Akrasis
by rsbakker
Akrasis (or, social akrasis) refers to the technologically driven socio-economic process, already underway at the beginning of the 20th century, which would eventually lead to Choir.
Where critics in the early 21st century continued to decry the myriad cruelties of the capitalist system, they failed to grasp the greater peril hidden in the way capitalism panders to human yens. Quick to exploit the discoveries arising out of cognitive science, market economies spontaneously retooled to ever more effectively cue and service consumer demand, eventually reconfiguring the relation between buyer and seller into subpersonal circuits (triggering the notorious shift to ‘whim marketing,’ the data tracking of ‘desires’ independent of the individuals hosting them). The ecological nature of human cognition all but assured the mass manipulative character of this transformation. The human dependency on proximal information to cue what amount to ancestral guesses regarding the nature of their social and natural environments provided sellers with countless ways to game human decision making. The global economy was gradually reorganized to optimize what amounted to human cognitive shortcomings. We became our own parasite.
Just as technological transformation (in particular, the scaling of AI) began crashing the utility of our heuristic modes of meaning making, it began to provide virtual surrogates, ways to enable the exercise of otherwise unreliable cognitive capacities. In other words, even as the world became ever more inhuman, our environments became ever more anthropomorphic, ever more ‘smart’ and ‘immersive.’ Thus ‘akrasis,’ the ancient term referring to the state of acting against one’s judgment, which here describes a society acting against the human capacity to judge altogether, a society bent upon the systematic substitution of actual autonomy for simulated autonomy.
Humans, after all, have evolved to leverage the signal of select upstream interventions, assuming it a reliable component of their environments. Once we developed the capacity to hack these latter signals, the world effectively became a drug.
Akrasis has a long history, as long as life itself, according to certain theories. Before the 21st century, the process appeared ‘enlightening,’ but only because the limitations of the technologies involved (painting, literacy, etc.) rendered the resulting transformations manageable. But the rate of transformation continued to accelerate, while the human capacity to adapt remained constant. The outcome was inevitable. As the bandwidth of our interventions approached then surpassed the bandwidth of our central nervous systems, the simulation of meaning became the measure of meaning. Our very frame of reference had been engulfed. For billions, the only obvious direction of success—the direction of ‘cognitive comfort’—lay away from the world and into technology. So they defected in their billions, embracing signals, environments, manufactured entirely from predatory code. Culture became indistinguishable from cheat space—as did, for those embracing virtual fitness indicators, experience itself.
By 2050, we had become an advanced akratic civilization, a species whose ancestral modes of meaning-making had been utterly compromised. Art was an early casualty, though decades would be required to recognize as much. Fantasy, after all, was encouraged in all forms, especially those, like art or religion, laying claim to obsolete authority gradients. To believe in art was to display market vulnerabilities, or to be so poor as to be insignificant. No different than believing in God.
Social akrasis is now generally regarded as a thermodynamic process intrinsic to life, the mechanical outcome of biology falling within the behavioural purview of biology. Numerous simulations have demonstrated that ‘outcome convergent’ or ‘optimizing’ systems, once provided the base capacity required to extract excess capacity from their environments, will simply bootstrap until they reach a point where the system detaches from its environment altogether, begins converging upon the signal of some environmental outcome, rather than any actual environmental outcome.
Thus the famous ‘Junkie Solution’ to Fermi’s Paradox (as recently confirmed by the Gala Semantic Supercomputer at MIT).
And thus Choir.
So what you’re saying is… you don’t like World of Warcraft? 😉
The exact opposite! That’s the problem.
i just played like 9 hours of magic the gathering, for free, completely sequestered away from any contact with other real human beings. solutions that dont involve heroin often feel just as guilt ridden. hey i guess its better than before i knew of the free client and was funneling large portions of my low income to hasboro!
This is why I don’t let my children play MMOs or any other game that doesn’t have an end. False sense of accomplishment and no skills that translate to real life. No, you are not a level 97 black mage! You live with your mom and you smell like India. Get a job.
You do realize you’ve described my life! 😉
The first thing I did when The Darkness that Comes Before was published was drive by my pop’s house with a hardcover in hand so that I could wave them in his face and say, See! See!
Get a job.
What if they are a level 97 CEO?
Lol. They you need to explain to your mom why you keep blowing your salary on gold in Game of War. 😉
I’m just wondering if ‘get a job’ is not much more than ‘stop playing world of warcraft and play bigger world of warcraft!’
