Monday, December 23, 2013

#1 Renouncing Reality

Stream of Consciousness.

I'm thinking about where we actually are. The real world with physical stuff versus the virtual world of bytes. Emails, news, papers, chats, video conferences, picture sharing, music sharing, picture creation, all these things are done mostly online. We do most of our communicating online. That's insane. We do most of our communicating in a medium that isn't real. It's real in its display monitors but it doesn't occupy space itself. Before, communication was on a piece of paper or from mouth to mouth. Now it exists in some electrical signals and a tiny part of some server, but these are just the physical infrastructure for the actual meaningful communication, which are the words and pictures and videos online. 

What else do people have to do aside from communicate? Eat and shit. Sleep. Be entertained. Earn Money. Store Money. Spend Money. Mate. 

Eating online and shitting online alone with their watery counterparts, drinking and pissing, are not going to happen online. For a long time. Sleeping means you're unconscious or dreaming. I actually think dreams will be the entry point for our first prototype versions of total immersion virtual reality, like Matrix style. Maybe go to sleep while hooked up to some instruments that can suggest various images, feelings, or change some chemicals to crudely put you in a human-constructed  world. It'd be imperfect because I can't really imagine how we could simulate smells and feels perfectly without some huge technology jumps, but that's ok, because we're talking about dream states here. In dreams, you might be totally unaware of physical sensations while fighting an army of pirate dogs, but it's totally ok because you totally don't care. It's irrelevant. So that would be a good state/medium for virtual reality to first come around. However, that sounds just like drugs, so we should just legalize some stuff first. For science. For theory research. For preparation. For the future.

Entertainment is easy. Video games. Movies. Music. Pictures. Youtube, Netflix, Reddit, News sites, Porn sites.

Jobs are increasingly online. It's hard to say if the trend will continue for a long time, but in the short run it most definitely will. There are so many tools online that makes things faster, smoother, and easier to work with. Google docs, video conferences, databases, online businesses.

Store money. This one's easy. It's all online. The number you have in your bank account, where is it? Is it sitting somewhere? Is it represented by gold somewhere? No, it's nowhere, it doesn't exist, except for on your computer screen. And this isn't a metaphorical, philosophical discussion about money. It literally doesn't exist, except as some bytes. Finance is no different from black magic.

Spend money is easy. Look at entertainment. Amazon, ebay. Hard cash is used less and less. It's slow, clunky, and most of all, risky! You could get robbed. Oh wait, Enron, 2008 depression. Yeah maybe cash under pillows is a good idea instead of Bank of America. Screw those guys, USE CREDIT UNION, EAT ORGANIC, SAVE WHALES am i right

If you're for world peace, cancel your Bank of America card. If you love your children, cancel your Bank of America card. This message brought to you by Chase.    

Dating sites, Flirting through texts, maintaining social media, naked pics. But honestly this is just going to increase.Once again, speed, accuracy, ease of use.

Right so we can't eat/shit or sleep online, but pretty much everything is good. Entertainment. The unholy trinity of make/store/spend money. Some mating.

Our species has already made clear its preference for the virtual world over the real world. We've renounced reality. Crazy.

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