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Steve Fly

'The Barbarian Hordes Storm the Walls' by Mark Pesce (from Future Present)

Mark Pesce - Words.
CHU - Images.
Steve 'Fly Agaric'' - Mixing 

http://chu51.wikispaces.com/UNEVENLY+DISTRIBUTED

http://www.sharethiscourse.org/

Unevenly Distributed:

Production Models for the 21st Century

 

II. The Barbarian Hordes Storm the Walls

Without any doubt the most outstanding success of the
second phase of the Web (known colloquially as “Web 2.0”) is
the video-sharing site YouTube. Founded in early 2005, as of
yesterday YouTube was the third most visited site on the
entire Web, led only by Yahoo! and YouTube’s parent, Google.
There are a lot of videos on YouTube. I’m not sure if anyone
knows quite how many, but they easily number in the tens of
millions, quite likely approaching a hundred million. Another
hundred thousand videos are uploaded each day; YouTube
grows by three million videos a month. That’s a lot of video,
difficult even to contemplate. But an understanding of
YouTube is essential for anyone in the film and television
industries in the 21st century, because, in the most pure,
absolute sense, YouTube is your competitor.

Let me unroll that statement a bit, because I don’t wish it to
be taken as simply as it sounds. It’s not that YouTube is
competing with you for dollars – it isn’t, at least not yet – but
rather, it is competing for attention. Attention is the limiting
factor for the audience; we are cashed up but time-poor. Yet,
even as we’ve become so time-poor, the number of options for
how we can spend that time entertaining ourselves has grown
so grotesquely large as to be almost unfathomable. This is the
real lesson of YouTube, the one I want you to consider in your
deliberations today. In just the past three years we have gone
from an essential scarcity of filmic media – presented through
limited and highly regulated distribution channels – to a
hyperabundance of viewing options.

This hyperabundance of choices, it was supposed until
recently, would lead to a sort of “decision paralysis,” whereby
the viewer would be so overwhelmed by the number of
choices on offer that they would simply run back, terrified, to
the highly regularized offerings of the old-school distribution
channels. This has not happened; in fact, the opposite has
occured: the audience is fragmenting, breaking up into eversmaller
“microaudiences”. It is these microaudiences that
YouTube speaks directly to. The language of microaudiences
is YouTube’s native tongue.

In order to illustrate the transformation that has completely
overtaken us, let’s consider a hypothetical fifteen year-old
boy, home after a day at school. He is multi-tasking: texting
his friends, posting messages on Bebo, chatting away on IM,
surfing the web, doing a bit of homework, and probably
taking in some entertainment. That might be coming from a
television, somewhere in the background, or it might be
coming from the Web browser right in front of him.
(Actually, it’s probably both simultaneously.) This teenager
has a limited suite of selections available on the telly – even
with satellite or cable, there won’t be more than a few
hundred choices on offer, and he’s probably settled for
something that, while not incredibly satisfying, is good
enough to play in the background.

Meanwhile, on his laptop, he’s viewing a whole series of
YouTube videos that he’s received from his friends; they’ve
found these videos in their own wanderings, and immediately
forwarded them along, knowing that he’ll enjoy them. He
views them, and laughs, he forwards them along to other
friends, who will laugh, and forward them along to other
friends, and so on. Sharing is an essential quality of all of the
media this fifteen year-old has ever known. In his eyes, if it
can’t be shared, a piece of media loses most of its value. If it
can’t be forwarded along, it’s broken.

For this fifteen year-old, the concept of a broadcast network
no longer exists. Television programmes might be watched as
they’re broadcast through the airwaves, but more likely
they’re spooled off of a digital video recorder, or downloaded
from the torrent and watched where and when he chooses.

The broadcast network has been replaced by the social
network of his friends, all of whom are constantly sharing the
newest, coolest things with one another. The current hot item
might be something that was created at great expense for a
mass audience, but the relationship between a hot piece of
media and its meaningfulness for a microaudience is purely
coincidental. All the marketing dollars in the world can foster
some brand awareness, but no amount of money will inspire
that fifteen year old to forward something along – because his
social standing hangs in the balance. If he passes along
something lame, he’ll lose social standing with his peers. This
factors into every decision he makes, from the brand of
runners he wears, to the television series he chooses to watch.
Because of the hyperabundance of media – something he
takes as a given, not as an incredibly recent development – all
of his media decisions are weighed against the values and
tastes of his social network, rather than against a scarcity of
choices.

