linear past-present-future of Newtonian time” (p. 152). But I’m straying again…

Wilson brings up Toffler to explain the quickening pace of “domesticated primate evolution” — that is, the ongoing development of human beings. According to Toffler’s model, the “First Wave” was a shift from tribal to “feudal-agricultural” societies. The Second Wave came in the mid to late 19th century, and was a shift from a feudal-agricultural system to an “industrial-urban-market economy.” That can also be described as the “Age of Reason” or the “Industrial Age.”

Now we’re in a sort of transitional period as the Third Wave passes through and creates the Information Age (many other potential titles have been proposed). As Wilson explains, “Each wave is faster, by a factor of 10, than the previous wave. And each wave is more total in that it changes more people…and in the process transforms our concept of human nature and human society” (p. 255).

This section turns out to be highly prophetic in what it says about the effect of computers on society.

Toffler does not claim that the computer is the whole of the Third Wave, but merely that it is the synecdoche or paradigm of what is happening. In this sense, the factory was the synecdoche of the Second Wave. It was not merely the agent by which ‘indust-reality’ spread across the world and multiplied our collective wealth (and illth); it also became the model for everything else (p. 256).

You might be wondering about Toffler’s term “indust-reality.” Essentially it means the mass reality tunnel that has been prevalent during the Industrial Age. In effect, “…’indust-reailty,’ the reality of the industrial age, moved everybody into the robot lockstep of the factory system” (p. 256).

This brings us back to the idea of the symphony orchestra:

‘Indust-reality’ is still so pervasive that it is…mostly invisible. For instance, the feudal age never progressed beyond chamber music—trios, quartets, etc. The modern symphony, with its huge orchestra, its Promethean themes, its god-like conductor (‘capitalist’), its concert-master (foreman), its string section moving in harmony with its brass section, etc. is a beautiful artistic expression of modes of mass human organization appearing usually in less beautiful forms in the factory assembly-line. (The factory also demanded cities—massive concentrations of labor in one place—which made the symphony economically possible…) (pp. 256-257).

Now to synthesize this information. The music of Wagner is wholly representative of the Second Wave, the Industrial Age, the Age of Reason — the military-industrial-capitalist complex that has dominated our civilization for the last 150 years. This point needs no further proof than the scene in Apocalypse Now when Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (played by Robert Duvall) blasts Wagner as his fleet of helicopters takes a Vietnamese town by storm.

As I said before, Wagner’s music also contributed to superhero characters and their stories. And we are likely duped into thinking that the problems facing mankind will be resolved by some benevolent source of power. But the most powerful role in “indust-reality” is the capitalist — i.e., whoever has the most money. Wilson recognized this as well, and he thought “it was inevitable in a domesticated primate species”:

Neither capitalist indust-reality nor socialist indust-reality have been able to give humanity what most of us really want: liberty and justice, freedom and the abolition of poverty, continued growth and continued security. [...] The Third Wave can, and will, transcend this problem within industrialism. [...] It will demand a whole new economy… (p. 257).

So as you can see, I think it’s a little humorous that “Here and Now” is celebrating the performance of Wagner’s opera. “Indust-reality” is becoming more irrelevant by the day, as computers and related technology help us bridge into the next phase of our evolution.

The most interesting news I’ve heard lately on the topic of custom publishing came last month from Mashable.com. As Jolie O’Dell reports, you can now create and print a custom book using content from Wikipedia. Just click “Create a book” in Wikipedia’s left sidebar (under “print/export”), and then click “Start book creator.”

The video below explains the whole process, but it’s actually really simple. And I learned a lot about navigating Wikipedia that I didn’t know before. Once you’ve started adding pages to your book, there’s even a suggestion engine that recommends more relevant content for your project. Books are printed by PediaPress and the cost is based on number of pages. In the example, the book of 212 pages will cost $12.48, and they’ll ship in the U.S. for about $3. Not bad!

Honestly this is an amazing tool and I can’t wait to use it myself. One question left unanswered by the demo video is whether you can create an e-book with the same Book Creator, and whether or not that would cost money.

Actually I just tried out the process myself and realized that there is a Download box on the Manage Your Book page. That gives you the option of downloading either a PDF or TXT file… FOR FREE! It took about 30 seconds to compile and download, and the finished product is quite impressive! My test e-book is called “Sex Ed 402: Advanced Techniques.” Hope you enjoy! (NOTE: for mature readers only.)