World of Warcraft fails utterly as an analogue for life. Life is not a power fantasy. You can’t create a new self when you get bored of the one you have, or max out your accomplishments between expansion packs. You don’t get to re-spawn. If you have the great misfortune of being attacked with a broad sword you will almost certainly die or suffer debilitating injuries. Your level 53 paladin does not die unexpectedly from undetected stage 4 ass cancer.
Now you can spend your life playing WoW, and revel in your fictional glory. You are still going to die of undetected stage 4 ass cancer (more likely diabetes given the demo), you just won’t have accomplished anything in the mean time.
But Zach, you’ve just A: Validated companies by saying ‘Get a job’ as if such jobs are legitimate – while B: Blizzard, the guys who run world of warcraft, are clearly running a number of jobs one could get.
So how could world of warcraft utterly fail as an analog for life, when you yourself validate the jobs at Blizzard as being real and important?
The conventional answer is that they are real and important but they make something which fails as analog for life, for the masses.
The lateral answer is that you suddenly realise that what you were taking as important, ie, getting that job, was just another game. That a job is as empty a thing as the thing it produces is empty.
How many companies are just like blizzard? Soft drink companies. Junk food companies. Fashion companies. Television. Movies…on and on.
But you’d say they are all ‘a job’ and you commit to them being important, while making something you’d say utterly fails as an analogue to life.
That’s (part of) the Akrasis, as I understand it.
But you’ll take up the conventional answer – which I can feel beckoning to me as well. Let’s escape that world of fantasy and get into something real! Yeah! A job! In sales, maybe! It’s all sales, really. It doesn’t matter how empty the thing we’re selling is, because jobs are real! They aren’t at all affected by the emptyness of the product involved.
(caveat: If you’d refered to a job as a farmer, or in manufacturing immunisation shots, it’d be a different ball game. But even the farmer is stuck paying land tax and needs to enter the money game, and so has to become a salesman…a purveyor of fantasies)
I own a bowling center… where does that fall on your continuum of legitimacy? I’m also an indie game developer. I can tell you that the real accomplishment of seeing kids play my prototype arcade games is worlds appart from the fictional accomplishment of being really good at tanking.
While some of my satisfaction emerges from the work that I do, much of it comes from being a husband and father. The get a job quip was offered in jest.
The fact that Blizzard employees people has nothing to do with whether or not the experience of using their product is a decent analogue for life. It’s not. It’s not meant to be. The problem arises when people treat it as such.
Well, you think employment at blizzard has nothing to do with whether the product is divorced from reality. For myself, I think while the notion of having a job is respected yet using what a particular job can provide (ie, world of warcraft) is not respected, some kind of contradiction is going on.
I think we are talking across each other a bit. For my part, I do (think) understand what you are saying. I don’t mean to be disrespectful (although my humor often is) to people who enjoy MMO’s. I’m a lifelong Role Player, and I wouldn’t be here if I were not a big fan of the fantasy genre. My gripe with MMO’s is actually personal as I have had multiple childhood friends vanish forever into the internet. Real life just didn’t cut it for them. They are also, each of them, quite depressed. I could be mixing up correlation and causation there. But I don’t think I am.
I’m very interested to see where the cognitive sciences come down on this. Can virtual satisfaction ultimately supplant the real as per Scott’s post? If so, is it neurologically equivalent. Can it make us truly happy? If not, can the shortfall lead to things like depression?
I prefer not to adopt the nihilistic view of nothing means anything and I’m okay with that. Meaning and satisfaction are both human constructs and neuro-chemical realities.
If virtual meaning can be substantially equivalent with no direct adverse psychological consequence (something I doubt), are we okay with the onset of Akrasis? It would certainly be an effective method of population control. Turns out that super hot dark elf necromancer you impregnated was a forty year old guy from Nashua. 😉 . When the sun eventually explodes, we might regret having not bothered focusing on real life accomplishment enough to be elsewhere.
Wait, is that the ‘Junkie Solution’ to Fermi’s paradox? No lie, I still haven’t looked it up. I’m doing a much better job of understanding what the hell Scott is talking about lately. His posts are usually well beyond the ken of my lexicon.