This means that the true value of media in the 21st century is
entirely personal, and based upon the salience, that is, the
importance, of that media to the individual and that
individual’s social network. The mass market, with its
enforced scarcity, simply does not enter into his calculations.
Yes, he might go to the theatre to see Transformers with his
mates; but he’s just as likely to download a copy recorded in
the movie theatre with an illegally smuggled-in camera that
was uploaded to the Pirate Bay a few hours after its release.

That’s today. Now let’s project ourselves five years into the
future. YouTube is still around, but now it has more than two
hundred million videos (probably much more), all available,
all the time, from short-form to full-length features, many of
which are now available in high-definition. There’s so much
“there” there that it is inconceivable that conventional media
distribution mechanisms of exhibition and broadcast could
compete. For this twenty year-old, every decision to spend
some of his increasingly-valuable attention watching
anything is measured against salience: “How important is
this for me, right now?” When you weigh the latest episode of
a TV series against some newly-made video that is meant only
to appeal to a few thousand people – such as himself – that
video will win, every time. It more completely satisfies him.

As the number of videos on offer through YouTube and its
competitors continues to grow, the number of salient choices
grows ever larger. His social network, communicating now
through FaceBook and MySpace and next-generation mobile
handsets and iPods and goodness-knows-what-else is
constantly delivering an ever-growing and increasinglyrelevant
suite of media options. He, as a vital node within his
social network, is doing his best to give as good as he gets.
His reputation depends on being “on the tip.”

When the barriers to media distribution collapsed in the post-
Napster era, the exhibitors and broadcasters lost control of
distribution. What no one had expected was that the
professional producers would lose control of production. The
difference between an amateur and a professional – in the
media industries – has always centered on the point that the
professional sells their work into distribution, while the
amateur uses wits and will to self-distribute. Now that selfdistribution
is more effective than professional distribution,
how do we distinguish between the professional and the
amateur? This twenty year-old doesn’t know, and doesn’t
care.

There is no conceivable way that the current systems of film
and television production and distribution can survive in this
environment. This is an uncomfortable truth, but it is the
only truth on offer this morning. I’ve come to this conclusion
slowly, because it seems to spell the death of a hundred yearold
industry with many, many creative professionals. In this
environment, television is already rediscovering its roots as a
live medium, increasingly focusing on news, sport and “event”
based programming, such as Pop Idol, where being there live
is the essence of the experience. Broadcasting is uniquely
designed to support the efficient distribution of live
programming. Hollywood will continue to churn out
blockbuster after blockbuster, seeking a warmed-over middle
ground of thrills and chills which ensures that global receipts
will cover the ever-increasing production costs. In this form,
both industries will continue for some years to come, and will
probably continue to generate nice profits. But the audience’s
attentions have turned elsewhere. They’re not returning.

This future almost completely excludes “independent”
production, a vague term which basically means any
production which takes place outside of the media
megacorporations (News Corp, Disney, Sony, Universal and
TimeWarner), which increasingly dominate the mass media
landscape. Outside of their corporate embrace, finding an
audience sufficient to cover production and marketing costs
has become increasingly difficult. Film and television have
long been losing economic propositions (except for the most
lucky), but they’re now becoming financially suicidal.
National and regional funding bodies are growing
increasingly intolerant of funding productions which can not
find an audience; soon enough that pipeline will be cut off,
despite the damage to national cultures. Australia funds the
Film Finance Corporation and the Australian Film Council to
the tune of a hundred million dollars a year, to ensure that
Australian stories are told by Australian voices; but
Australians don’t go to see them in the theatres, and don’t buy
them on DVD.

The center can not hold. Instead, YouTube, which founder
Steve Chen insists has “no gold standard” of production
values, is rapidly becoming the vehicle for independent
productions; productions which cost not millions of euros,
but hundreds, and which make up for their low production
values in salience and in overwhelming numbers. This
tsunami of content can not be stopped or even slowed down;
it has nothing to do with piracy (only nine percent of the
videos viewed on YouTube are violations of copyright) but
reflects the natural accommodation of the audience to an era
of media hyperabundance.

