By Bianca Gubalke

Digital Communication

One thing we can certainly say about our era of explosive and uncontrollable distribution of information and knowledge through modern high-tech communication technologies and channels via the Internet -  is that it’s gone ‘digital’.
And this is only the beginning.

Digital Advertising Online to grow by 8,6%

Not surprisingly, the only real highlight at the renowned Cannes Lions 2009 Advertising Festival in France… besides the significance of China as an emerging market and the promotion of “green” technologies… was without any question Digital Advertising Online.

In a year that is expected to be problematic and financially critical by many experts – with the global advertising market to fall by 6.9 % -, the prognosis for Digital Advertising is brilliant:  a whopping 8.6%  growth… depending to a large extent on developments in China.

YORGOO Booster Ad by Bianca Gubalke

Digital Spending to ’stay strong’

When questioned about the impact of the recession in the US,  Google CEO Eric Schmidt said he was optimistic for 2010 and that digital spending would stay strong.

If we think that an industry giant like McDonald’s spends on average 7% on digital advertising – and this with a rising tendency – this reflects on the opportunity for online marketers and business entrepreneurs to grab a piece of the advertising market share to earn a living from in the future.

Digital Advertising and Semiomantics

Advertising – offline and online – always had to be ahead of trends if not setting them. Here time and a fine sensor and feeling for what the people, the audience, the potential customer wanted and how they wanted it have always been of the essence – often born from grassroots and original artistic expression, be it in music, movies, dance  or fashion etc.

Watching the Cannes Lions Festival advertising reels was always an exciting and psychologically interesting and instructive journey through the year covered, while casting ahead a shadow of what was to – possibly – come.

As such, Digital Advertising is a process of continued research to find the right pulse of the time, the hot spot where people are reachable and touchable… and most importantly, Ads need to reach their target audience, jumping into their eyes and creating the desired CLICK HERE NOW impulse – before being hijacked by the next distraction and virtual destination.

This means that attractive onlinel ads need to be visible on Google Top 10 positions – and this does not really depend on excellent ads nor on good content – but on other factors, skills, strategies, techniques and. . . an aggressively tuned Script, genre Semiomantics as well as the brand-new and soon to be launched Booster.

Ceguna.com on YORGOO Booster

YCADEMY Online Business Building Seminars

The good news is that while this is no easy path… it can be learned – as the past Ycademy Seminars have shown and “. . . as seen on Google” – in other words the simple yet undisputable proof.

“YORGOO Booster is a Great Tool for generating Income” ~ Ceguna.com, NY, USA

“Now I am able setting up my own shopping mall on the Internet” ~ hannocoetzee.com, South Africa

“YORGOO Booster ist einzigartig ! Es ist alles enthalten was man braucht. SUPER !!!”
uteschaedler.com, Germany

“Great for business, great product, customer satisfaction!” taxmart.com, Alabama, USA

“YORGOO Booster is amazing, astonishing, easy and fun ! TOUS DERRIERE !”
photozcool.com, France

YCADEMY Online Business Building Seminars

The good news is that while this is no easy path… it can be learned – as the past Ycademy Seminars have shown and “. . . as seen on Google” – the proof.

And the other good news is that the Internet has levelled out the playing fields – meaning that in the Google Top 10 challenge the Davids get a chance to win the Formula 1 of the virtual highway… and that’s what the whole game is all about – isn’t it?!

TIME FOR CHANGE. . .

Bianca Gubalke

By Bianca Gubalke

Google Top 10 Ranking with YORGOO Booster

Ycademy June 2009 Seminar

WOW! If Day 1 of this year’s smashing YCADEMY Online Business Building Seminar is anything to go by, then each Seminar participant will be equipped with yet another incredibly powerful – meaning Google TOP 10 ranking efficient – tool… if not arm… by Sunday night!

YORGOO Booster Ad created by Bianca Gubalke

YORGOO Blasters and YORGOO Boosters

Just like  the ‘YORGOO Blasters’, the ‘YORGOO Boosters’ are so-called “set and forget” devices.

Typical AdSense Pay per Click advertising is ideal…. as well as Hot Offers where people cannot resist the temptation of wanting to find out more through attractive and captivating Ads – that’s the power of this genre of Semiomantics Scripts.

Work From Home via your PC

So what is needed to get ready for the Beach and let the Internet work for you in a more or less automatic way… the typical slogan that is so often announced especially in distributor ads from MLM companies like Herbalife?

Here’s the MODEL:

1. You need a Product to Sell

The easiest products to put on automation are products purchasers can download or products where the fulfillment can be completely automated or out-sourced.

Ideal products are Digital Products and Affiliate Products.
If you use physical products which need to be shipped, you must take care of organizing your fulfillment while
being at the beach.

2. You need a web site to promote the product

I suggest YORGOO Booster!

YORGOO Booster is an alternative to YORGOO Blaster and the ideal carrier for your Message in a highly provocative and visible way to where people are looking for it: on TOP 10 of Google. Proven and effective.

3. Shopping Cart

A shopping cart is needed for your own products only.

Affiliate Products will be sold off the merchant’s site.

4. Product Delivery System

The focus is on delivery by Download and on out-sourced delivery for esp. affiliate programs.

5. Customer Service

Ideally,  focus on products where no or only minimal input is required.

YORGOO Booster Ad by Bianca Gubalke

That’s the basic setup. . . and it’s amazing and fantastic to see how all Seminar participants who followed the “Path to Profitability” conscienciously over the past years are now in a position to swiftly follow the technical instructions and get tangible results!

There’s no better investment than in ourselves – once the technique is in the blood, improvisation and the REAL dance are starting… and this is when the “Beach” comes to our homes and into our hearts as we thoroughly enjoy what we do AND we reap the benefits and steady financial growth.

We are looking forward to tomorrow’s Training with great anticipation and we close the day with gratitude to our extraordinary teacher,  Internet wizzard Yorgo Nestoridis!

THANK YOU!

YORGOO Booster TOP 10 – As seen on Google!

