Mudras and Technium

I've recently been on a Star Wars binge and imagining the future of technology is always a fun detour to take as I ride the winds of the aether.

There were a lot of artistic leaps taken at the time like handheld communicators (which were, off-camera, slightly modified women's razors) that are comparable today to the common cell phone of a child in Africa.  Science fiction once again paved the way for reality to catch up.  Now we must imagine greater again for the process to repeat.

In Mass Effect, the Omni-tool is the all-in-one computer that is accessed on and operated with the dominant hand of the user.  It has a flashlight, video recording, holographic projection, data mining, remote console interfacing, crafting, holographic blades, writing stuff, even pseudomagical capabilities such as supercooling or superheating the local atmosphere.  All of these tools and more simply appear at the will of the user.  I ask how one tool attached to the wrist of the user could do all of these things without a bulky interface?  I ask and I imagine.  I could give a thousand different methods this could work by, but I'll start with my favorite.

What if mudras, a form of yoga for the hand, could conjure up an interface or a command?  What if holding the hand in a two-finger position touching the ear automatically ran the communicator program.  Once opened, gestures with the hand such as a flick of the wrist could replace broad commands while the left-hand keypad could then be used for finer tunings.  What if holding out the palm in mudra like a gesture of giving could open up file displays?  Once opened, finger gestures could operate basic commands with the left-hand keypad available as always for more directed changes.  What if actions such as throwing or pointing were combined with specific mudras to access the supportive arsenal of the tool?  I think the trick to this type of interface would be to create physical interfacing that would not interfere with the everyday actions of the user.  For instance, I wouldn't want to accidentally project my pictures in AR while paying the cashier, nor hurl an incineration tech at my coworker at the same time as I throw him the key he asked me for.  

Mudras provide a solid foundation for that reality.  As well as that, they could provide tangential learning through their use.  Specific mudras may match up with their meditative purposes or their existence as programmable shortcuts may allow the user to associate them with desires, providing a muscle memory that draws upon these complex algorithms.  

I think if anything of worth can be taken from my ramblings today, dear reader, it is that it's hella important for our tools to incorporate tangential knowledge in them so that they can be easier to understand by our connection-oriented brains.  For instance, I like the metric system not only because it is base ten and that makes sense with my anatomy of ten fingers and base ten counting system, but also because one meter is about the common running stride.  A journey of a kilometer is tangentially accessible to my mind as a journey of a thousand strides.  The system itself is a part of, and teaches me about, the world I use it to describe.  I HATE the Gregorian calendar because none of its conventions are connected to things we can grasp on to.  The seasons we use the calendar to describe are not aligned in any easily assimilated manner.  The units of time like weeks and months are arbitrary at best and do not actively connect to most lives.  The names of the month teach us that October represents the 10th month of the year, yet it is named after the latin root for eight.  Oh and also being a murderer like Augustus Caesar gets a month named after you.  Good tangential lessons right there.

I think it's time I tackle the Gregorian calendar all by itself, but I'll leave that for next time.

Finding the light in the darkness

I said that line in a previous post and it surprised me.  I don't really know why I said it, it really wasn't related to what I was saying, but it happened and it has been tumbling through my thoughts ever since.  Get ready to go on a journey, dear reader.  This thought spreads its arms across the vastness of human experience.  I will start this tale in a place you'd never expect and lead you into the unknown and then back to the humblest yet most quintessential aspect of our soul.  I have a lot to live up to in my own introduction...  So it is time to start.

In economics, there is a term called marginal cost.  For you calculus minded individuals, this term defines the integral of the producer's cost to produce an additional unit, q, with respect to q.  For those of you non calculus people, I will have to use more words to describe the same thing:  When producing an item, there are some initial costs like building a factory to make it, wages for labor to produce it, and the price of raw material for it to exist in.  All those costs divided by the number of units that can be produced with those costs is one way of thinking of the marginal cost.  According to a lot of market theory, the marginal cost of increasing my productivity by one unit is the price we should sell our good at; ie if I still have loans on the factory floor and my CEO has a huge salary, then my marginal cost will be pretty high, but once I have paid off the price of land and fired my CEO, the cost of increasing my output by one reduces drastically, and so should my marginal cost, the price my customers pay.  

Technology has driven real marginal cost down on an exponential curve the last hundred years.  The industrial revolution was but one step on this path.  We broke the task of making a shirt across the world, cloth coming from here, dye coming from there, labor coming from here, distribution going there.  Institutionalized slavery still exists today, but the mechanization of labor could reduce the cost and time of production further.  With all these drops, why hasn't the price of creating dropped?  Because the marginal cost remains the same in the balance books of these companies.  As marginal cost has exponentiated downwards, upper management pay has exponentiated upward which holds our marginal cost at 20 dollars even when it costs 13c to make a shirt.  

People say often that this greed is the ultimate evil of our time.  It is the darkness, the yin, the masculine energy flourishing to dominating power that has subjugated our world to the state we see today.  Yet the light is rising, my dear reader.  You know it.  You feel it as I do.  But how?  It is in the nature of masculinity and femininity that our story travels next.

Masculinity is a blanket of earth or a swathe of fire.  It extends and covers, it smothers with its exuberance and desire.  Femininity is the wind or the water.  It flows and it yields eternally.  Masculinity reaches indefinitely and femininity is never truly grasped.  If masculine energy has reached so far as it has in our economic model, how is that feminine energy to return the masculine back into balance if it only yields?  Let's talk the housing market to answer that, shall we?