What then, is to be done?

Sodtherich by CHU

Evolve The Spore

Evolve and revolve to solve the Novelle’
Loose spore, spoor, spell s’poor.
Lou’s Spore

Spore of Destiny. The weir of brandy,
Spart of the Lyf Cycle cycle.

Sports Day. Sport for all. 
Reproductive seed,
Ballistico Spores blowing, 
Spores and cures and 

cleansed pores, 
Rowing a shore with oar to spore.


Dream fish...the Net, an ‘idea’ sized catch?
Starseed Transmissions 2010.

The Intelligence in the Cherry Stone
Words are 

Cryptospores, fossilized messages
Paragraphs in

    the Zoospore, locomotion 


Swarmspore social movement, decentralized, 

self-organized
Natural or artificial? Thought sport?

Moving

away and outword, wayward sores float


Dispersed verse turning a propeller in the wave crush


Water sports thoughts awash with salt

Growing both on the ground and
Underground


Spore Mycollegee Degree
Liberty Butter 

Yeasts and Leomould Bloom

The role of spores

in Decomposition of the matter?

DJ fly agaric 23 plays Jungle beats again, for you and your tube

Firey Tongues

John Sinclair Radio Show #325 (Firey Tongues 2010)

John Sinclair Radio Show #325

By

lar420

Published: May 26, 2010

Posted in: John Sinclair Radio Show

Tags: amsterdam, Baden Prince jr., Eddie Woods, Fly Agaric Studio, Hans Plompp, Jim Christy, john sinclair, John Sinclair & His Blues Scholars, Jordan Zinovich, Kain the Poet, radio free, Radio Free Amsterdam, Raymond Wiley, Robert Priest, Ruigood, Steve Fly, Steve Fly Agaric, Ted Jackson, The John Sinclair Foundation, Thelonious Monk, Vurige Tongen, Wayne Kramer

The John Sinclair Foundation Presents
Virije Tongen, Ruigoord
Sunday, May 23, 2010 @ 5:00-6:00 pm [20-1021]
Amsterdam, NL.

Today Steve the Fly, Raymond Wiley & I took the 82 bus west to Ruigoord, the venerable alternative art & cultural community just outside of town, where I participated in the Vurige Tongen (Fiery Tongues) poetry festival with MC Hans Plomp and poets Jordan Zinovich, Jim Christy, Baden Prince jr., Ted Jackson, Robert Priest, Kain the Poet, and Eddie Woods, whose readings were crudely recorded by the Fly and edited for this episode of the radio show, interspersed with pertinent recordings by Thelonious Monk and a single cut by John Sinclair & His Blues Scholars featuring Wayne Kramer.



Playlist 325

[01] Opening Music: Thelonious Monk: Epistrophy
[02] John Sinclair Intro & Opening Comments with Steve Fly Agaric
[03] John Sinclair & His Blue Scholars: Cow
[04] Intro > Ted Jackson: Birthday Poem
[05] Ted Jackson: Van Gogh
[06] Thelonious Monk: Thelonious
[07] John Sinclair Conversation with Raymond Wiley
[08] Thelonious Monk: Rhythm-A-Ning (fragment) > Hans Plomp Intro >
[09] John Sinclair: a monk suite for ruigoord
[10] Thelonious Monk: Well You Needn’t
[11] Robert Priest: Reading the Bible Backwards
[12] Robert Priest: Conversation with John Sinclair, Steve Fly & Raymond Wiley
[13] Thelonious Monk: In Walked Bud
[14] Hans Plomp Intro > Kain the Poet: The Fear of Isolation
[15] Eddie Woods: For Roberto Valenza
[16] Closing Music: Thelonious Monk: Epistrophy

Hosted by John Sinclair for Radio Free Amsterdam
Recorded by Steve Fly Agaric at Vurige Tongen, Ruigood, Amsterdam
Produced, edited & assembled by John Sinclair at Fly Agaric Studio,
Amsterdam, May 24, 2010

Remixed & re-edited by John Sinclair at Fly Agaric Studio, May 26, 2010
Annotations corrected May 27, 2010 with special thanks to Eddie Woods
Posted by Larry Hayden
Executive Producer: Larry Hayden
Special thanks to Hans Plomp, Ted Jackson, Steve Fly & Raymond Wiley
© 2010 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.

