Catching Up: A Fave Vlogger

Tangential to the content here, I mentioned Armenia in a later post, regarding the Caucasus as encoding for a "white race" [sic], so I decided to slide this one forward in time by adding these paragraphs and making the link more explicit. 

Originally, this post came before Psychological Remarks and Gravity, but was only the embedded YouTube, by a Russian vlogger who moved to the Caucasus near the start of the 2022 special military operation (aka Z). I've mentioned her before.

In a race-based mythology (such as some Germans wanted to believe in), one might start with whites beaming down as if from the Starship Enterprise, straight to the Caucasus region, a way to halt the narrative going backwards. 

This is especially possible given Mt. Ararat is in nearby Turkey, where Noah's Arc came to rest and from which one human family emerged, a genetic bottleneck. 

Not until the Tower of Babel debacle did humans escape the resulting groupthink and split up into Diaspora Nations, known today as "races". The whites come directly from ye olde Tower Project, by way of Europe and Penn Station.

In a competing mythology, monkey-man spread to the Polynesian Islands, where a similar beaming down begot more polymorphic headwaters, associated with mammals going back to the sea (dolphins and whales), or going forward as ocean-based human navigators, who would spread their ways around Planet of the Apes.

Psychological Remarks

A favorite phrase, in political namespaces especially, is "saying the quiet part out loud". 

To my ears, that phrase also sounds like a leftover from parenting, as in: "use your words". One might regret when junior finally does use his words, and says the quiet part out loud, begetting a sense awkwardness in the room, perhaps provoking countermeasures.

Short of saying the quiet part "out loud" we have saying it "between the lines". 

This "between the lines" trope becomes our door to "encryption" which again partakes of parenting, as mom and dad will sometimes keep their conversation somewhat purposely opaque to junior, simply by using a less accessible vocabulary, or even a foreign language in some households. Junior, if he catches on to what's happening, may strain to decode, which is often great exercise.

In the Freudian lexicon, the ego tends to sense its own fragility in a negative way, if it's secrets come out in embarrassing ways, resulting in a sense of exposure and vulnerability. 

However secrets are not by their nature all of the same subtype, in terms of the consequences of their being found out, duh. 

Some might be kept out of humility, with their discovery by others resulting in a sense of pride. "You found I had the highest score." 

Others might come across as wrapped gifts or buried treasures, happy surprises for the intended recipients. 

Where the unknown becomes known is a complicated shoreline.

Depending on the state of one's own ego, one may be more or less receptive to different "out loud" parts, which is somewhat the point of a therapist. A patient on a voyage of self discovery cannot be expected to anticipate what all the "quiet parts" will be, and which of these will come across as blessings or as threats. 

A therapist steers towards a non-threatening context, which somewhat paradoxically may mean "safe enough to surrender" for egos having growing pains, or maybe shrinking pains.

There's "letting the cat out of the bag" with regard to secrets, and then no way of "getting the toothpaste back in the tube". Both of these sayings emphasize the entropy of irreversibility. 

Once the secret is out, the sense of ripple effects may avalanche. The next chapter is about coping mechanisms, dealing with what's now in the open. Sometimes we go for just shrugging it off as a first resort. Make it not matter. The ego has ways.

Here we turn to screenwriting and the job of storytelling more generally. 

What drives a plot forward is often what two people are doing unbeknownst to one another, then multiplying that by even more characters behaving in mutual ignorance of the bigger picture. 

The privileged viewpoint of the narrator, having hindsight, is likewise what makes a story all the more edifying. 

Then, in the story, as the action unfolds, the various characters might suddenly discover one another's hitherto non-convergent trajectories. People whose paths have never crossed, cross paths.

In Quakerism, the "quiet part" (the unconscious, whether stormy or not) is the ocean of silence one strives to meet with a sense of peace. 

Peace does not mean suppression and denial (a "forced peace") so much as a high level of sensitivity, meaning receptivity to nuances, to doubled meanings, to fleeting insights and intuitions. 

The birdwatcher is quiet in order to hear the music of interest, not just some internal chitter chatter. A blabbery ego is less likely to hear the subtle stuff.

Note however that Quakers don't insist on remaining in that waiting state in all modes of being, or even touting that as an ideal. That spoken ministry is welcome during Meeting only hints at the wider practice, which includes worship-sharing and worship-discussion, along with whatever additional experimental forms happen to be in vogue at the time. 

