Creating Realities

I'm trying to bring together three or four thoughts at once here, so let's just say this is a light jaunt through the nature of reality as a growing accretion of simulacra, and an attempt to find the true meaning behind mediated reality. I learned in philsophy that there is no unmediated reality, and so the question I would like to ask you is, who or what is mediating the particular reality you find yourself in?

I sent out an email link to some friends this week, in which the author asserts that President Obama has stopped using the word "we" in his speeches and has begun to use the word "I" to begin sentences, assert his will, and claim dominion of various parts of the govenrment apparatus. Not to make too much of a fuss about an email, or besmirch my rogues' gallery, but the response was briefly "meh..." The point I was trying to make was not, Oh dear, look at the language on this guy, but that language shapes our reality, and even the substitution of a single-syllable word can serve as the fulcrum upon which our world turns. Furthermore, there is every reason to analyze and attempt to triangulate the purpose of everything Obama says, because as with any political figure, his words and actions have a very unique set of motivations that bear looking at. Reality is not as it appears, but it is changing in very specific ways, and only by observing the changes can we attempt to decode what is actually happening beneath our perception of things.

This week I am reading Halting State, a novel by Charles Stross, in which the world has become hooked into the ubiquitous Internet, served on high-res displays inside eyeglasses and mediated by phones, which in 2017 are the primary components of worldwide distributed networks. Much of the populace are engaged in several layers of augmnented reality at any given time, including massively persistent worlds thast exist in parallel with our own. One of the three protagonists enters a gaming convention and instantiates all his realities at once, superimposed on each other, and views goblins conversing with spacemen and secret agents dickering with Cthulan horrors. In this reality, the banks which control in-game possessions and harness liquidity are managed by real-life financial concerns, and a heist of in-game loot constitutes a very serious threat of economic stability. Clearly, this world is only a few steps beyond our own in terms of its commitment to artifical worlds, and we are rapidly heading in that direction. Another protagonist, a police detective, lives with her glasses projecting CopSpace on top of her daily world: floating beacons, indications of crimes in progress, threat analysis, and constant communication between members of the force. These are realities that are being constructed even now, as Great Britain last year claimed to have created the world's first technological panopticon. (I am still looking for a link on this story.)

The next thing that piqued my interest came just an hour ago, in the form of an essay I've been looking for for some time. Titled How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, by Philip K. Dick, he begins by talking about the craft of writing but then widens his scope to the creation of the universe by God, whose mind may be synonymous with the universe itself. He reaches this territory by telling the story of writing "Flow My Tears the Policeman Said," which was recounted by Richard Linklater in Waking Life. It's a fascinating story, and like Linklater I don't know if he reached the final, unmediated conclusion, but I think it's something everyone has to experience it themselves. It goes into the realms of synchronicity, and if you've ever spent any time thinking about 11:11, the numbers 42, 5, 23, or the shamanic journey, you'll recognize the gist of the idea at once. Everything is now. All this has happened before, and it will all happen again. All of us travel inside God's channel. As I said to Berman last week,
"Reality is thermoplastic."

While I was composing this article, the words "Quantum Jumping: Traveling Alternate Realities" came up in Google Ads. I'm also hoping that one of these guys has something to say on the subject. In the meantime, I'm always looking for suggestions on which world to visit next.