Open Source Medicine - Amsterdam Blues Scholars by flyagaric23

Open Source Medicine - Amsterdam Blues Scholars  by  flyagaric23

Further Weirdness with Terence Mckenna

Further Weirdness with Terence

By Paul Krassner

An except from "Further Weirdness with Terence Mckenna"

For all his pursuit of mysticism, Terence Mckenna is essentially a scientist. He may have a cult following, but he is not a cult leader in the sense that he encourages challenge rather than forbids it. "A scientists job," he says, "is to prove that he is wrong. You don't get that at the ashram or up in a monastery - [mimicking what such a guru would not say]. Well, we crushed that hypothesis to smithereens." So, naturally, i had some follow-up questions for him, in person and by e.mail.

Q. I would feel incomplete if i didn't ask for your comment on the recent news story about Heaven's Gate cult.

A. Like most people, i haven't sorted out the San Diego mass suicide. I imagine that on the mainland, the soul-searching and efforts to determine everyone's collective guilt and complicity are in full cry. But from the slopes of mauna loa, it looks like simply the latest Southern California pyschodrama with attendant obligatory media jack-off. I encountered Do (then Bo) and peep in 1972. They were contemptible, power-crazed new age creepoids then, and apparently things didn't get better.

Q. During the workshop at Esalen, you talked about not knowing where the mind is. Do you think that the mind can function without the brain.?

A. I have not made up my mind on this, but think of the mind as a hyperspatially deployed organ that is ordinarily invisible. As to whether or not it can exist independent of the brain, i am not sure. If the physical world is concieved in a 4-D manifold, it is logically impossible for a physical thing, a 4 D solid, to move or otherwise change. It must be our state of consciousness which changes as we become successively aware of adjacent cross-sections of the 4 D manifold. But this makes sense only if we, the observers, are not in space-time. This would imply that our minds exist on a level beyond anything that physics can tell us about.

Q. You also mentioned how, posteschaton, we'll look back from the grave and laugh at the futility with which we struggled through life. Were you implying that you believe individual consciousness can survive after physical death?

A. Not really, only that life will show its pattern and plan when we look back on it, and that will redeem some of the weirdness of having to live it essentially without a clue.

Q. You mentioned in the workshop, in terms of the coming apocalypse, that people should do things fast. Now, i thought that doing things fast was one of the problems that brought us to this place and that the antidote would be to slow down and savour the implications of what we do. Maybe you and i are saying the same thing?

A. Well, i don't really mean do more and more things, i said more and more will happen. I think the thing to do is to eliminate foolishness, having your time vampirized. I agree with you, the goal is not to just jam in as much stuff as possible. basically one strong motivation for moving to Hawaii was just to escape the silliness, the triviality of it all, and i've discovered there was apparently no information loss. I can keep up with an O.J Simpson discussion even though i spent three minutes a week keeping track. The people who watched every day of the testimony, my God, they must be slow learners. And it's amazing how many fields you can participate in as a fully empowered player without investing much time.

As pleasant as it is, i can't hold the whole thing in my mind in the states, as we citizens of the sovereign state of Hawaii, i can look at it all and see trends and tendencies, and pontificate about it in my rain forest, and it all makes sense. Somebody said, "yeah, well, it all makes sense because you never talk to anybody else. " Probably some truth to that.

Q. At Esalen, you stated: "The technological push that has seemed so relentless and so brutal and so difficult to deflect is, in fact, we are doing the right thing, and the only question is whether we'll make it in time, and it looks like it's going to be a flash photo finish. We basically have until 2012 to figure out how to download all human DNA [and other forms of DNA] on this planet into some kind of indestructible storage mode. Then there's a chance to ride out this catastrophic wave of extinction."

Now, my question is, in view of the recent news which has placed human cloning on the boarder between science-fiction and reality, might not cloning be an answer to the question posed by the statement? How does cloning fit into your theory of the need to prepare ourselves for the apocalypse?