Social hour often immediately follows Meeting, and is a time to be optionally blabbery on purpose, having already dipped one's ladle in the silent pool and partaken of the proverbial "kool-aid" (a cult of one). Now is the time to speak in tongues (belonging to many professions), over cakes and coffee.

Our Sunday Morning Adult Discussion (SMAD) has tried many variations on the "talking stick" system.  Listservs are less synchronous. I always think Quakers could be doing more using movies and television.

Gravity

In reading through the Synergetics Dictionary again, under the definition of "gravity" and/or "gravitational field", I'm again struck by what seems to be Bucky's long arc agenda to anchor his meanings to some alien logic, from the standpoint of CERN. 

He acknowledges how physicists see gravity as weak up close, at the micro extreme, where it's dwarfed by electromagnetism, in terms of forcefulness. Gravity comes into its own when swinging planets around stars or stars around galactic centers. 

But then he keeps associating his gravity with tensile strength, so when a new alloy permits yet greater tensive pull per cross-section, he sees "gravity at work" whereas the CERN corpus would predict stronger electro-chemical bonding. He sprinkles talk of Newton's law where established trains of thought would not. He sees electro stuff too, but for him that's polarization that simply adds to gravity's rainbow powers. Gravity is generalized attractiveness.

Perhaps in the sense of "doing more with less" owing to knowledge of metallurgy, there's greater gravity in this picture.  As humans become more metal savvy, they express a convergence with principles, which is what gravity is all about... But that's not what gravity is all about.

In the Synergetics grammar, compression is islanded, special case, tunable, focused, whereas tension tends toward ubiquity. Compression associates with radiation, that which is squeezed out by taut tautologies (exceptionless in nature). Gravity is anti-entropic coherence.  These seem to be the associations Fuller constantly cultivates in the minds of his readers. He seems to be in the business of revectoring "gravity".

Given we nowadays have word2vec and text2vec, we're used to the idea of text getting mapped to vector spaces that encode proximity. King - Man + Woman = Queen. Vectors have been weighted in a multi-polar matrix, depending on what corpus gets used to define them. The analogy with nD geometric vectors remains strong, given maths is very much into metaphors.

Speaking of metaphors, might we say the "gravity" in Synergetics is metaphoric, gluing linear segments, the compression rods, into a tensile sphere? The tensile sphere is Fuller's metaphor for any coherent system of beliefs, one might suggest. It hangs together. For the believer, it serves as a guidewire.

Think how AI uses probability to predict what to say next, likewise following a guidewire to generate believable content.

One of Fuller's favorite memes is about nutcrackers arranged in a spherical pattern with their lever arms towards the surface, gripping an internal nut, or planetary core. The idea is even slight squeezing at the surface translates to enormous pressures deep within, thanks to leverage. Gravity may seem "weak" up close and in the short term, but over the long haul, it might worm itself into a position of greater responsibility. We just need to stay patient.

I'm taking the line on math4wisdom that Synergetics is not a TOE (theory of everything) or GUT (Grand Unified Theory) precisely because GPT identifies TOE with any project to explain and/or unify the "four forces" (not "horses") deriving from the Big Bang: strong (quarks), weak (W, Z bosons), electromagnetic (electrons), gravitational. Synergetics does not try to map itself to this particular vocabulary in great detail, although it does proffer a "tetrahedral Feynman diagram" designating the neutron-proton interaction (e.g. beta decay).

That doesn't mean Synergetics is uninterested in any kind of unification, just that the definitions of GUT and TOE seem too restrictive to contain it. The kind of unification it seeks seems more long term speculative. There's also no direct mention of dark energy or dark matter.

The process of reading in, studying, plumbing the depths of Synergetics, may impart new trajectories and new spins, i.e. may prove influential, however its use of "gravity" is more likely to make waves in a non-STEM semantic space.  

We've seen these ripple effects already with "love = metaphysical gravity" making it into the shared treasure chest of social media memes. A metaphorical gravity keeps the geometry pumped and rounded as a sense container.

Virtual Worlds

You may remember my virtualization model, inspired by my first encounter with an IBM mainframe. My account thereon emulated that of a mainframe operator. I had the resources of a whole computer, in virtual form, and could mount things, manage a file system, putter about in my cloud computer. That was in 1977, and here I am in 2023 enjoying much the same experience, with the toyz and I evolving together ever since we conjoined, or since I became a part of the cloud and/or internet, another host, another client.

Later, post Princeton (Class of 1980), I got into the World Game simulation more, via the workshops (in Oregon, and in San Diego at the 1995 GENI Centennial) and by meeting Chuck Dingee, one of the workshop instructors. 