Now for a little discussion. This is a fascinating development from Wikipedia, the site that hopes to create a compendium of all human knowledge that is openly accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. This makes the information even more accessible, since these custom books and e-books can be used offline at the reader’s convenience. I’m SO GLAD that they offer the free e-book option, since tablet computers and e-readers are booming right now. And the file even comes loaded with a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license!

The demo shows someone making a book for a Caribbean sailing trip. But think how quick and easy it would be to create a book about a recent news topic. Wikipedia is increasingly becoming a source for in-depth coverage of complicated news developments. I could easily make a custom book about the BP oil spill, for example, and include the entire story plus background on British Petroleum, the oil industry, off-shore drilling, clean-up efforts, previous disasters, etc. Then I could distribute that book on my independent news website with a Creative Commons license. Many people would prefer that to endless Google News searches or waiting for a preferred news outlet to present a more complete story — instead of just watching the webcam of oil spilling into the water ad infinitum.

One thing to think about is that PediaPress lets you put your name as editor and a photo from Wikipedia on the cover of the book. That custom book is also stored in their system in case you want to print the same book again. The e-book download, on the other hand, only let’s you put a title and subtitle on the cover. And once you disable the Wikipedia’s book creator, your project is deleted.

Try it out yourself and see how it feels to be a publisher!

We are a locally focused initiative, facilitated by EcoZoic L3C, working to catalyze paths towards community empowerment, sustainability, and resilience in the city of Detroit. We are building and expanding mutually enhancing relationships among the community of life.

“Our own special role, which we will hand on to our children, is that of managing the arduous transition from the terminal Cenozoic to the emerging Ecozoic Era, the period when humans will be present to the planet as participating members of the comprehensive Earth community.” -Thomas Berry

To fill the gaps still present in my understanding, I searched the Web for these terms. The Wikipedia page for “Cenozoic” says it’s the most recent of three geologic periods, describing the last 65.5 million years, after the Cretaceous period ended. The same search for “Ecozoic” re-directs to the page about Michael Dowd, who’s described as “an American evangelist minister, evolutionary theologian and religious naturalism advocate.”

“Oh fuck,” I thought. “The Detroit spore is run by undercover evangelicals.” Luckily that premature conclusion wasn’t very accurate.

I watched an ABC interview on the website for Dowd’s book Thank God For Evolution and, though I remain somewhat skeptical, many of my fears were reduced. To clarify, my fears are based on the use of religious language to describe evolution or the progress of mankind. The language used in monotheistic religions is extremely vulnerable to misinterpretation, due to the inherently conservative nature of those religions. The goal is (and has to be, in a mass creed) to maintain tradition, beliefs, hierarchy, etc.

I can’t embed that ABC interview here, but I did find a similar one on YouTube from WREG-TV in Memphis (embedded below). I have to say, I was really impressed by this guy. Personally I have a problem with the fact that most scientists today don’t feel a conflict between their professional work and their religious beliefs, despite the enormous conflict that is usually present between the two. I figured Dowd would walk the same territory — or if not, he was probably trying to take the steering wheel from modern science and swerve the vehicle into a brick wall.

Instead of inspiring fear or hatred in me, Dowd convinced me that he may actually be capable of bringing Christianity up to speed. He and his wife (an atheist) drive around the country, sleeping in their van and working in people’s spare bedrooms. They’re trying to spread the message that there is no essential conflict between the language of science and religion. In his view, talking about the development of the universe after the big bang is no different than talking about the divine work of God. He seems to be expressing the idea that religious language was the best way to explain the universe at the time. Now we have other ways to explain it, ways that are more relevant at this time.

The point is that this marks a potential shift away from the concept of an omniscient, personified god who promises access to eternal life after death in heaven (and so on), to a new concept — one that is much more relevant, less vulnerable to manipulation, but (obviously) more difficult to explain and understand (especially for anyone who does believe in a personified god — or worse, those who believe that Jesus is still coming back to “save” them).

I haven’t read Dowd’s book yet, but I’m definitely interested in hearing more of what he has to say. Maybe this sort of movement will strengthen both science (which tends to reduce or devalue the individual in today’s post-industrial world) and religion (which was always supposed to be an individual journey of spirituality and higher meaning, not a subscription to a creed).