A. In spite of the cloning of Dolly, we still have a great deal to learn about DNA. What was remarkable about the Dolly episode was how far the research team got to understand about the cloning process and how it works. Which does not mean that it will not be applied before it is fully understood. But at this point, it is a kind of stunt. Clones are simply people with a strange family history, and who among us does not fit that description?

The interesting thing about the recent cloning news, both regarding Dolly the ewe and the two cloned monkeys, is that both fated births occured right around the same time, July-August 1996. That was a time that my timewave had long predicted would be a period when there would be some enormous scientific breakthrough.

I was very excited, therefore, by the announcement, at the time, of the discovery of the discovery of microfossils in a Martian meteorite. Now, with the news of clones, i am more convinced than ever that my prediction of a period of novelty and scientific breakthrough was correct. As for the clones themslves, i am reminded of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's distopia of clueless clones. More scary than 1984, that is for sure. And more likely, long run. So corporate, so elegant.

Q. What are your visions of alternative scenarios that are upcoming, either in December 2012 or before?

A. Well, i've spent a long time thinking about this, although i realized about a year ago that, in a sense, it's not really my issue. The funny thing is, here i have this wave, it predicts every second between here and December 12, 2012, i show it to people and their first question is, 'So what happens afterwards?" It dosen't address that. It addresses all moments before that. nevertheless, i feel the force question, and i've created a series of scenarios in ascending weirdness which answer the question.

A low weirdness answer would be, suddenly everyone begins to behave appropriately. This is kind of Buddhist, Taosit approach. Now, the interesting thing about that scenario is, the first thirty seconds of that we can predict - appropriate behavior would probably be to take your foot off your neighbor's neck. Step back from what you're doing.

And then i always imagine - for some reason, i don't know why - that everybody would take off their cloths and go outside. But after that i can't figure - thats only the first thirty seconds of appropriate behavior. Since we never had that, we can't imagine what it would be like.

Then there's the transformation-of-physics scenario, which basically says, "All boundaries dissolve." What that would probably be like, the first hour of it would be like a thousand micrograms of LSD. After that we can't imagine or predict, because again it would have so totally changed the context that you could no longer predict it.

Then there are the catastrophic scenarios that revolve around the question, "Death, where is thy sting?" And probably the most efficient of those is the planetesimal-impact scenario. A very large object strikes the earth and kills everybody, and that's it.

Q. A blunt object

A. It's a blunt solution. Sort of in that same category is the blue star in Sagittarius. And then a kind of intermediate between those two the sun will explode. That would certainly clear the disc and fulfill the whole thing. The planet vaporizes, and collectively we and all life on earth move into the shimmering capsules of the post-mortem realm, whatever that is. Novel, novel.

When i worked with the timewave, i argued strenuously that it reflects the ebb and flow of novelty, but somebody will come up with something like the release of the Sergeant Pepper album or the O.J Simpson trial, and then we see that it's lost in the noise. What the wave seems most pristinely to predict, or what parallels the wave most closely, is the evolution of technology, and i think technology is something that we haven't really understood. In a sense, technology is the alchemical journey for the condensation of the soul and the union of the spirit and matter in some kind of hyperobject.

The rise of the web has been a great boost to my fantasies along these lines, because now i can see with the Web from here to the eschaton. Apparently, it's a technology for dissolving space, time, personally and just releasing everybody into a data stream, something like the imagination. Then that's why the ultimate technological fantasy along this line of thought is what is conventionally called a time machine.

There's an interesting aspect to the time machine. The wave describes the ebb and flow of novelty in time, but then you reach a point where it's so novel that it fails beyond that point. Well, a time-traveling technology would cause such a system to fail, because it's a description of the unfolding seriality of linear events, which a time machine would disrupt.

So it may be that it isn't explosion of the sun, or the coming of the aliens, or the descent of the second person of the Trinity, it's simply that a technology is put into place that destroys linear time and, from thence forward, when you give your address you have to say not only where but when. There are some problems with this.