I saw a show on collectors of things, once – one was on harry potter collectors and a woman collector (early twenties?) said something really striking about it “It’s not that it’s believable, it’s that we want to believe”
The funny thing about roleplay games is that they have an extreme effect, I think. They show you, basically, a rock star lifestyle. The reason you might get depression is that in seeing that lifestyle, your friends know they are never going to attain it in life…yet emotionally we are not primed to live two lives – emotionally we thought we were in the rockstar life (to some degree). So the extreme effect is throwing oneself further into the MMO rabbit hole, or alternatively roleplay games burn away your sense of what is important – until you start making posts on blogs saying jobs aren’t all that great!
That said, I think the way western culture seems to deal with depression seems ass backwards. We treat it as if it’s only ever the subjects problem. It’s like prodding the canary in the mineshaft, saying “Go on, you’re all right, get back on the perch! Take these meds to help you back on the perch!”. When really, apart from brain chemistry issues, depression is a bunch of canaries falling off their perches because there is gas in the mine! But we try and patch up the depression maybe to keep up our rockstar job lifestyle fantasies? We just can’t stop jumping into the rabbit hole that we have to tell everyone with depression it’s an issue with them?
To me, the idea of kings (then governments) owning all land (then selling it off) was the first MMORPG. I’m not sure how correct this account is, but certainly my inner sociopath/bastard would certainly think it good sport to drive people off their land then they have to work/get a job to have food – yet they wont have the impression they are slaves (certainly not after a generation or two to normalise it)
So I feel ‘Get a job’ is really just ‘play those long dead kings LARP’.
I mean never mind the sun exploding – what about the sex slave trade – the starvation – the death by really basic deseases of whole families? “Yeah, it’s all sad – but I’ve got a LARP to attend, if I want to make rent”. Where’s the real life accomplishment there? When the guy in the MMORPG and they guy in their job both have exactly the same effect on those issues as each other, how can one raise themselves above the other?
(for anyone else reading, LARP=Live Action RolePlay)
It’s not a zero sum game. I.e. solve all the world’s problems or do nothing at all. I fully agree with your characterization of rpgs. The same is true for most fantasy novels. It’s a power fantasy. The thing that makes MMORPGs particularly addictive is that they go on for as long as you like, that your character is afforded a degree of individuality that makes them more personal to you, and that you are forced to maintain a high level of participation to keep the same peers. It becomes a obligate priority rather than simply recreation. They also lack the real life friendships and interaction of table top or LARP.
You might even describe them as being predatory code!
In terms of of zero sum, I think it takes continual resource generators to then apply those resources against the problems, continuously. However the expectation is that one uses resource generation to keep up with the joneses (even if that’s just keeping roof over head/not skipping meals). It’s almost like you are forced to maintain a high level of participation to keep the same peers!
I mean, I just keep seeing parallels – it’s kind of my bent to take my beat up of fantasy games to some kind of actual applicability to life in general! I can see the pidgeon hole I might be put in in, in that regard – and I can myself acknowledge some applicability of that pidgeon hole!
No doubt the parallels exist. Where the analogue fails is on the consequence side of the equation. It’s for that reason, IMO, that the satisfaction of fantasy is ultimately fleeting. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. You can simulate consequence. In Ultima IV if you acted un-virtuously you lost your progress in that virtue and the game auto-saved. That was back in the day of only one save game. Since it’s not real, you can always just walk away. No consequences. The satisfaction associated with an accomplishment is directly related to the risk and work it took to achieve.
On the other side of the parallel you have evoked several tropes that are not necessarily representative of how people actually live. Are the rat race and keeping up with the Jones’s a reality for some people? Sure. But many people also do work that they love. Not everybody is slaving away in some cubical or call center. You love fantasy. What is preventing you from becoming the next George Martin or Scott Bakker? Probably World of Warcraft 😉 . Which, incidentally I am now blaming for the wait time of The Unholy Consult 😉 .
Let me end with a story. A good friend of mine has a brother in law who is obsessed with Call of Duty. A very nice and gregarious kid. Loves the game. Is great at it. Wants to play national tournaments. I took him to play paintball. He loved it. He loves it far more than Call of Duty. He is obsessed with it and wants to play national tournaments. What is the difference? Paintballs hurt. There are real consequences and real people.
Once he had a chance to experience it, Real life > Fantasy. The down side is that paintball is considerably more expensive than Call of Duty. So he’s going to have to get a job 😉
Since it’s not real, you can always just walk away. No consequences.
Yeah, but you know what I’m going to ask, Zach. And you know instead of the heady world of out there examples it’ll be close to the bone: The consequences of bowling?