Bianca Gubalke

My new YORGOO Booster site starts HERE.
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At the beginning of this summer an Amish guy I met online rode his bicycle out to our home along the foggy Pacifica coast. Online, is of course, the last place you’d ever expect to meet an Amishman. But he contacted me via my blog, and then a few months later he appeared at our door hot, sweaty and out of breath from the long uphill climb to our house under the redwoods. Parked a few feet away was his ingenious Dohan foldup bike, which he rode from the train station. Like most Amish he did not fly, so he had stored his bike on the 3-day cross-country train ride from Pennsylvania. This was not his first trip to this neck of the woods. He had previously ridden his bike along the entire coast of California, and had in fact seen a lot of the world on train and boats.

For the  next week, our Amish visitor couch-surfed in our spare bedroom, and at dinner he regaled us with tales of his life growing up in an horse-and-buggy Old Order Plain Folk community. I’ll call our friend Leon Hoffman, although that is not his real name, because the Amish are averse to bringing attention to themselves (thus their reluctance to being photographed). But Leon is an unusual Amish. While he never went to high school (Amish formal education ceases after 8th grade) he is among the few Plain Folk to go to college, where he is currently an older student in his 30s. He hopes to study medicine, and perhaps become the first Amish doctor.  Many former Amish have gone to college, or become doctors, but none that remain in the Old Order church. Leon is unusual in that he has remained in the church, yet relishes his ability to live in the “outside” world as well.

The Amish practice a remarkable tradition called “rumspringer” wherein their teenagers are allowed to ditch their home-made uniforms — suspenders and hats for boys, long dresses and bonnets for girls — and don baggy pants and short skits to buy a car, listen to music, and party for a few years before they decide to forever give up these modern amenities and join the Old Order church. This intimate, real exposure to the technological universe means that they are fully cognizant of what that world has to offer, and what exactly they are denying themselves. Leon is on a sort of permanent “rumspringer” although he doesn’t party, but works very hard. His father runs a machine shop (a common Amish occupation; not all are farmers), and so Leon is genius with tools. I was in the middle of a bathroom plumbing job on the afternoon when Leon first showed up and he quickly took over the job. I was impressed by his complete mastery of hardware store parts. I’ve heard of Amish auto mechanics who don’t drive cars but can fix any model you give them.

As Leon spoke of what his boyhood was like with only a horse and buggy for transportation, and what he learned in his multi-grade, one room school house, a fervent wistfulness played over his face. He missed the comfort of Old Order life now that he was away from it. We outsiders think of life without electricity, central heat, or cars as hard punishment. But curiously Amish life offers more leisure than contemporary urbanity does. In Leon’s account, they always had time for a game of baseball, reading, visiting neighbors and hobbies. This was a complete surprise to Eric Brende, an MIT student who gave up an engineering degree and instead dropped out to live alongside an Old Order Amish/Mennonite community. Brende, who is not Amish, eliminated as much gear as he could from his home with his wife and tried to live as Plain as possible, a tale he recounts in his book, Better Off.  For over two years Brende gradually adopted what he calls a minimite lifestyle. A minimite uses “the least amount of technology needed to accomplish something.” Like his Old Order Amish/Mennonite neighbors, he employed a minimum of technology: no power tools, or electric appliances. Brende found that the absence of electronic entertainment, the absence of long auto commutes or frequent shopping trips, and the absence of chores simply maintaining existing complex technology, was replaced by more real leisure time. In fact the constraints of cutting wood by hand, hauling manure with horses, doing dishes by lamp light liberated the first genuine leisure time he had ever had.

Who is not seduced by the allure of this lifestyle?

At the same time, the hard, strenuous manual work was satisfying and rewarding. He not only found more leisure but more fulfillment as well. Wendell Berry is a thinker and farmer who works his farm in an old fashioned way using horses instead of tractors, very similar to the Amish. Like  Brende, Berry finds tremendous satisfaction in the visible arrangement of bodily labor and agricultural results. Berry is a master wordsmith as well, and no one has been able to convey the “gift” which minimalism can deliver as well as he. One particular story from his collection The Gift of Good Land captures the almost ecstatic sense of fulfillment won with minimal technology.

Last summer we put up our second cutting of alfalfa on an extremely hot, humid afternoon. Our neighbors came in to help, and together we settled into what could pretty fairly be described as suffering. The hayfield lies in a narrow river bottom, a hill on one side and tall trees along the river on the other. There was no breeze at all. The hot, bright, moist air seemed to wrap around us and stick to us while we loaded the wagons.

It was worse in the barn, where the tin roof raised the temperature and held the air even closer and stiller. We worked more quietly than we usually do, not having breath for talk. It was miserable, no doubt about it. And there was not a push button anywhere in reach.

But we stayed there and did the work, were even glad to do it, and experienced no futurological fits. When we were done we told stories and laughed and talked a long time, sitting on a post pile in the shade of a big elm. It was a pleasing day.

Why was it pleasing? Nobody will ever figure that out by a “logical projection.” The matter is too complex and too profound for logic. It was pleasing, for one thing, because we got done. That does not make logic, but it makes sense. For another thing, it was good hay, and we got it up in good shape. For another, we like each other and we work together because we want to.

And so, six months after we shed all that sweat, there comes a bitter cold January evening when I go up to the horse barn to feed. It is nearly nightfall, and snowing hard. The north wind is driving the snow through the cracks in the barn wall. I bed the stalls, put corn in the troughs, climb into the loft and drop the rations of fragrant hay into the mangers. I go to the back door and open it; the horses come in and file along the driveway to their stalls, the snow piled white on their backs. The barn fills with the sounds of their eating. It is time to go home. I have my comfort ahead of me: talk, supper, fire in the stove, something to read. But I know too that all my animals are well fed and comfortable, and my comfort is enlarged in theirs. On such a night you do not feed out of necessity or duty. You never think of the money value of the animals. You feed and care for them out of fellow feeling, because you want to. And when I go out and shut the door, I am satisfied.

Leon spoke of the same equation: fewer distractions, more satisfaction. The ever-ready embrace of his community was palpable. Imagine it: neighbors would pay your medical bill if needed, or build your house in a few weeks without pay, and more importantly allow you to do the same for them. Minimal technology, unburdened by the cultural innovations such as insurance or credit cards, forces a daily reliance on neighbors and friends. Hospital stays are paid by church members, who also visit the sick regularly. Barns destroyed by fire or storm are rebuilt in a barn-raising. Financial, marital, behavioral counseling are done by peers. The community is as self-reliant as it can make itself, and only as self-reliant as it is because it is a community. I began to understand the strong attraction the Amish exerts on its young adults and why, even today, only a very few leave after their rumspringer. Leon observed that of the 300 or so friends his age in his church, only 2 or 3 have abandoned this very technologically constrained life, and the ones who did, joined a lifestyle that is still constrained compared to the average American.