This is particularly exciting because, as I’ve learned from reading about Jungian archetypes, Christian symbolism is still very valid in human psychology. If we toss off all the arbitrary bullshit, then maybe we can reinvigorate the true purpose of the Christian myths, to the benefit of Western civilization as a whole. Yet now that I’ve watched the video below, I see that even Dowd is still pressing the idea of a personified god (it’s the use of He, with a capital “H,” that gets me) — so it can’t be that much of a jump forward.

Icky poo poo wires make me feel dirty in my digital crotch

It’s been a long, strange month since I last posted here, and now I have 37 drafts to catch up with. If you haven’t heard, I’m now a resident of the Republic of Saint Kitts and Nevis, located in the Eastern Caribbean. My girlfriend is attending vet school at Ross University, which means we’ll likely be living on St Kitts until August 2012. I spent two or three weeks in a mad rush preparing for the move, and the last two weeks adjusting to life in a different (less “developed”) country.

I probably won’t be able to post very often at first. We have really poor Internet connectivity at our apartment (it’s out half the time, and when it’s on the speed is usually around 0.3 MB/s), so it not only takes longer to post but it’s also risky business (since WordPress doesn’t auto-save well when Internet is slow. Just after typing this sentence, my Internet went out — and I’m at the Ross campus!). And also, I’m still in the “struggle through each day” phase of starting a new life.

To get back into the groove, I figured I would offer a retort to an essay by Virginia Heffernan from the most recent New York Times Sunday Magazine, entitled “The Death of the Open Web.” It seemed relevant to me because the Times plans to put up a paywall for regular users in 2011. The essay basically argues that more people are starting to prefer a limited Web experience — like that offered by apps on the iPhone — because it’s cleaner and easier than the open Web.

At first it seems that the author is lamenting this change. That’s even stated clearly in the article’s conclusion. But between the lines she indubitably sends the message that the “gated communities” of the web’s “suburbia” will, in the coming years, be infinitely preferable to the “urban chaos” of free websites. The author states in various ways that the World Wide Web is “haphazardly planned. Its public spaces are mobbed, and signs of urban decay abound in broken links and abandoned projects.”

But now, with the purchase of an iPhone or an iPad, there’s a way out, an orderly suburb that lets you sample the Web’s opportunities without having to mix with the riffraff. This suburb is defined by apps from the glittering App Store: neat, cute homes far from the Web city center, out in pristine Applecrest Estates. In the migration of dissenters from the “open” Web to pricey and secluded apps, we’re witnessing urban decentralization, suburbanization and the online equivalent of white flight.

First of all, this is a blatantly racist statement that equates the open web with places where “minorities” live (i.e., where they are corralled into), sneakily sending the message that you should move far, far away… wherever the digital country clubs are located — that is, if you intend to be an advanced member of Web society. (It also implies that white flight was justified in the real world.) Second, the Web has NEVER BEEN CENTRALIZED OR ORGANIZED!!! The fact that it cannot be ordered into a traditional hierarchy is its greatest attribute!

They are presenting a myth for people who have only ever used AOL, MySpace, or Facebook. The myth strengthens their goal: the normalization of paid web content:

All these things make spaces feel “safe” — not only from viruses, instability, unwanted light and sound, unrequested porn, sponsored links and pop-up ads, but also from crude design, wayward and unregistered commenters and the eccentric ­voices and images that make the Web constantly surprising, challenging and enlightening.

When a wall goes up, the space you have to pay to visit must, to justify the price, be nicer than the free ones.

After convincing the audience that paid content is normal, the author hopes to show them that highly processed Web apps heighten the online experience.

The far more significant development, however, is that many people are on their way to quitting the open Web entirely. That’s what the 50 million or so users of the iPhone and iPad are in position to do. By choosing machines that come to life only when tricked out with apps from the App Store, users of Apple’s radical mobile devices increasingly commit themselves to a more remote and inevitably antagonistic relationship with the Web.

Nevermind that smartphones running Google’s Android OS — an open-source platform and direct antithesis to the top-down control employed by Apple — have begun to outsell iPhones! The author fails to mention that, while continuing to manipulate you into thinking she actually likes the open Web. She presses on with more metaphors and a subliminal punch to the openness of Web 2.0.