College debt has exploded over the past fifty years to the point that fewer and fewer homes are being purchased and that market is slowly dying.  As this cycle begins to wane, the young are not reaching for new homes, they are being inherited, traded, and communally built.  Why?  Because economic oppression from our economic model forces people to be more efficient and use less and something just clicks.  Some personal transformation occurs and them to become as humble as the dirt.  After being shoved into the dirt, they become the dirt and economic shackles no longer hold them.  Homes get passed down and no longer have any value aside from becoming places of life shared as a community of man.  This is how femininity triumphs.  Please remember, I am not talking about man and woman, I am talking about a state of being.  It is not to say that all women are like this and all men are like that.  The correlation exists, but we all have both in us at a certain balance that changes every passing moment.

An arguably better example is Napster.  Someone took it upon themselves to use the free building tools provided on the internet to build a sharing house for media.  Once media springs out of the mind and into the physical realm, it is replicated and shared on these platforms with very small marginal cost compared to running a company that crafts and ships disks.  The cost of housing and replicating 90kb is negligible, why pay a distribution company with thirty offices of stooges who isn't really paying the artist for their profits anyway?  Fast forward ten years and media is being produced and shared on YouTube professionally on nothing but advertisement revenue.  Marginal cost is so small, it can be absorbed by someone who wants to steal a bit of your airwave to sell someone detergent.  So many free platforms now exist and the amount of wallet saved from this free exchange encourages donations to what someone knows is worth their investment.  A freer market emerges.

This feminine motion is intoxicating, it draws you into it like all sacredly feminine motions do.  Once the Napster market was tasted, it was too sweet.  Once soaked in this masculine darkness as we have, these feminine motions draw us back out into the light BECAUSE OF the darkness before.  Without being forced to pay an absurdly imbalanced marginal cost, freer models of being would not be so seductive.  Ironically, the darker the shadow, the brighter the light needed to create it.  We have been in the dark so long that it can be hard to see how far this light will take us.  Fifty years from now, I imagine a brightness that looks like this:

I imagine a young person building a set for a movie.  She has a device attached to her arm.  It is a deeply interconnected device that links her to like minded individuals.  With it, she finds or creates the schematics for a piece of her set for free.  The rendering technology exists because someone desired to make it.  The energy exists because our star still shines and our wind still blows.  She grabs some recycled material and feeds it into this device and it prints her imagination into reality.  She crafts her whole scene this way, creating the illusion of being in a wake-walking lucid dream of her imagination and she spills forth this story into reality without a single dime.  She is housed wherever she may go because no one owns land anymore and the world is beautified with communal architecture that incorporates natural cycles into its designs that eat waste and regurgitate food-- like an edible architecture birthed in the minds of the local artists.  She is making her movie because it has meaning for her.  With no marginal cost, she gives her movie to the sharers.  The money donated to her by the fans of her imagination goes towards treating herself beyond the basic needs provided for her by the sacred environment she lives in.  Man lives in rhapsodic abundance and life is lived to the point of tears in every waking moment.  

This image-- this light will grow not just from, but because of the darkness that envelops us today.  Without the ideas of mechanization, efficiency, the ever grasping for more that strangles the mighty into husks of Sin, we would not have these tools.  Now armed with the fruits of that mindset, we are free to take it and create with it.  Therefore I say that I am in love with masculinity-- in love with this evil darkness, because it's depths grow me.  When he envelops me, I become the light in his darkness and suddenly I am cradling him and we are one in the same.  

One day, like the breath of a divine being, the feminine light will be smothered again by darkness on a grander scale as it has from the birth of reality.  One day, that darkness will become light yet again, but I can only hope I will be long dead to see what darkness the next cycle will know.  I do not hate the dark that has swept over us as it now fades.  I anticipate it, so that I may flow around its advances and use its flame to burn brighter and longer than I ever knew possible.

The Numinous Dimension

I want to talk today about dimensionality.  I'll start with a brief synopsis for the uninitiated and then jump into what I want to say after the music note if you wanna jump right down.

Let's start with one dimension, a line.  I can go left, I can go right, but any other direction just seems insane to me.  If this is a numbered line, 1 is 1 and there is no other 1 out there.  There is an infinite in front of me and an infinite behind me, how could I imagine anything more.  

Moving on to two dimensions, each point on the original line becomes a new infinite.  Miraculously, the number 1 from our previous line now holds within it the entire known and unknown universes it could imagine in the previous dimensionality.  Now there is a plane, a flat sheet of paper, a Flatland if you'll forgive the literary reference, that we can draw cool stuff on.  Connections never thought possible are able to be created indefinitely on this new infinite canvas.

In three dimensions, there is yet another direction to go.  Moving in this direction can appear like moving through time.  An entire new infinite canvas, expressing another entire imagining of everything the previous universe could come up with.  String a few together and you can create a psychic continuum that can tell stories.

Expand your view of conscious.  We can all understand these three dimensions because we actively live in them.  I can go left, right, up, down, forward, and backwards.  Time carries us forward into new iterations of our 3 dimensions.

Likewise with all other steps upward, we have to imagine infinity, all the possible and conceivable universes being stored in every individual point of our 3rd dimensional space.  The only way I can picture this is by picturing this new direction to be imagination.  Every point holds within it every conceivable universe.  Patterns emerge on this 4th dimensional landscape.  These patterns are the next replicator; they are IDEAS arising from the primordial soup of human culture.  Ideas jump from mind to mind, spread and take root, they exist simultaneously across vast quantities of space, they are higher dimensional beings.  

When I hear physicists fumble with higher dimensions, saying that they are "all wrapped up" or "moving in an imperceptible direction", I can't help but smile.  I live in the numinous dimension above.  When I close my eyes, I can experience lives relived with different choices or I can leave myself entirely and experience galaxies of lives unfurling like a flower before me.  

The Numinous.  I like that name.  I think you'll be hearing it more often now.