Are the rat race and keeping up with the Jones’s a reality for some people? Sure. But many people also do work that they love. Not everybody is slaving away in some cubical or call center.
If the number of people ‘doing what they love'(which also means making rent) was steadily increasing over time, I’d agree with you.
You love fantasy. What is preventing you from becoming the next George Martin or Scott Bakker? Probably World of Warcraft 😉 .
Ah, the casino sell. Sure, everyone can win! Put in the hours it takes to write 50k+ words…just on the off chance you’ll get paid. That’s the society capitalism fosters – the ‘maybe paid’ one – so it can crowdsource a million talents, then only pay for the one or two names it likes.
Oh, I do write – I write about systems that crowd source a million talents to discard the majority and evagelicise a handful. Then I throw on some dragons and magic onto the heap, so it seems an out there example and it’s not too close to the bone. I write about vampires.
Once he had a chance to experience it, Real life > Fantasy.
Well, I guess that’s the thing – people playing WOW sort of treat it as real life as some people treat paintball as real life. Myself – I don’t find paintball to be ‘real life’ as much as WOW. More exercise though, I’ll grant.
Michael,
If we looked at all the attempts at making flying vehicles in the past, there were so many one might be tempted to say ‘if god had meant man to fly…etc’. But because of hindsight bias, we forget about all the failed models.
Also you seem to want overall system change, rather than producing a different system inside a larger one (to hopefully largely replace the larger system, one day). It is possible to grow a rose from a corpse. But people who feel see the world as a tragedy, while those who think see it as a comedy – and this would all just get in the way of your jokes.
“That said, I think the way western culture seems to deal with depression seems ass backwards. We treat it as if it’s only ever the subjects problem. It’s like prodding the canary in the mineshaft, saying ‘Go on, you’re all right, get back on the perch! Take these meds to help you back on the perch!’”.
The thing is, Callan, that the miners and the canaries are stuck. They can’t leave the mine and they can’t pump the poison gas out. No matter how fucked up your environment is, if you can’t leave it or change it you have to adjust to it.
A while ago in response to another post on this blog I said that thinking about alternatives to capitalism is a waste of time because nobody since Marx has actually suggested a path from capitalism to any alternative (and that didn’t really work out). We’ll have to keep swinging our pickaxes, coughing up black phlegm and eating our dead canaries. When our lungs finally fail we’ll all go to heaven, which will be a lot like Magic; the Gathering. (insert bitter smiley-face here.)
To Zach Sundberg
Your friend’s brother-in-law might want to see his Army recruiter. He’d get paid and bullets hurt even worse than paintballs, so it would be a win-win all around. (Insert flashback/nightmare/double-amputee/traumatic brain injury smiley-face here.)
lol. Yeah, the other thing that makes paintball fun is the not dying part 😉
The consequences of bowling?
None. It’s recreation. But nobody is trying to claim substantial equivalence to all of life. If we are going apples to apples, It is a great deal more rewarding than Wii bowling. I was comparing paintball to Call of Duty.
If the number of people ‘doing what they love'(which also means making rent) was steadily increasing over time, I’d agree with you.
Again with the sweep. The long term trend and total numbers (both of which are unknowable) are irrelevant. The only statistic that matters is you.
Ah, the casino sell
Nope. If you are doing it for the money then you missed the point. I have three arcade games, an Android app, a SC2 tribute game, and dozens of other projects all of which have netted me zero (negative actually) income. I do it for the challenge and to create something. If I end up making real money off of it some day… bonus.
people playing WOW sort of treat it as real life</i?
I view this as the problem. Also, there is a word for people who treat paintball as real life: douchebags. I've been playing for 20 years and I promise you that it is nowhere near the mil-sim tough guy fuckwittery that people imagine it to be. The mil-sim guys are quickly disabused of that notion and either embrace paintball the way she is played, or go play airsoft were they can still pretend to be a commando.
Your entire argument seems to be a rationalization of being taken advantage of by predatory code.
"The rules aren't good enough for me. I'm taking my ball and going home to blog about it".
I guess I can't be surprised that Bakker fans would have a grim dark world view, but the world isn't nearly as shitty as you seem to think it is. The very fact that you can spend your time blogging and interaction over the whole of the planet rather than being a bent back serf tilling your field and praying that most of your kids survive the winter is testimony to that. The poor of the western world have a higher standard of living than most classes throughout all of history. The world may still be a shitty place on the whole, but it is far less shitty today than it has ever been before.