Perception, after all, is everything: many apps are to the Web as bottled water is to tap — an inventive and proprietary new way of decanting, packaging and pricing something that could once be had free.

Apps sparkle like sapphires and emeralds for people bored by the junky nondesign of monster sites like Yahoo, Google, Craigslist, eBay, YouTube and PayPal.

To finish things off, she reminds the reader to think about his or her own ego when deciding how to approach the Internet.

Even to the most committed populist there’s something rejuvenating about being away from an address bar and ads and links and prompts — those constant reminders that the Web is an overcrowded and often maddening metropolis and that you’re not special there.

Since late 2008 I’ve been a big fan of NYT’s Sunday Magazine, but now I’m not so sure. From now own I pledge allegiance to no media company. This media industry growing efforts to get us to pay for content will fail. For every company that tries to make us pay, five others will pop up with more interesting insights, videos, and even applications that cost nothing.

I can say right now that Supraterranean will never put up a paywall. We may show advertisements, and we’ll have to ask for donations — but if you ever catch us requiring payment to use the site, please send us repeated hate mail until the idiocy stops.

Back in February when Kaliptus was planning the Tryptophantasia event, his friend Salma posted an interview with him on the site Evolver.net, a new social network with the slogan “It’s our world to change.” Naturally, I signed up for the site right away (here’s my profile).

I quickly learned that Evolver is connected with an online magazine called Reality Sandwich. Now the team behind the two websites are working on starting up the Evolver Social Movement, which is essentially their attempt to make the ventures financially sustainable (their primary investors bailed). Membership does require a monthly payment, but you get to choose the dollar amount (they’re asking for $10 per month, but it’s wide open).

At the end of March, Evolver/RS editorial director Daniel Pinchbeck published an essay explaining how these projects came to be and why they were now asking for money. Daniel has some very interesting views about the world in which we live (he has also authored three books), and some of his opinions on topics like literary hipsters are very close to my own (I posted a comment on his essay to let him know). With that said, I thought I would excerpt some parts of his essay that really grabbed me.

On what he did before Evolver/RS:

While my pool game improved, my life was stagnating. I was working on fiction but experiencing little success with it, while I wrote freelance magazine articles to make a sort of living. For various reasons I began to feel increasingly alienated and depressed – as I discuss in my books. Eventually I began to spiral deeper and deepr into a massive spiritual crisis and depression, often feeling I was on the verge of going crazy.

I simply couldn’t understand what the point of any of it was as it seemed we lived in a nihilistic universe, a secular materialist prison. In my social set at that time, to open up big philosophical questions about the nature of reality and the soul was only to invite sarcasm and hipster dismissal. My friends conceived literature as a way of seeking the proper pose or stance in relationship to a world that had no meaning outside of one’s personal style and ability to see through it with a perfectly jaundiced eye and finely-turned phrases pitched just right.

On straying from the world of hip lit:

I increasingly felt that literature as well as much contemporary art had become distraction mechanisms, ways of contemplating the degraded and fragmented state of our world from a safe distance instead of making active efforts to change anything in it.

On the immediate positive reaction to Reality Sandwich:

It was clear that there was something important happening here – some nexus between psychedelic and mainstream political and ecological thought that needed to happen. We also noticed that some articles got hundreds of comments, and that the commentators often wanted to find others in their area.

On our present moment and the role he sees RS playing:

My research for my last book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl convinced me that this is indeed a time of intense transition – that humanity has to either evolve its consciousness and take individual and eventually species-wide responsibility for its effects on the planet, or we won’t have a future here. Evolver – and now the Evolver Social Movement – are the best way I have been able to conceive to contribute to this transformative process, by helping to build a viable alternative culture in local communities, and by producing media that spreads the word.

In New York City, where I live, I find that most people are not able, at this point, to understand that the way of life to which they and the multitudes have become accustomed is soon going to end. This will come about through some combination of possibilities that include a much deeper crash of the economic system, shortages of fossil fuels and other necessities, an intensifying series of disasters like the earthquakes that recently wracked Haiti and Chile, or civil unrest and tax rebellion. I am pretty sure this will be the case at any rate – although, admittedly, I am not a fan of our current civilization, and look forward to seeing it give way, though I hope this happens through some process that doesn’t cause too much death or misery. People are so locked into the matrix, its narrow rewards system, that they are incapable of looking beyond it.

