Stitching the Internet to Joe Daily

"For Stacey Kim, a 36-year-old book editor who lives in the Boston suburb of Arlington, Massachusetts, emotional blogging has become a reflex. On April 11, 2007, Kim curled up next to her husband and held him as he succumbed to a long battle with pancreatic cancer. The next morning, she went online to post about the experience.

"It cemented the reality that he was gone," Kim says. "I got hundreds of comments back that were all so loving and supportive. It gave me a really tangible sense of community."

This is from an article on CNN.com which is about the role blogging has in dealing with trauma. What I find especially interesting here though is the way Kim phrased this, "It cemented the reality that he was gone". So often we like to pretend that the internet and real life are two seperate things, and this causes a lot of stress, because feelings about events that happen on the internet can be as real as those that happen off of it. But that doesn't change for many people the notion that there is a logged on identity and a logged off identity. What we are seeing with this kind of statement is that they are actually tandem, or even *gasp* one in the same thing.

Why this is useful is because many people underrate the experience building power of the internet, and don't really understand that the ways it works are akin to the way say astral traveling would work for a magician. What we are talking about here, with the internet. Is a kind of communal self-conscious experience. The internet you experience is in large part due to various clicks, gestures, and feints that you make on it to produce various kinds of experiences, both intellectually and emotionally. Whether it's reading an interesting article, watching a funny youtube video, or talking to a lover--these experiences are guided by a kind of sub-conscious drive that externalizes in a very obvious way the identities and desires of the various factions of the human unconscious. Now, this happens too in your life away from the internet. The way that you build experiences, is in large part due to your will, not random uncontrollable forces, but subtle and overt pushes and pulls of your will. The internet is just a more graphic and obvious expression of this--and a much quicker one.

And the thing is, if you pay attention to what is happening on the internet, the things that you are doing, the worlds that you are shaping, you are going to be that much closer to learning how to shape them through these experiences. It is possible with the internet to induce experiences in a much quicker and efficient way than you would offline. And in doing so, you can shape and change your identity and surroundings at a much more rapid rate. Both on and offline. It should be very obvious, that the internet is the new astral plane for magicians. All of your tools are here to make will manifest and reach a higher knowledge of self.

The key is to, like Kim, pull those experiences in and out of the offline experience, until the both of them are stitched together in one coherent identity, whether that's a patchwork job or not.

Sex, Index Cards, and the Proto Internet Occult Conspiracy

A late fix for a fantastic Tuesday.
This by way of Kenneth Hite and Rob Mcdougal:
"The wise and devious robotnik gave me a pointer to this entry in Paul Collins'³ blog, which contained the following snippet of almost unimaginably pregnant occult metaphor:

In the US, for instance, the War Department struggled with mountains of haphazard medical files until the newly touted method of card filing was adopted in 1887. Hundreds of clerk transcribed personnel records dating back to the Revolutionary War. Housed in Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC -- the scene of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination a generation earlier -- the initiative succeeded a little too well. Six years into the project, the combined weight of 30 million index cards led to information overload: three floors of the theatre collapsed, crushing 22 clerks to death.

Can anyone say Ascension of the Bureaucrat in 1894? [EDIT: Per Wikipedia, on June 9, 1893.] Blood sacrifice to begin the Information Age? Creation of the "mass man" from data (which is to say, DNA) and crumpled flesh (of 22 people -- where was the 23rd, necessary to complete the full chromosomal pairing?), intermingled on the blasphemous regicidal altar of America? The possibilities are limitless."

Also I definitely want to link to this.

Debauchette apparently had an interview with Diane Sawyer, and has written two very great blogs on sex work. So yeah. Worth seeing that if you haven't. Good stuff.

An excerpt:

"In some ways, I feel the way I felt when I was sitting across from Sawyer. I feel like I can only sigh, because I doubt I can begin to penetrate the many layers of misunderstandings and preconceptions, let alone that relentless working assumption that a woman’s value as a human being decreases as she gains sexual experience. (Sawyer asked me about preserving the ’sanctity’ of my body, as though sex without the imprimatur of love were inherently degrading.). I’m glad my mother didn’t lash out in anger or patent disgust — what’s come across in her note is some mix of restraint, confusion, and extreme discomfort. That deserves some kudos, even if I still feel miles away from having a real conversation with her about this, which, unsurprisingly, is exactly how I felt when I sat down with Diane Sawyer. We just don’t see eye to eye."

Sex Magic on the Internet and What it's To Do with Gandhi

From Slashdong

Yeah so, what this is, is a flashlight they've converted into a sex mouse, that a male sex game player would put their member in and be able to interact more "naturally" with the game environment.

Now they just need to combine an exoskeleton with second life, and you'll be in like flynn on the internetz. If you can move around it, touch it, feel it, have sex with it--is it really there? At the very least it's a blow-up doll world.

But really what we are talking about is that sensation of immersion via a kind of projection. It's very interesting the intersection between hi-technology concepts and old world shamanism. Though to be sure, a lot of the technology is perverting many of those techniques, but it's using them all the same. Immersion is just astral projection. The internet is a kind of astral plane. Corporate logos are sigils. Magic is all around us. But more often than not we're interacting with it in an unconscious and passive way.

To that end, here's a lovely story from cnn's second life division about a guy re-enacting Gandhi's "Salt March to Dandi".

"Joseph DeLappe’s 22 days and 240 miles of walking on a treadmill to control his Gandhi avatar walking across Second Life to re-enact the Mahatma’s “Salt March to Dandi”, the seminal 1930’s protest against the British Salt Act of 1882. On this, the final day of walking both on the treadmill at Eyebeam, New York City, and in Second Life, the public is invited to either visit Eyebeam to witness the final steps of the march or join MGandhi Chakrabarti in Second Life to virtually walk the final miles."

I need to get on this second life thing, YESTERDAY!