Kiyoshi Kuromiya drove me to Medard Gabel's WG headquarters in Philadelphia. This was the group that used a gymnasium-sized version of the Fuller Projection to stage a World Game experience for participants, involving role playing.

Putting these threads together, I see the tidy set of flags representing the United Nations, each decorating a console and/or control room, a kind of mission control, where the object on the big screen, what the monitors all monitor, is Planet Earth, the homeland. 

Imagine a picture frame around the Big Blue Dot, with a national flag bottom center, attached to the frame. The insignia belongs to the control panel. Every nationality shares the same game board. "This is your Israel, your promised land..." "This is all your Republic of South Africa, your promised land..." "This is all your United States, your promised land..." Most of which is an ocean. One island in one ocean.

Does creating a new point of view always entail adding a new flag to the UN set? Not at all. IBM had (and has) a worldview. A given individual, a world game player, is free to walk from one control room to another, seeing the same Planet Earth through a large number of viewpoint windows. Israel's is a whole world view, Palestine's another, even if the latter is a virtual viewport with a diaspora for its citizenry, in the eyes of other nations. Universities might be able to step in with additional documentation permitting travel, if the nation-states don't feel up to it (more science fiction).

"Wandering from room to room" doesn't have to mean physical travel, as we're talking headspaces mostly. In looking for communities that could use development and creatives, I'm seeking to open possibilities for refugees more generally. Each refugee family gets a menu of Asylum City projects, none of which in principle need be seen as dead end assignments without any possibility of return, should returning be in the cards (Bikini and Marshall Islanders are always wondering which atolls will still burn them alive).

In gaining hypothetical Palestinian citizenship in a diaspora nation, I'm still not necessarily freed from my penitentiary camp or compound by my UN prison guards. I'm perhaps imprisoned because I was forcibly displaced (or my grandparents were), but now that I want to leave my camp voluntarily, I'm told I can't be forced to leave, only to forced stay, by the international lawyers. If I try to force my way out, I'll be hunted, like an escaped slave in the pre Civil War US south.

The "trust but verify" approach adopted in negotiations around WMDs entails a lot of mutual surveillance, which parties may try to squirm out of, perhaps by exiting various treaties. "If I stop spying on you, then I can rightfully stop you from spying on me" might be the internal monologue, not always honest. Given parties to the original agreements may have considered them "for the ages" (long lasting), there's some inertia and some continuation of surveillance nonetheless, even to a point of some new regime taking over such that the exited treaties might be restored and renewed.

In the lead up to the 2nd attack on Iraq, post Desert Storm (now CNN's "shock and awe" campaign) I was always talking up surveillance as the way to nail down the results of any weapons purge, post the United Nations inspection program headed by UN inspector Scott Ritter. I published my little memos to Usenet, about all the webcams we'd be needing. 

I'm all for giving civilians the freedom to explore the benefits of nukes (including medical), where the danger of adding further weaponry is clearly a downside, not always factored in by the lobbyists, or even hyped as a net positive to the true believers.

In anticipation of a Chinese delegation coming to San Francisco, a theme of "life in our urban centers" is gathering steam (ramping up) on social media. How much will that city do to clean itself up before the Chinese cameras arrive, feeding millions of eyeballs with news about how the US is doing? Its regular folks, not its celebrated media personalities. Do other countries have this level of substance abuse? What experimental social policies are being tried?

Citizens of a US mindset are likewise tuning in news from other states. Sometimes the enlightened approach is not to punish and criminalize but to invent new lifestyle possibilities.

Along those lines (homelessness, drug abuse, suicide...) is Germany really the basket case people say it is, ever since a pro-Ukrainian group sabotaged its infrastructure? I bet today's Germany would feel pretty normal to me, although it's been decades since I wandered the forest trails of Bavaria, or toured the industrial cities of Hamburg and Cologne. 

I remember going through Checkpoint Charlie in our tour bus, back into East Berlin, where our train had stopped, coming from Scandinavia. Today, there's no more wall. Yet some states are building new walls. To what extent does the concept of citizenship require fences to make sense?

The tacit competition World Game sought to invoke was towards higher living standards, meaning likewise in an ethical sense, contrary to stereotypes. Living like a billionaire philanthropist is not all about creature comforts, the pandering to which shortens lifespans according to science. Most billionaires work out, realizing they're fortunate to be weighty (financially) and wanting to maximize the length of their lifetime scenarios.

Athletes play to win but when genuinely in the spirit of the game, they're able to empathize and celebrate the victories of teams other than their own, based on quality of play, although fortune (luck) does play a role (per quantum mechanics (a type of thermodynamics)). 