But the cost for this closeness and dependency is limited choice. No education beyond 8th grade. Few career options for guys, none besides homemakers for girls. I asked Leon whether he could imagine all the goodness of the Amish life — all that comforting mutual aid, satisfying hands-on work, reliable community infrastructure –whether it could still issue forth if, say, all kids attended school up to 10th grade? Just for starters. Well, you know, he said, “hormones kick in around the 9th grade and boys, and even some girls, just don’t want to sit at desks and do paperwork. They need to use their hands as well as their heads and they ache to be useful. Kids learn more doing real things at that age.”

Fair enough. I can really identify with that, since I wish I had been “doing real stuff” instead of being holed up in a stuffy high school classroom. On the other hand, reading books in high school opened up my mind to possibilities I had never imagined in grade school, and my world began expanding in those years and has never stopped. The technium amplifies possibilities, and a technological oriented education (which is what contemporary education is) optimizes choices. Amish minimalism, on the other hand, is deliberately aimed to optimize satisfaction, fulfillment and the comforting bonds of family and community. It does that well.

In the late 1960s some million self-described hippies stampeded to small farms and make-shift communes to live simply, not too different from the Amish. I was part of that movement. Wendell Berry was one of the clear-thinking gurus we listened to. In tens of thousands of experiments in rural America, we jettisoned the technology of the modern world (because it seemed to crush individualism) and tried to rebuild a new world while digging wells by hand, grinding our own flour, keeping bees, erecting homes from sun-dried clay, and even getting windmills and water generators to occasionally work. Some found religion, too. Our discoveries paralleled what the Amish knew — that this simplicity worked best in community, that the solution wasn’t no-technology but some technology, and what we then called appropriate technology. This day-glo, deliberate, conscious engagement with appropriate technology was deeply satisfying for a while.

But only for a while. The Whole Earth Catalog, which I edited at one point, published the field manual for those millions of simple technology experiments. We ran pages and pages of how to build chicken coops, grow your own veggies, curdle your own cheese, school your children and start a home business in house made from bales of straw. I got to witness close up how the early enthusiasm for restricted technology would inevitably give way to unease and restlessness. Slowly those millions of hippies drifted away from their deliberate low tech world. One-by-one they left their domes for suburban garages and lofts, and much to our collective astonishment, transformed their small-is-beautiful skills into small-is-startup entrepreneurs.  The origins of the Wired generation and the laid-back, long-hair computer culture (think open source) lay in the hippies of the 70s. As Stewart Brand, hippy founder of the Whole Earth Catalog remembers, ” ‘Do your own thing’ easily translated into ‘Start your own business’.”  I’ve lost count of the hundreds of individuals I personally know who left communes to eventually start hi-tech companies in Silicon Valley. It’s almost a cliche by now — barefoot to billionaire, a la Steve Jobs.

The hippies of the previous generation did not remain in their Amish-like mode because as satisfying and attractive as the work in those communities were, the siren of choices was more attractive. The hippies left the farm for the same reason the young have always left: the possibilities leveraged by technology beckon all night and day. In retrospect we might say the hippies left for the same reason Thoreau left his Walden; they came and then left to experience life to its fullest. Volunteer simplicity is a possibility, an option, a choice that one should experience for a least part of one’s life, not the least to help you sort out your technology priorities. But in my observation simplicity’s fullest potential requires that one consider it one phase of many (even if a recurring phase as is meditation or the Sabbath). In the past decade a new generation of minimites has arisen, and they are now urban homesteading — living lightly in cities, supported by adhoc communities of like-minded homesteaders. They are trying to have both, the Amish satisfaction of intense mutual aid and hand labor, and the ever cascading choices of a city.

It is a fine experiment. I too left a place where I built a house from scratch, and kept bees, and lived on a commune, and I left because choices were limited. Instead I came to a place where opportunities increased every day: a megalopolis sprawl. Yet I carry an old habit of minimites: I am constantly seeking the least amount of technology needed to do the most good. I have hope that some version of minimitism is possible in urbanity.

Because of my own personal journey from low-tech to high choice, I remain fascinated and deeply impressed by Leon and Berry, and Brende and the Old Order Plain Folk communities. I am impressed that their tightly bound mutual support can reliably resist the perennial lure of modernity. That’s an amazing testimony because so few other cultures can boast that.

But there is one aspect of the Amish, and the minimites, and the small-is-beautiful hippies at their heyday, that is selfish. The “good” they wish their minimal technology to achieve is primarily the fulfillment of a fixed nature. The human that is satisfied by this agricultural goodness is an unchanging human. For the Amish, one’s fulfillment must swell inside the traditional confine of a farmer, tradesman, or housewife. For minimites and hippies, fulfillment must rise within the confine of the natural unhampered by artificial aids. For example, Wendell Berry will agree that a solid cast iron hand pump is much superior to hauling water in buckets on a yoke. And that domesticated horses (an invention equal to iron) are vastly better than pulling a plow yourself, as many an ancient farmer has done. But for Berry, who uses horses to drive his farm gear, anything beyond the innovation of horse power works against the satisfaction of human nature and natural systems. When tractors were introduced in the 1940s, “the speed of work could be increased, but not the quality.” He writes: “Consider, for example, the International High Gear No. 9 mowing machine. This is a horse-drawn mower that certainly improved on everything that came before it, from the scythe to previous machines in the International line… I own one of these mowers. I have used it in my hayfield at the same time that a neighbor mowed there with a tractor mower; I have gone from my own freshly cut hayfield into others just mowed by tractors; and I can say unhesitatingly that, though the tractors do faster work, they do not do it better. The same is substantially true, I think, of other tools: plows, cultivators, harrows, grain drills, seeders, spreaders, etc… The coming of the tractor made it possible for a farmer to do more work, but not better.”