More on urban hipsters:

There is a tendency toward fatalism and almost a romanticization of our current society’s horrible state. I believe that this is due to a cultural indoctrination by a media that makes people feel passive, cynical, and alienated. The media has a large role in producing and framing the type of consciousness that can be expressed at the time. Therefore, I believe we have a real need for “interdependent media” that expresses a different viewpoint, recognizing that the fall we are already experiencing is necessary to bring about a shift into a different form of society.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, consider having a look at their operation.

Now that I’ve emerged from my symbolic journey through the desert that took place over the last few months, I need to start cracking away at a variety of topics that have sparked my interest lately. The timeliest of those topics is WikiLeaks, a site that I heard about a few weeks ago via an NPR column. Now that I Google search for it, I see it was actually a partner article (from a group called Foreign Policy), and they made it sound like it was already old news on April 8.

In other words, a video of an American helicopter shooting down a group of non-militant people in a suburb of Baghdad accrued more than two million views on YouTube within five days of being posted online (that happened on 4/3/10). It now has more than six million views. This is the way that information will be distributed in the future, and the distribution itself is almost more interesting than what we see in the video. After all, put in a different context, this could be a scene from a popular Hollywood war movie.

But this is “real life.” This is a group of American marines murdering innocent Iraqis who were “suspected” to be looking for trouble in the streets. Two of them were professional journalists (Reuters photographers) carrying large cameras under their arms, which by a far stretch could be made out to be automatic weapons. If there had actually be a battle going on (and if more than two were carrying large black objects), one might be able to argue that it was an honest mistake — collateral damage in the “fight for justice” while we “bring freedom to the world.”

However, these people were walking casually down the street. There was no warfare in sight. The helicopter simply requested permission to shoot down these “targets,” quite simply because they were out looking for targets. As many have likely already commented, the scariest thing is how absolutely ordinary these events seem to the marines in the helicopter.

The ghost of Bill Hicks is chuckling on my shoulder right now. “I told you fuckers! What do you expect when you give a bunch of emotionally stunted and overly aggressive Americans access to the most expensive toys in the world?! They’re gonna do exactly what those war video games and movies brainwashed them to do: kill everything in site with a grin on their face.”

Yes, Bill. Thanks, and we miss you… very dearly.

It turns out that WikiLeaks is actually based in Sweden and run by a group called the Sunshine Press — a “non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public” (Wikipedia has much more information about them). And they have a separate site for this specific video: collateralmurder.com. Essentially they published this video after Reuters used Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to obtain it.

Personally I think this will be one of the most important stories of the year. This is the inevitable path of technological advance. Truth will demand to be acknowledged. I think that’s why Obama is pressing for universal access to high-speed Internet, even though he bowed to the bail-out demands from banks and auto companies. He knows there’s a hypocrisy to his actions, but he also knows that the intelligence capabilities of the general public are reaching a point where they will become superior to any one secret agency.

Of course, information will never come without a price — even if it’s free of cost to the public. From journalists on the war front (139 were killed in Iraq from 2003 to 2009, according to the Collateral Murder page), to a group like the Sunshine Press (who, according to information on their Wikipedia page, have already been the target of censorship, surveillance and/or attacks in various countries worldwide), this type of service is going to take a lot of courage, cooperation and hard work.

Currently their biggest problem might be fundraising. As it says on their site:

We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release to a world audience. You can change that and by doing so, change the world. Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another ten thousand hands and $1000, a million.

So if you’re a fan of truth — not just “fact-based journalism” coming from mainstream media (which, because of near-universal corporate affiliation, is weakened by conflicts of interest), but the kind of truth that is going to reverse the downward spiral of civilization — and you have some money to spare, consider sending it their way.

Of course, many would argue that Wikipedia or some other resource really marked the beginning of what I’ve deemed the “first-ever golden age of journalism.” But I’m not so sure. Wikipedia is great for that purpose, but you really have to know what you’re looking for. I think we’re going to see a very rapid growth of specialized reporting sites like WikiLeaks that have a specific focus or unique way of gathering and distributing content — content that is vital to the interests of the American public, rather than to the interests of the American oligarchy. Either way, we have a lot to look forward to in this area.

In case you haven’t yet seen “Collateral Murder,” here’s the clip from YouTube.