Observation: If the number of people ‘doing what they love'(which also means making rent) was steadily increasing over time, I’d agree with you.
Responce: Again with the sweep. The long term trend and total numbers (both of which are unknowable) are irrelevant. The only statistic that matters is you.
I’m the one with a sweep? It’s ‘unknowable’ and ‘irrelevant’. Absolutist terms on your part.
Where is you ‘if’ statement?
It’s really easy to always be right. All one has to do is avoid the word ‘if’.
Your entire argument seems to be a rationalization of being taken advantage of by predatory code.
Maybe.
And in return where is your ‘maybe’ on something I’ve said that potentially leaves you vulnerable? Where’s the thing you admit maybe there’s a chance of some flaw on your side of the story?
Upcoming hard statement time:
Some people would be set only only extracting maybe’s from others while never commiting to any themselves. Of course they’d never admit that – but that dishonesty characterises them more generally.
Maybe there’s some reason to get angry over it other than as an extractor trying to distract – but you have your rationalisation observation and I have my potential extractor observation. Unless you want to reciprocate with a maybe of your own – in which case, great!
Also I meant to comment on this
The poor of the western world have a higher standard of living than most classes throughout all of history. The world may still be a shitty place on the whole, but it is far less shitty today than it has ever been before.
I mean, you say yourself it’s less shitty?
So that begs the question, what changed?
Which also begs the question, whatever changed that – can that change be reveresed.
But I know – the moral to take away is ‘It’s better than it was…don’t ask questions in case it all falls apart for asking!’. I follow a similar philosophy in regards to when I get my damn internet connection to work – I try not to touch it or think about it after that.
We’re all secretly unraveling in “The Secret World” H.P. Lovecraft meets us in Kingsport, transports us to Miskatonic U. – I’m a Dragon (Chaos), your Illuminati (Dark Order)…. whose the Templar (Control)?
http://www.thesecretworld.com
“For the whored!”
I think I’m in the right business. 😉
TIL Wracu is Old English for vengeance/cruelty/misery. COOL!!
source: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wracu
credit: https://www.reddit.com/r/bakker/comments/3jrf96/the_meaning_of_wracu/
It’s one of my faves.
I really liked this. Is this a glimpse into another project you are working on?
Thanks Dharm. All this stuff is part of the Semantica book.
Thanks for a fascinating post Scott. Do you happen to know of any books analyzing the uses of cognitive science in marketing? I’ve been thinking about this a lot, especially in connection to the dual-theories of cognition, and how marketing mainly appeal to the first level and wants to silence the upper level. Thanks again!!
Thanks, Axl. Recently, there’s been Brain Sell, Decoding the Irrational Consumer, and a number of others, though I haven’t read anything but capsules, so I can’t attest to their quality. For me, the amazement stems from simply browsing the ever increasing number of commercial websites that clutter the cogsci searches I do. Frankly, I feel like the commercial interest in many of the things I write about actually outstrips the academic interest, that the ‘man’ is far, far ahead of the curve on these issues.
Dubious supposition from the start. Look at any thing where people really get involved, and sink in time and care. Just take sports. There’s very high level discourse there. Very intentional, system one discourse. The entire choir functions the same way except maybe in the most straight forward of physical hungers like for alcohol, red bull, cigarettes, or fatty/salty/sweet foods.
Reblogged this on synthetic zero.
Hm. Getting a 404. Authorities finally catch up with you guys?
or we could just bankrupt our governments as we eat ourselves to death while hooked on federally subsidized corn-syrup:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2015/09/08/50-percent-of-adults-in-u-s-have-diabetes-or-pre-diabetes-study-finds/
The real zombie apocalypse: everyone carrying a sack of groaning, non-sentient flesh on their asses.
You can blame it all on Castro. When we lost the Cuban sugar, they made fructose corn syrup the new ingredient. Folks in Iowa should build a statue of Fidel.
they sell stevia in walmart now. little fuckin jar costs the same as a couple 5 pound bags of sugar and it provides no caloric content at all! but i guess it should make up for what i’d spend on dental visits otherwise.
For anyone confused by it, for what it’s worth I put one potential explanation/decompacting of the story on my blog
Pretty damn good, skeptical in all the right places as well.
akratic becoming:
http://s31.photobucket.com/user/divisionbyzer0/media/Posthuman.jpg.html
You look how I feel! 😉
Cool stuff.
So you assent to the existence of True Contentful Representations!