For Berry technology peaked in 1940, about the moment when all these farm implements were as good as they got. In his eyes, and the Amish too, the elaborate circular solution of a small mixed family farm, where the farmer produces plant feed for the animals who produced manure, power and food to grow more plants, is the perfect pattern for the health and satisfaction of a human being, human society and environment. Yet, it is pure foolishness, if not the height of conceit and hubris, to believe that in the long course of human history, and by that I mean the next ten thousand years in addition to the past ten thousand years, the peak of human invention and satisfaction should be 1940. It is no coincidence that this date also happens to be the time when Wendell Berry was a young boy growing up on a farm with horses. 1940 cannot be the end of technological perfection for human fulfillment simply because human nature is not at its end.

We have domesticated our humanity as much as we have domesticated our horses. Our human nature is a malleable crop that we planted 50,000 years ago, and continue to garden even today. The field of our nature has never been static. We know that genetically our bodies are changing faster now than at any time in the past million years. Our minds are being rewired by our culture. With no exaggeration, and no metaphor, we are not the same people who first started to plow 10,000 years ago.  The snug interlocking system of horse and buggy, wood fire cooking, compost gardening, and minimal industry may be perfectly fit for a human nature — of an ancient agrarian epoch. I call this devotion to a traditional being “selfish” because it ignores the way in which our nature — our wants, desires, fears, primeval instincts, and loftiest aspirations — are being recast by ourselves, by our inventions, and it excludes the needs of our new natures.

There are many traditionalists who deny this shift, and who hold our nature is unchanging; from the perspective of an individual, or even a generation, it looks that way. But for anyone raised by a modern culture crammed with ubiquitous writing, communication technology, science, pervasive entertainment, travel, surplus food, abundant nutrition, and new possibilities every day, we are different beings than our ancestors. We think different. That should be no surprise because our personas are dictated beyond our genetics. More than our hunter-gatherer ancestors we are shaped by the accumulating wisdom, practices, traditions, and culture of our all those who’ve lived before us and live with us. At the same time our genes are racing. And we are speeding the acceleration of those genes by several means, from medical interventions to gene therapy, and then racing our culture with computers and wires as well. In fact every trend of the technium — especially its increasing evolvability — point to more rapid change of human nature in the future. Curiously many of the same traditionalists who deny we are changing, insist that we had better not.

Not everyone is born to be a farmer. Not every human is ideally matched to the rhythms of horse and corn and seasons, and the eternal close inspection of village conformity. Where in the Amish scheme of things is the support for a mathematical genius, or a native doctor, or a person who might spend all day composing new music? Mr. Berry himself supplements his farming satisfactions with those of essay writing (using paper and pencil). A large technological system of book printing, distribution, desk-bound editors, and bookshop sellers reward his efforts. He would have engaged that part of himself much less if no one outside his family was reading him.

What the Amish can’t deliver are possibilities. Technology summons possibilities. The arc of change in the technium moves toward increasing choices, options, and possibilities. Chief among those expanding possibilities are new ways to be human. If we expand our memory with an always-on auxiliary Google-in-a-phone attachment from when we are young, then we have a new organ. But we don’t know how to satisfy those new parts of us. The honest truth is that as the technium explodes with new self-made options, we find it harder to find fulfillment. How can we be fulfilled when we don’t know what is being filled? And how do we know how large we are — our innate potential — until we try to overfill it?

We expand technology to find out who we are. The Amish find incredible contentment in their enactment of a fixed human nature. This deep human contentment is real, visceral, renewable, and so attractive that Amish numbers are doubling every generation. But I believe the Amish and minimites have not, and can not, really discover who they are. They trade discovery for contentment. In their deliberate constraint of technology they optimize an alluring combination of leisure, comfort, and certainty over the optimization of uncertain possibilities – which is what the technium optimizes.

The narrow minimite definition of humanity and the occupations one can attain, not only constrain themselves, but others. If you are a  web designer today, it is only because many tens of thousands of other people have been expanding the realm of possibilities. They have gone beyond farms and home shops to invent a complex ecology of electronic devices that require new expertise and new ways of thinking. If you are an accountant, untold numbers of creative people in the past devised the logic and tools of accounting for you. If you do science, your instruments and field of study have been created by others. If you are a photographer, or an extreme sports athlete, or a baker, or an auto mechanic, or a nurse — then your potential has been given an opportunity by the work of others. You are being expanded as others expand themselves.

I know the Amish, and Wendell Berry and Eric Brende, and the minimites well enough to know that they believe we don’t need exploding technology to expand ourselves, at least in the proper directions. They are, after all, minimalists. They see most of the promises of freedoms from increased technology as illusionary. In their eyes, technology generates fake choices, meaningless options, or real choices that are really entrapments.  This is an argument worth exploring because there is some truth in it. The technium is an autonomous system that tends to favor choices by humans that expand its own reach, which can feel like a type of entrapment. And many choices we make don’t matter.

But the evidence that the technium expands real choices is voluminous. Throughout history there is a one-way march from the farm to the bustling choices of the city. That steady migration is going on today at a shocking rate; More than two million people per day decide they prefer the options that modern technology life offers, so they flee the constrained choices in a picturesque and comforting village somewhere. They can’t all be bewitched. It would be a powerful spell to fool 50% of the people living on this planet.

Those million urban migrants per day have enrolled into the technium for the same reason you have (and you have if you are reading this): to increase your choices. To increase your chances of unleashing your full potential. Perhaps someday someone will invent a tool that is made just for your special combination of hidden talents. Or perhaps you will make your own tool. Most importantly, and unlike the Amish and minimites, you may invent a tool which will help unleash the fullest of someone else. Our call is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, but to expand the possibilities for others. We have a moral obligation to increase the amount of technology in the world in order to increase the number of possibilities for the most people. Greater technology will selfishly unleash us, but it will also unselfishly unleash others, our children and all to come.

The Amish are a little sensitive about this, but their self reliant lifestyle as it is currently practiced is heavily dependent on the greater technium that surrounds their enclaves. They do not mine the metal they build their mowers from. They do not drill or process the kerosene they use. They don’t manufacture the solar panels on their roofs. They don’t grow or weave the cotton in their clothes. They don’t educate or train their own doctors. They also famously do not enroll in armed forces of any kind (but in compensation of that, they are world-class volunteers in the outside world. Few people volunteer more often, or with more expertise and passion than the Amish/Mennonites.) In short they depend up the outside world for they way they currently live. The increasing numbers of minimite urban homesteads are likewise indebted to the ongoing technium. If the Amish had to generate their all their own energy, grow all their clothing fibers, mine all metal, harvest and mill all lumber, it would not be Amish at all. Their communities would hardly be civilized.

