IM2 | OQP

A singularity is that beyond which predictions are impossible to make. It’s where progress and evolution distinguish one another. The former is controlled, with milestones, a direction and criterias to measure success. The latter is emergent, with plateaus, hills and valleys, where the only rule is to be fit for your environment and the only criteria is living or dead.

“It’s that feeling you have had all your life. That feeling that something was wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad, driving you to me. But what is it?”
– source: Morpheus to Neo in The Matrix

What do Chomsky, Hofstadter and McLuhan have in common? Their quest for the meaning of meaning. It’s all very meta, the world is turning on itself. Eyetrackers and MRIs in the hands of ad agencies to improve brand awareness, television directors playing their part to make the public more receptive - it’s not a quest anymore, it’s a race.

“The ‘mainstream’ has long been trying hard to rubbish the alternative; but this one seems to be putting up a good fight. Below is a rather business-eye view of the expansion of the Free Software logic (mainly called ‘Open Source’ in the media) to other realms of life.

Its bottomline: you’re almost just as bad as us.

By focussing on Open Source, and lower costs, it hides from issue of the politics of software (or, more broadly speaking, knowledge-creation), and the emergence of the idea of freedom among the hacker.”
– source: Frederick Noronha in [iosn-general]

It’s a knowledge economy, where brainshares and intellectual property [sic] are used to create value by restricting access to our universal ties. Dividing us to sell or lease us the same book, the same movie, the same sneakers, over and over again. Divided, we acquire unity in the stuff we consume; demand and offer meeting to obey the mystical laws of the market. A sense of loneliness in our gut, we’re desperately feeding that void eating from the very hand that keeps us apart.

Differences, similarities. What’s a good ratio? and what is it good for?

• Freedom over power.
• Quantity over quality.
• Participative over representative.
• Durability over growth.

Free Software as a service. Free Software as a currency. Dollars, hours, lines of codes, lines of documentations, help hotlines or tutorials.

Network of networks, exponential growth, singularity.

Like atoms suddenly showered by some distant energy, us electrons get all excited throwing ourselves left and right center (but mostly left, someone recently said). We hop around, joining new atoms, finding new niches and the miracle happens. It’s no longer what we consume, but what we produce that serves to unite us.

An apology

Maybe you didn’t read the whole post. I started wanting to write something else completely, went over it for three days, a sure signal that something is wrong with this post, and since I’m not too fond of the delete button, hit publish and submitted you to this incoherent babble. Hey, you can’t win them all.