High ranking military officers will cultivate this same empathy because it helps them think more like the enemy in some cases. Sometimes both sides sense political leaders have made this mess, and their clash is more a crash, like a train wreck. Such militaries feel abused. Tulsi Gabbard spoke up for them, although she's not a pacifist and carries a predictable level of antipathy towards Muslims, such as we've learned to expect from India's Hindus, influential among Samoans apparently.

I tend to side with peace-loving civilians against those wishing to settle scores with outward violence, so I cheer when civilians manage to escape war zones and get on with their lives, perhaps returning to rebuild if and when order is restored. The Narnia kids got to do this, spending their childhoods in an alternative reality. The imagination provides a last resort form of escapism. 

The martial arts are about controlling emotions and not rushing into reckless actions without thinking through consequences. Politicians without martial arts training may find their authority undermined, by mystery cults such as Mithraism. Military people start thinking alike, even across enemy boundaries, about the incompetence of a certain political class. This state of affairs doesn't always result in a coup or regime change, as those lacking imagination might suppose.

A military may act in good conscience to defend a people, but if destruction engineering is the best answer (rubblizing the fruits of civilized living), with humans unwittingly caught in the crossfire (like on 9-11), then management failure higher in the chain of command is simply presumed, as a tautology. 

Design science needs to be given a real chance first, and a lot of the time, that just doesn't happen. 

Letting civilians leave was an aspect of the conflicts both in Syria and Ukraine, and in Yugoslavia before that. Noncombatants had some humanitarian corridors to get out through. Convoys of buses arrived. You could elect to stay or go, amidst family pressures. If your nearest and dearest are all leaving, you might as well go too, unless your calling is to stay and fight some oppressor.

On the other hand, refugees fleeing devastation through Libya do not get supportive bus convoys or flotillas, operated by the many states. The navies and coast guards in question tend to criminalize migrating humans, finding them to be undocumented and therefore unworthy. 

The Mediterranean is only partially organized around letting people merry-go-round on cruise and/or ferry ship tours, as if with Eurail passes. Folks in retirement phase, spending savings, or families working jobs at home, on a vacation, get to joy ride. Emigres get to walk or swim. Refugees get treated as outcasts.

Stateless humans suffer punishment by those enjoying statehood of some kind. The conquest of the planet by the prison states (states that act like prisons, keeping their peoples behind border fences, yet permeable to elites) is the story of recent chapters. The states hope to build more walls wherever they can gain a foothold as the ultimate public authorities, which is still an uphill battle for a lot of them, including in the federated states of North America.

That brings me to a concluding thought, which continues a thread raised by TrimTabbers on our last call. We were discussing Fuller's search, chronicled in his Ideas and Integrities (1963), for candidate college majors that might be used to unify the subdividing PhD specialties i.e. which majors might stay comprehensivist and polymathic? You need big picture thinkers, per Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969).

He comes up with architecture as a main one, suggesting military logistics had been his own ticket to this mindset, but that this offering was now in retreat.  Architects might be molded into a type of social engineer who'd actually be integrated to in decision-making and planning circuits. 

One of the TrimTabbers: "so who is listening to such social engineers today and do we even have any worth listening to?" Good question. I'd say many fancy themselves to be in such positions, even without "social engineer" on their business cards. From that point, our discussion moved (somewhat predictably I'd suggest) to Fuller's failure (a common topic) to persuade us that relative Utopia was really a choice beyond a fateful Oblivion. 

We do not yet celebrate a shared comprehensivist viewpoint at this point, nor employ many polymaths, and we're therefore obviously going to hell. That seems closer to the consensus reality (CR) than than the Bucky buzz, which still heralds humanity's success, along with desovereignization.

That's right: Bucky disciples are not uniformly optimistic or upbeat given world trends. My main quibble with their conclusion is I regard Fuller to have personally been a success, in objective terms, given all his honorary degrees and stellar awards. Choosing oblivion would be more our failure than his. He did what he could. We don't get to use a double standard. Maybe judge your own performance first, before seeming to preside (serve as president) over others.

However, from a flag wavy Uncle Sam informed viewpoint, I'm still in the game. My Uncle Sam (US) is a skeleton, Grateful Dead inspired, with additional iconography on the way, mixing in more baseball and other sports. My Ministry of Education after Occupy Portland is nowadays called Revolution Hall (we've been gentrified).