Their choice of minimal technology adoption is a choice — but a choice enabled by the technium. Their lifestyle is within the technium, not outside it.

As I encourage new technologies I am working for the Amish, and Leon, and the minimite homesteaders. So is anyone who is inventing, discovering, and expanding possibilities. In our ceaseless collective generation of new technologies, we technology boosters can invent more appropriate tools for minimalism, even though they are not doing that for us. Nonetheless, the Amish and minimites have something important to teach us about selecting what we embrace. I don’t want a lot of devices that add maintenance chores to my life without adding real benefits. I do want to be slow to embrace technology that I can back out of. I don’t want stuff that closes off options to others (like weapons). And I do want the minimum because I’ve learned that I have limited time or attention. 

I think I can put it this way: What we are seeking is the minimum amount of technology that will generate the maximum number of options for all.

By Bianca Gubalke

Google Top 10 Ranking with YORGOO Booster

Incredible performance on Google rankings by Semiomantics Scripts, with the brand-new YORGOO Booster to be launched this coming week-end, at the Ycademy Online Business Building Seminar.

YORGOO Booster Banner by Bianca Gubalke

Pre-seminar Calls with preparatory activities to avoid stressing servers over the weekends are taking place today and tomorrow, Friday, for all Seminar participants and future YORGOO Booster resellers.

YORGOO Booster will truly boost our online activities and carry niche targeted Ads straight to Google!

More to follow. . .

Bianca Gubalke

By Bianca Gubalke

Google Top 10 Ranking with YORGOO Booster

Whoever has listened to last night’s InfoCall with Yorgo Nestoridis in yorGOtalk must finally come to the conclusion that the time invested over the rather difficult period of the past two years in terms of learning and applying highly complex technical matter such as coding etc  (…that was for sure not everyone’s cup of tea, mine neither… ) – that all this time spent NOT infront of the TV, NOT on the beach and NOT in the pub BUT listening to Calls and attending the monthly Ycademy Online Business Building Seminars… was all worth it in view of the future changes and approaches by Google… in case the belief up till then was a little shaky.

Conclusion: we are following the right Path to Profitability, the right VISION and the right Leadership - and with the Knowledge and Tools we get or learn to handle and apply, everybody should sooner or later find HIS or HER very specific ’solution’ or ‘niche’ to profit financially and reap the rewards.

My inner barometer says: Exxxxxxciting times ahead… and together we may be sculpting them along with the ‘big boyz’…

Bianca Gubalke Web Graphics

Secure Google Top 10 Rankings NOW – Profit from your YORGOO Booster Advantage

Congratulations to all Ycademy Seminar participants. . . you can count yourself lucky in getting this new Targeted Ads Delivery tool based on the highly efficient Semiomantics Scripts included in the ticket price.

Very few tickets are still available HERE.

Did you notice?

When looking at what comes up when surfing the Internet or seeing what AdSense comes up with, one realizes rather quickly that it’s time for some visual challenge, innovation… and change in online Advertising.

I always admired the striking Creativity in Advertising and in my years in Europe I never missed the spectacular Advertising Festival in Cannes. True… the Advertising budgets then were immense – which was not always a guarantee for extraordinary results, but there was incredibly good and more than often absolutely excellent material. The stuff that makes hairs raise and jaws drop! Just awesome and always an adventure. I remember having myself larger budgets for Movie Advertising Spots of 60 seconds than for cultural TV documentaries of 52 minutes!!!

YORGOO Booster Ad by Bianca Gubalke

All this to say that creating pulling and intelligent Ads is a high-paid profession for creative directors, copy writers, illustrators and graphic artists – without going into the cinema world.

As we are talking Online Advertising we have to focus on two aspects:

1. the technical and relatively ’secret’ Google efficiency of a Script itself (the what we don’t know too much about), and

2. visually attractive Ads.

Aspect 1 takes care of itself IF you get the right script… and here the proof is simple and a mere  “seeing is believing”!

Google Top 10 Rankings with Semiomantics Scripts

With the number of screenshots shown as proof of how fast Semiomantics Scripts reach Google Top 10 rankings the Proof has been delivered over and over again. We’re getting used to it… BUT the fact is that this is by no means simple nor normal at all! This is extraordinary!!!

When I look at the search term “Google Top 10″ right now, there are 169,000,000 – that’s 169 Million returns on Google. Check it HERE. And if you see what I see, then you discover YORGOO Publishing on rank 8!!!

Google Top 10 for YORGOO Publishing on 24 June 2009

Aspect 2 – the Creation of Ads needed for – in this case the YORGOO Booster (Semiomantics Booster) - is entirely in your hands. In other words: create your Ads yourself – or outsource and pay a professional to do so for you.

As offline so online; exploit what YOU are good at and buy in the Services you need for your success. . . it’s a matter of buying Time and Results. It’s a worthwhile investment; observe what each big company does – nothing more needs to be said.

YORGOO Booster Ad by Bianca Gubalke

While Ycademy Seminar participants have yet another advantage in being supplied with lots of value in terms of marketing and advertising material at no additional cost to get on the road, there will come the time when either the skills of creating good Ads have to be acquired or a collaboration with a professional is needed.

Either way, the best way to start is by attending the preparatory InfoCalls this week and securing one of the last tickets for this weekend’s Ycademy Seminar.

And yes, before I forget it: meanwhile my posts from yesterday occupy positions 3 and 4 on Google – see HERE.

I am now courageous enough to attack a slightly different headline to attempt positioning myself in the frontlines of the 169 million!

What a task! However… on Google even the little David’s have a chance. . . if they have a Semiomantics Script in hand that is!

To be continued. . .

Bianca Gubalke

PS:  I developed the above YORGOO Booster Web Graphics according to popular demand after last night’s call :)

Bianca Gubalke Web Graphics for YORGOO Booster

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By Bianca Gubalke

Top 10 on Google with YORGOO Booster

Making a bold statement is one thing, proving it is another. A short while ago I posted an article with the headline

“Top 10 on Google with YORGOO Booster”

The time can be easily checked… and it’s any serious Author’s or Blogger’s routine job to check his or her ranking on Google after the posting itself.

