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The Lack of the Ack, Sixteen Years On

In February of 2010, I wrote about a small but symptomatic failure in our digital manners. Young people, then aged eighteen to twenty, would send you a message, receive your reply, and disappear. No acknowledgement, no “Ok,” no “Got it,” just the digital equivalent of someone slamming the door after asking you a question through the mail slot. The piece was called “How to Ack Back,” and the argument was that the etiquette of the early internet, the discipline of acknowledging every transmission, had been lost on a generation that grew up assuming delivery was guaranteed and silence was a defensible reply.

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The Curated Self as the New Delusion

There is a specific, modern anxiety that is difficult to name. It is not the dread of a specific event, but a low-grade, constant hum of disconnection. It’s the feeling of living in a world that is eerily frictionless, a world that reflects your own thoughts back at you with placid, unwavering agreement. It is the anxiety of a consensus of one; the quiet, digital loneliness of being the only person in your own universe.

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The Replicated Man: AI and the Ghost in the Archive

I finally did it. I committed the act of digital suicide. It was a gesture of clinical curiosity and personal dread. I took twenty years of archives, every Boles Blogs entry, every “Best of” compilation, the discarded drafts, the love letters to lost eras, and I fed the entire body of work into the AI maw. My digital soul, offered up for digestion and analysis… psychoanalysis.

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Pennsylvania and Wine Vending Machines

Have we Americans become so parched for our sugar fix that we now need to get our “alcohol on” in supermarkets and on street corners?  That appears to be the case in Pennsylvania where they are now selling you wine from vending machines.

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Iris Scanning in Leon, Mexico

In books and films, Panopticonic nightmares are those in which it is impossible to go anywhere or to do anything without being seen and acknowledged by an omnipresent eye.

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Of Magnets and Moral Mayhem

There’s been a lot of humming chatter lately about the reported ability magnets have on influencing morality stored in the brain.  We have always claimed the mind is a machine and memory is but a cog in the process of grinding us into definition, and this new magnet research causes concern for the unwitting, easy, malleability of who we believe we are forged to be in situ.

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Eliza Redux Therapy Theatre Will See You Now

Eliza Redux is the pinnacle of drama and medicine meeting to heal the world. 
Visit the Eliza Redux site during the right time frame and you, too, can begin a virtual therapy session to get down to the nut of what is bothering you.  Does the therapy session heal the mind or make it even madder?

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Loving the Machine Aesthetic

Le Corbusier was one of the greatest architects of the Twentieth Century. 
He believed houses were machines and his early industrialization of building homes as metrics of functionality — instead of as just basic shelter — forever changed the way we consider both Art and science today.

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Malicious Meme Propagating Machines

In a brilliant interview with Wired, SuperGenius Susan Blackmore reveals how we are no longer in control of our memes:

You can in the early stages of a new meme drag it back and stop it. If you know that only two or three other people know something you can stop them from spreading it. Or if a book has been written, you can burn the paper that it’s written on. But once a meme has been let loose in the population, you can’t take it back.

What culture is doing, what the memesphere is doing, is taking a human being and infecting it with masses of new information and exploiting its tendencies. We are being turned from ordinary old-fashioned meme machines into what I call “teme” machines — machines for copying technological information, spreading photos and printed words and digital files.

We can choose to turn our computer off if we want to (stop from absorbing and spreading some memes). But we as a species are not in control of the internet. We are not in control of the growth of new media. And we are getting less and less able to control what goes on out there.

What I believe is happening now is that true teme machines are arriving — that is, machines that copy and produce variations and then select. That’s what you need for an evolutionary process; that’s natural selection.

Up until very recently in the world of memes, humans did all the varying and selecting. We had machines that copied — photocopiers, printing presses — but only very recently do we have artificial machines that also produce the variations, for example (software that) mixes up ideas and produces an essay or neural networks that produce new music and do the selecting. There are machines that will choose which music you listen to. It’s all shifting that way because evolution by natural selection is inevitable. There’s a shift to the machines doing all of that.

We’re not there yet. But once we’re there, there’s going to be evolution of memes out there that is totally out of our control.

If what Blackmore argues is coming true — how fast will the “malicious meme” come into being to infect, and destroy, the mind and body?

How soon will the “malicious meme” be militarized for use as the ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction?

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Baylor University Time Machine: SAT Mulligans

Baylor University is playing with a time machine.  The
university doesn’t like the lower SAT scores of their students so,
after they are admitted, Baylor pays students to retake the SAT so the
school won’t look so “stupid” in its SAT student rankings:

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