I’m having problems with links today. I wonder if the site’s acting up.
feeling robot pain?
http://www.spacetimemind.com/blog/2015/9/15/episode-33-the-philosophy-of-mind-of-pain-with-david-pereplyotchik
I’ll check this out later–looks very cool!
How do you fast forward/go to the time you want to listen to? I just had a quick listen – the bit where the idea of pausing a creature is brought up and one speaker says “But if you were paused while in pain…!” and the other says “…ah, but subjectively”. Possibly wrapped up a little too quickly by the ‘subjectively’ responce (or so it seemed from my quick listen), but a really good moment there. It’s at about 6:30 in the recording.
ah yeah it’s sort of hit or miss and depends on mood and interests.
On a more hopeful note:
http://freakonomics.com/2015/09/10/preventing-crime-for-pennies-on-the-dollar/
It’s interesting – I think possibly part of the anger management is that when the social contract is laid out in a group, everyone there knows that when they don’t just react violently, it’s to uphold the values of the contract rather than ‘taking it like a bitch’ or something else that diminishes them. Possibly knowing but not at a purely concious level. But that mutual understanding is probably a pivotal thing.
Fascinating article. Looks like CBT beat mindfulness to the punch!
https://deterritorialinvestigations.wordpress.com/2015/09/16/philip-mirowski-the-terms-of-media-markets/
I remember there was an experiment where the “therapist” was just a computer selecting from a table of Rogersian type of statements which basically just mirror the patient to themselves, and this was as effective as the drugs and the real therapy. Has therapy advanced beyond the efficacy of a coin toss? CBT was invented what, in the 60s, and its basically no different than what preists, shamans, and gurus have been doing for thousands of years.
CBT is nonsense (not unlike most analytical philo), and here in particular where many of these folks being ‘treated’ lack the sorts of self-soothing/self-control social skills/habits needed to take a moment to re-consider (and even then how do we do in terms of short-term satisfactions vs long-term abstract goals?) and which, like language acquisition tend to get harder to develop with age, not to mention the social norms/pressures of not being seen as weak and endangering/exposing yer self or loved ones aren’t being addressed, so which loyalties and deep seated habits will win out, not a hard one really…
absolutely. i hugely resent that teachers and guardians didnt get any help for me during formative years. my paretns were totally hands off. they would just let me drop out of everything and go into isolation. i wanted to reach through the tv and punch bill maher when he was joking about the fabrication of social anxiety disorder and how in his day they just called it “being shy!” well thats where it began for me. i am sure many people end up being shy and functioning but it can be indicative of broader difficulties.
How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the light bulb has to want to change. If the light bulb wants to change, then self-reflection might be all that’s needed. I wonder if it’s possible to make money running an Ashley Madison type scam on people with psychiatric disorders.
Part Two:
http://freakonomics.com/2015/09/17/i-dont-know-what-youve-done-with-my-husband-but-hes-a-changed-man-a-new-freakonomics-radio-episode/
ochlo, spill the beans. you said translational science has been helping people. i know translational science is working on male pattern baldness (ie cotsarelis and garza’s work on prostanoids in scalp skin), but what have they come up with for anxiety and executive functioning.
cancer as well, but i dont have that one (yet). dont want you guys too think i care about baldness but not cancer!
My wife is currently here:
http://www.aacr.org/Meetings/Pages/MeetingDetail.aspx?EventItemID=54#.VftRHbT4G88
I’ll ask her when she gets back.
This should give you a sense, though:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/23/us-cancer-survival-idUSKBN0NE2KD20150423
Meanwhile, I guess get a hat and a bag of weed? (You’ll likely be SOL in terms of “executive functioning” but 2/3 ain’t bad, as they say).
weed just makes me lethargic. same reason i dont usually use valium and xanax.
http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2014/03/discovery-sheds-new-light-on-marijuana-anxiety-relief-effects/
The digital infrastructure of the Sousveillance State:
http://www.theverge.com/sponsored/8462809/50-billion-devices
Also, too:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Peripheral-William-Gibson/dp/0399158448
I watched my son finished metal gear 2 the other day – honestly there were parts in the games discussions I’d completely forgotten about. Like mentions of gated communities who simply hide from others so as to maintain their own prefered truths, rather than mingle.
It’s all good, but three minutes in and it sounds Bakker
[…] them always and everywhere. Projecting this trend leads him to envision something very close to Integration, where we become so embalmed in our information environments that “[d]isconnection will mean […]