There’s just ONE difference – the Semiomantics Difference:

Normally, one would check this a day later and be happy to find a place somewhere near the frontrunners… however, with am explosive weapon like a Semiomantics Script one can see amazing results already 15 or 30 minutes later.

The Semiomantics Difference

Here is the almost instant result when pasting the exact headline I used into the Google Search Engine:

Spot 4 for http://biancagubalke.com within 30 minutes. . . :

Top 10 on Google with YORGOO Booster – Google Result

Salvador Dali’s surrealistic stare across time and space combined with Semiomantics must be simply unbeatable :)))

Bianca Gubalke

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By Bianca Gubalke

Top 10 on Google with YORGOO Booster

About Scripts

Scripts don’t equal Scripts; here as in everything of value in Life – and especially in your Online Business and income generating endeavours – you need to make a precise plan, you need to allocate a realistic time frame and budget, and accordingly, you need to make a choice.

Therefore, depending on your target and goal you need to acquire the right Script, meaning the correct technical setup and blogging foundation for reaching out and achieving what you have set out to accomplish on the Internet.

While the visual aspect and impact of a blog or website are one thing and most definitely essential to attract and keep readers, what is even more important is the technical coding and tuning of a Script; in other words what makes it interesting to Search Engines… as at the end of the day even the most sensational article is strictly non-existent if noone finds, sees or reads it on Google. I agree, this is very complex material for specialists and experts in that particular field – nevertheless, it largely enhances and determines our success as Authors and Writers – and that’s why we cannot stick our heads into the sand and just ignore the facts of virtual life: we have to engage in understanding the principles, be aware of what we really need as the ideal support to carry our messages to our target audience, make our choice and then focus on what we are good at.  Success is always based on some form of Teamwork – be it the Artist and a Gallery, an Author and a Publisher, an Architect and a Builder.

When you choose a good and efficient Script, you are working with an invisible Script Master at your side who knows what your needs as an Author or Writer are and who will respond to the constantly changing requirements of the Internet – like updates of scripts and plugins – sometimes daily. He does so in the background with the unique intent of keeping the ‘carrier’ for your words and meanings optimized and intact according to latest technoliogy.

No easy job and most definitely one I don’t want to have to bother with… and for which I happily pay just to keep my peace of mind and be able to focus on what I have to say or write, design or show.

Semiomantics Scripts

Semiomantics WordPress based Frameworks by Yorgo Nestoridis are known for their high Performance and Delivery when it comes to Google rankings, and while the Script you are reading this Post on is a Semiomantics Author Script – meaning a dedicated formula to help Authors and Writers like myself to build their name and reputation by achieving well deserved exposure and positionings for their original content on Google – , there are other Semiomantics Scripts for other Purposes.

YORGOO Booster Ad by Bianca Gubalke

YORGOO Booster on Semiomantics

Many fortunate YORGOO Members and Ycademy Seminar participants have tested the amazing efficiency of the YORGOO Blaster (Semiomantics Blaster Script) in the past, namely when it came to bringing Advertisements in Niche Keyword Campaigns to prime Google rankings.

For even more speed when it comes to Ads Delivery targeting Top 10 on Google positions in Niches, a brand-new Semiomantics Script – the YORGOO Booster – will be released at the upcoming Ycademy Business Building Seminar on the weekend June 28 and 28, 2009.

How to get the YORGOO Booster for Free

Personally, I never believed in anything ‘free’ – however, I do believe the best investment ever is in myself, my knowledge, my personal development and mental (as well as spiritual) wellbeing.

As such, I warmly recommend everyone who is determined to succeed online to join the YCADEMY JUNE SEMINAR 2009 ($50) and be one of the privileged and fortunate few who get a YORGOO Booster ($67) at no extra cost.

And not only that: the Seminar will specifically focus on setting up this aggressive tool that all new owners will be very glad to see in their online marketing arsenal.

YORGOO Booster Ad by Bianca Gubalke

YCADEMY Pre-Seminar Information

Leading up to this important Seminar that also marks the middle of 2009, will be 3 important calls, the second of which will be held today, Tuesday, 23rd June 2009 at 8 pm London time in the exclusive Ycademy Room.

I invite everybody to be on time and take notes!

While we are going through an incredibly rough time in terms of storms, pouring rains and even hail – and possibly snow – down here South of Cape Town, South Africa, this may have an impact on my connectivity, however, it does not keep me from designing some advertising material to boost our Booster as you can see! And as all loyal YORGOO activists got the most amazing graphical tools to operate with, why not go and design your own web graphics – just as I do?

Ads will be the lifeblood of your Semiomantics Booster… and exercising our creative muscle is extremely fun and rewarding!

Bianca Gubalke

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One of the greatest unappreciated inventions of modern life is the default. “Default” is a technical  concept first used in computer science in the 1960s to indicate a preset standard. Default, for instance, as in: the default of this program assumes that dates are given in two digit years not four. Today the notion of a default has spread beyond computer science to the culture at large.  It seems such a small thing, but the idea of the default is fundamental to the technium.

It’s hard to remember a time when defaults were not part of life. But defaults only arose as computing spread; they are an attribute of complex technological systems. There were no defaults in the industrial age. In the early days of computers, when system crashes were frequent, and variables a lot of trouble to input, a default was the value the system would automatically assign itself if a program failed or when it first initiated. It was a smart trick. Unless a user, or programmer, took the trouble to alter it, the default ruled, ensuring that its host system would probably work. So electronic goods and software programs were shipped with all options set to defaults. The defaults were preset for the expected norms of the buyers (say the standard voltage of the US), or expected preferences (subtitles off for movies), or best practices (virus detector on). Most times presets work fine. We now have defaults installed in automobiles, insurance programs, networks, phones, health care plans, credit cards, and anything that is customizable.

Indeed, anything with the slightest bit of computational intelligence it in (that is any complex modern artifact) has defaults embedded into it. These presets are explicit biases programmed into the gadget, or system, or institution. But a default is more than the unspoken assumptions that have always been present in anything made. For instance most hand tools were “defaulted” to right hand use. In fact assuming the user was right handed was so normal, it was never mentioned. Likewise, the shape of hand tools assumed the user was male. Not just tools: early automobiles were designed assuming the driver was male. Anything manufactured must make a guess about its presumed buyer and their motivations; these assumptions are naturally designed into the technology. The larger the scale of the system, the more assumptions it has to make. A careful examination of a particular technological infrastructure will reveal the broad assumptions that are buried in its design. So American optimism, high regard for the individual, and penchant for change are all wrapped up in the specific designs of the American electrical system, railroads, highways, and  education.