And then here is a slightly more interesting and woo-woo scenario. The thing that's called the grandfather paradox - somebody pointed out it's not called the father paradox because apparently you want to avoid an Oedipal situation - and it's simply the following objection: if you could travel into the past, you could kill your grandfather. If you killed your grandfather, you wouldn't exist. Therefore, you couldn't travel into the past. Therefore, time travel is impossible.

One idea i have for an end of history scenario: Time travel becomes more and more discussible, finally there are laboratories working on it, finally there is a prototype machine, finally it's possible to conceive of a test; and so on the morning of December 12, 2012, at the world Temporal Institute headquarters in the Amazon Basin, by a worldwide, high definition, three-dimensional hook up, the entire world tunes in to see the first flight into time. And the lady temponaut comes to the microphone and makes a few brief statements, hands are shaken, the champagne bottle is smashed, she climbs into her time-machine, pushes the button and disappears into the far flung reaches of the future. Now, the interesting question is, what happens next? And i have already established for myself that you can travel backwards into the past, but you can't travel further into the past than the invention of the first time machine, for the simple reason that there are no time machines before that, and if you were to take one where there are none, you get another paradox.

So what happens when the lady temponaut slips into the future? Well, i think what would happen a millisecond later is tens of thousands of time machines would arrive from all points in the future, having come back through time, of course, to witness the first flight into time. Exactly as if you could fly your beachcraft back to Kitty hawk, North Carolina, to that windy morning when the Wright brothers rolled their flyer out and fueled 'er up. And that's as far as the road goes. That's the end of the time road.

But the grandfather paradox persists. One of those time travelers from 5,000 years in the future, on their way back to the first time-travel incident, could stop and kill his grandfather, and then we have this whole problem again. So i thought about this for a long time, and i think i've found my way around it. But, as usual, at the cost of further weirdness.

Here's what would really happen if we invented a time machine of that sort. The lady temponaut pushes the button, and instead of all time machines appearing instantly in the next moment, in order to preserve the system from that paradox, what will happen is, the rest of history of the universe will occur instantly. And so that's it. I call it the God whistle.

This is because you thought you were building a time machine, and in a sense you were, but the time machine isn't what you thought it was. It caused the rest of time to happen instantaneously, and so the furthest out developments of life, matter, and technology in the universe can right up against you a millisecond after you break that barrier, and in fact you discover that traveling time is not traveling time, it's a doorway into eternity, which is all of time, and that's why it becomes more like a hyperspatial deal than a simple linear time-travel thing.

There's been a parallel development which has caused me to be more confident. We're now beginning to build this parallel world called the Wolrd Wide Web. And you can bet that long before we reach 2012, the major religions of the world will build virtual realities of their eschatological scenarios. There will be the Islamic paradise, the Christian millenium, the Buddhist shunyata - these will be channels that you tune into to see if you like it and want to join, so in a sense guaranteeing we will have a virtual singularity.

It's all very well to try to understand the end point, but recall that where we are relative to the end point is in resonance with the year 950 AD. We're like the people in 950 AD trying to understand the web, the hydrogen bomb and the catscanner. How can we? My God, we don't even have calculus yet. Newton hasn't been born yet, let alone Einstein. I mean we're running around - essentially we're primitives, is what i'm saying. We don't have tools yet to conceive of the object of 2012. We must build those tools between now and then. And good places to start are with the web, psychedelic drugs, whatever is the most cutting edge and most far out.

Q. So that saying, "May you live in interesting times," is supposed to have been a chinese curse, but if the ruling class had control of language, it would curse them, but it was a blessing to the people who made it interesting times.

A. I think it's saying the same thing as the Irish toast [heavy brogue], "May you be alive at the end of the world."

Q. Meanwhile, my Chinese fortune cookie predicted that you and i would cross paths again and also that i will enjoy another repast soon.

A. We must meet in a Chinese restaurant and save the oracle unnecessary embarrassment.


- from Further Weirdness with Terence Mckenna" Paul Krassner, Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs - From Toad Slime to Ecstacy. Ten Speed Press. 2004

Paul Krassner is the author of One Hand Jerking: Reports From an Investigative Satirist;
he publishes The Disneyland Memorial Orgy at www.paulkrassner.com.

Track:
Mackenna's Gold

CANNABIS LEGALIZATION FORUM