The bankruptcy of the US from the Grunch point of view (Fuller's) occurs in the Reagan Era, with an imposter state sponsored by Grunch continuing in its now-vacated WDC-based role, taking us deep into a dramatic if surreal chapter, featuring a lot of farce and fanaticism. 

Or call it satire, as clearly practically no one is into suspending their disbelief enough to read this narrative as anything beyond a prescient piece in the speculative financial genre (a kind of science fiction). It'd be another forty years before gambling on US bonds was seen as tantamount to providing Grunch with its own risk capital, to spend in elective showdowns.

See Grunch of Giants, required reading among the Bucky disciples, to sample the flavor of World Game globalism way back then. I set up a domain and Wordpress site (grunch.net) to further memorialize this history and to further explore the ramifications of his contributions, including his receiving a Medal of Freedom in the Reagan Era (a fact most high school texts still tend to suppress, especially the USA's public ones -- another sign of Grunch's dominance).

Real World BizMos

My science fiction around the business mobiles, the fleets, their responsibilities, is still future tense. However all the priors are in place, meaning crewed RVs have their fanbases, via YouTube and Patreon. A mom and pop RV team will ply the highways and byways of North America (stereotypically), with both high praise and damning testimony, vs-a-vs what may well be a challenging (but worth it?) lifestyle.

I was just watching such a team today, giving us the big picture: a couple hits the road, starts a fanbase, starts merchandising, and gets addicted to the sponsorships that start coming with the territory. If your channel has high viewer numbers, you're gold to those wishing product placement. And I'm totally down with this myself i.e. looking back, my bizmo teams were indeed going to weight and rate products, although I'm not saying always on request.

In my own Youtube channel, for example, I'll extol products, and yet I don't check the box saying there's a paid sponsorship involved, because there isn't. I'm capable of extolling products of my own volition, and do so.

Then, the couple continues, the grass starts to look greener in some other pasture. Veteran fans, who've enjoyed the BizMo Based Lifestyle (BBL) themselves, as hosts of their own channels, are now ready to retire to some alternative way of life. They continue as a cohort, representing those transitioning "from" instead of "to". Hey, that's a life chapter too.  Having been a One Band One Roader for some decades, it's time for that remote home that doesn't move so much (even if you still do).

I anticipated a lot of these technologies in my science fiction: Kickstart; YouTube; hypertext in general. These special case instances were answers to generic prayers. Prayers, as prophecies (per Thomas Paine), as dreams of the future, needn't be that specific.

Where's the Magic?

Could it be that we intuitively understand, after decades of immersion in special effects science fiction, that we're ready for a next level? 

We see whole cities built and left largely empty in China, in part because skilled people need something to do. That's why we have militaries too, to stay occupied and in shape. But in shape for what? Are we talking about livingry or killingry?

Are we in any shape to build new EPCOTs? 

That's an arcane way of asking the question, but not off target, as the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow had a modicum of LAWCAP support, meaning lawyer-capitalism seemed it might be ready to take the "theme park" concept to the next level, and indeed that's what started to happen. But then the effort bogged down.

Who picked up the Disney baton, if WDC itself, post Walt, had to drop it?

We've heard talk of Google's plans for mini-cities. But big tech comes across as pretty hard edged and predatory compared even to The Mouse. 

Big tech is always scheming to prove essential workers are not really needed. Where's the magic in that?

The A in AI is for Artificial, which means Phony, Simulated, Unreal. 

AGI (artificial general intelligence) is a weak opening, conceptually, as it's oxymoronic, as we're to understand AGI, when and if, is no longer Phony, but the real deal. "Humans, not really understanding their own capabilities, have now developed these abilities in their machines" -- that seems to be the plot. But how coherent is that whole screenplay?

It could be that humans are ready to implement more of what the design science revolution was promising, having faced up to their lack of integrity in so far failing to do so. 

Given the ubiquitous nature of media-making equipment (for staging, for recording, for sharing), the implementation phase will in fact be televised. So let's work on the scripts. Let's start with location scouting.

We will always need emergency shelter for people transitioning back to a more normal lifestyle, and one model is to bring the refugee camp to them. 

Depending on geography, these could take the form of hospital ships, after a hurricane or tsunami for example. A smattering of hospital ships amidst a circulating convoy might be used to move millions over a period of some months. The system activates as needed.

But why not build an Asylum City for the express purpose of providing what military bases provide today: shelter for economic (and/or other) refugees, with opportunities for R&R. 

Guantanamo comes to mind. Should Cubans build an EPCOT where Gitmo used to be? Or should Gitmo be preserved as a museum?