But while these embedded biases, common to all technology, share many attributes with the concept of a default, they are not a default proper. A default is an assumption that can be changed. The assumption of right-handedness in a hammer, or pliers, or scissors, could not be switched. The assumption of a driver’s gender as manifested in the seat position in an automobile could not be altered easily in the old days. But in much of modern technology it can be. The hallmark of flexible technological systems is the ease by which they can be rewired, modified, reprogrammed, adapted, and changed to suit new uses and new users. Many (not all) of their assumptions can be altered. The upside to endless flexibility and multiple defaults lies in the genuine choice that an individual now has, if one wants it. Technologies can be tailored to your preferences, and optimized to fit your own talents.

However the downside to extremely flexible techniques is that all these nodes of exploding possibility become overwhelming. Too many mind-numbing alternatives, and not enough time (let alone will) to evaluate them all. The specter of 99 varieties of mustard on the supermarket shelf, or 2,356 options in your health plan, or 56,000 possible hairdos for your avatar in a virtual world produces massive indecision and paralysis. The amazing solution to this problem of debilitating over-abundant choice are defaults. Defaults allow us to choose when to choose. For example, your avatar is given a standard default look (kid in jeans) to start out. You can alter every default description later.  Think of it as managed choice. Those thousands of variables — real choice — can be managed by adopting smart defaults, which “make” a choice for us, yet reserve our full freedom to choose in the future when we want to. My freedoms are not restricted but staggered. As I become more educated I go back to my preferences and opt in, or opt out, or tweak a parameter up or down, or ditch one thing for another. But until I do, the choices remain veiled, out of sight, and house-trained, obediently waiting. In properly designed default system, I always have my full freedoms, yet my choices are presented to me in a way that encourages taking those choices in time — in an incremental and educated manner. Defaults are a tool that tame expanding choice.

Contrast that expansion to the classic hammer, or automobile, or 1950s phone system. Users simply had few choices in how the tool was used. World-class engineers spent years honing a fixed universal design to work best for the most people, and there’s still an enduring beauty in those designs. The relative inertness of industrial artifacts and infrastructure was compensated with elegant and brilliant access for the average everyman. Today you may not actually make a lot more choices about your phone than 50 years ago, but you could. And  you’ll have more choice in where to make those few choices. These unfolding potential choices are nested within the adaptive nature of mobiles and networks. Choices materialize when summoned. But these abundant choices never appeared in fixed designs.

Defaults first arrived in the complex realms of computation and communication networks, but they aren’t excluded from hammers, or cars, or shoes, or door knobs, for that matter. As we inject adaptability into these artifacts by manufacturing them with traces of computer chips and smart materials, we open them up for defaults as well. Imagine a hammer handle made of some kind of adaptive material that would reform itself to your left hand, or to a woman’s hand. You might very well have the option to designate your gender, or age, or proficiency, or work environment, directly into the small neurons of the hammer. And if so, then the tool would be shipped with defaults.

But defaults are “sticky.” Many psychological studies have shown that the tiny bit of extra effort needed to alter a default is enough to dissuade most people from bothering, so they stick to the default, despite their untapped freedom. Their camera’s clock blinks at the default of 12:00, or their password remains whatever temporary one was issued them. The hard truth, as any engineer will tell you, is that most defaults are never altered. Pick up any device, and 98 out of 100 options will be the ones preset at the factory. I know from my own experience that I have altered very few of the preferences available to me; I’ve stuck to the defaults. I’ve been using a Macintosh from the day it was introduced 25 years ago and I am still discovering basic defaults and preferences I had never heard of. From an engineering perspective this default inertia is a measure of success, because it means the defaults work. Without much change, products are used, and their systems happily hum on.

Therefore the privilege of establishing what value the default is set at is an act of power and influence. Defaults are a tool not only for individuals to tame choices, but for systems designers — those who set the presets — to steer the system.  The architecture of these choices can profoundly shape the culture of that system’s use. Even the sequences of defaults and choices make a difference too. Retail merchandisers know this well. They stage stores and websites to channel decisions in a particular order to maximize sales. If you let hungry students make their desert choice first rather than last, this default order has an impact on their nutrition.

Every element of a complex technology, from its programming language, to the user interface design, to the selection of its peripherals, harbors a multitude of defaults: Does the system assume anonymity? Does it assume most people are basically good or basically up to no good? Are its defaults set to maximize sharing or maximize secrecy? Should its rules expire after a set period by default or renew automatically by default? How easy is to undo a choice?  Should the process of control be an opt in or opt out process? Recombining four or five different default parameters will spawn systems with hundreds of different characteristics.

Identical technological arrangements — say two computer networks constructed of the same hardware and software — can yield very different cultural consequences simply by altering the defaults embedded in the system. The influence of a default is so powerful that one single default can act as a very tiny nudge that can sway extremely large and complex networks. As an example, most pension investment programs, such as corporate 401k plans, have very low participation rates in part because the plans have an overwhelming number of sub-options to choose from. The behavioral economist Richard Thaler relates experiments whereby making enrollment automatic with a default choice (“mandated choice”) dramatically increased savings rates for employees. Anyone could opt out the program at any time, with full freedom to change the specifics of their plan, but simply shifting the default  from “having to sign up” to “automatic enrollment” changed the entire tenor of the system. A similar shift happens if you make the donation of organs upon death automatically an “opt out” choice (it happens unless you refuse beforehand) versus “opt in” (it does not happen unless you sign up). A opt out donor system greatly increases the number of organs donated.

The tiny default is one of the ways that we can bend the inevitable unrolling of a technological innovation. For instance, an elaborate continent-wide technical system, such as 110-volt AC electricity, may gather its it own momentum as it acquires self-reinforcing support from other technical systems (like diesel generators, or factory assembly lines), and that accelerating momentum may steamroll over prior systems, but at every node in the electrical body, a default resides, and with the proper alignment and deft choices, those slim defaults can be used to nudge the gigantic system toward certain states. The system can be bent towards making it easy to add new but less secure innovations , or making it difficult to change, but more secure. The tiny nudges of defaults can shape how easy the network expands, or not. Or how well it incorporates unusual sources of power. Or whether it tends to centralize or decentralize.  The shape of a technological system is set by the technology itself, but the character of the system can be set by us.

Systems are not neutral. They have natural biases.  We tame the cascading choices we gain from accelerating technology by introducing small nudges — by deliberating embedding our own biases (also called a default) into the system here and there. We wield biases within inevitable technologies to aim them towards our common goals — increasing diversity, complexity, specialization, sentience, and beauty.

Defaults also remind us of another truth. By definition a default works when we — the user or consumer or citizen — do nothing. But doing nothing is not neutral, since it triggers a default bias. That means that “no choice” is a choice itself. There’s is no neutral, even, or especially, in non action. Despite the claims of many, technology is never neutral. Even when you don’t choose what to do with it, it chooses. A system acquires a definite drift and clear momentum from those inherent biases, whether or not we act upon them. The best we can do is nudge it.

Last year I posted an ode to the Anthropocene — the period in Earth’s long history when humans are the dominant geological force. That would be the last 20,000 years or so. One anthropocenic question brought up by Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist from the University of Leicester, is, as he puts it, “What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?.”  He speculates that we’ll leave fossil cities as the debris of our civilization is pressed into rock.

Reader Brett Lovgren was reminded on this on a walk along Wassenaar Beach in the Netherlands a few weeks ago. He tells me: “We were on a field trip  with my son’s 2nd grade class from the American School of the Hague.  His science teacher had them identifying the shells, jellyfish and seaweed that wash up on the beach. The kids found this bit of barnacle encrusted plastic cup.  It made me feel like an archaeologist from the future discovering a layer of the Technium.”

By Yorgo Nestoridis

Homosexual Penguins adopt Egg

Nothing wrong with gay penguins as homosexuality exists amongst animals as well. This story takes place in Germany, exactly in the Zoo of Bremerhaven.

Gay Penguins

The Bremerhaven Zoo is home to 6 gay penguins, namely to a couple which has been together for over 10 years. Worried about the future of their penguin community, the Zoo tried various strategies to get the gay birds on a straight track.

Swedish Females to straighten out the Homosexual Penguins Situation

In 2005 the Zoo’s management decided to import a few Swedish females to stimulate the male community to opt for a straight lifestyle. The trick ended in a double failure: the gay Penguins showed absolutely no interest in the hot female temptations from the north -  no wonder. And worse, worldwide associations of gays protested against the plan to put the birds on a straight road.

Pink Penguins Image

Gays breed Rocks

In the past it has been observed that gay Penguins, similar to humans, seem to have a natural desire to breed or at least they show nesting behavior and ” breed” rocks.

Homosexual Penguins breed an Egg

A few days ago a heterosexual Penguin Couple had two eggs and rejected one. This egg has now been adopted by the gay penguins who enjoy a less bumpy ride than on a rock.

According to experts from the Bremerhaven Zoo, the baby will most likely not suffer from the fact that it will grow up with two fathers.

Chinese Homosexual Penguins

Homosexuality amongst penguins seems to be a worldwide phenomenon. Last year a couple of Chinese Homosexual Penguins tried to steal an egg from a heterosexual couple in Polar Land in Harbin, north China. The two penguins have started placing stones at the feet of the legitimate parents before waddling away with their eggs, in a bid to hide their theft.

But the deception has been noticed by other penguins at the zoo, who have excluded the gay couple from their group.

Gay Discrimination and Segregation

The keepers decided to segregate the gay penguins by fencing them separated from the group in order not to disrupt the community’s hatching season.

According to the keepers, this is not discrimination.

These Chinese Birds may not share that opinion and luckily for the keepers, Californian law does not (yet) apply in China in this context.

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Philosopher Bruce Mazlish claims that the eyes of science have overthrown humanity’s view of itself in a series of revelations.  At each unveiling, we descend one notch. In the first removal, Copernicus dethroned our common-sense assumption that our world stood at the center of the universe. Astronomy eventually revealed, with a shock, that we were a minor tribe huddled on a small speck circling a nondescript star at the outer edge of an immense average galaxy floating among a trillion others in one small corner of the universe. The noble distinction between us and the rest of the universe was eliminated to reveal a continuous continuity of existence. Our perceived exceptionalism was demoted to the ordinary. Within the universe, we were not set apart, but dwelt in a continuum.

The second break from the exalted was launched by Darwin, who revealed that the exceptional discontinuity we perceived between ourselves and other animals or plants was equally illusionary. We are one continuous life, one evolution. Our position as humans is only one twig on a million-twigged tree, each terminal equally evolved. Within life we were not set apart, but dwelt in a continuum.

According to Mazlish the third discontinuity was located in our heads. Freud began the on-going process of overcoming the specialism we attribute to the idea of “I.” Psychology and neurology discovered that the “I” is a handy fantasy constructed to facilitate daily life, but that there is no central decider at home; rather there are many “i”s operating in our mind, and those parts are not distinguishable from our physical body, or even at times from other minds. Our own consciousness has been dethroned from central emperor to a field of cognitive tricks. Within sentience, we are not set apart, but dwell in a continuum.

We are now in the middle of dispatching the fourth discontinuity. The venerable distinction between machines and living creatures is receding so fast that it is becoming increasingly clear to everyone that a grand continuity connects the world of the made and the world of born. Nature and machine are two faces of the same extropic force. I’ve previously written a long argument in support of this continuity, and I assume its validity here on this blog. The question today is not so much whether the technium shares its roots with biological evolution, but whether it will displace its parent, or cohabit with it. Either way within the technium we, the living, are not set apart but dwell in a continuum.

But as the arc of evolution continues beyond these four continuums, what future smoothings can we expect? I propose that the next exceptionalism to be broken by science, the fifth discontinuity so to speak, is the special status we give to the physical. We feel the universe to be a place full of physical material that pushes back and presses against us. Things have weight, size, and duration. That’s what the universe is in everyday experience — the real stuff that can be really measured, felt, and sensed. Our world of matter and energy follow a set of laws to such an exacting degree that we can manipulate it to make rockets and computers. Matter’s consistent refusal to be bullied outside its own laws adds to the sense of it being “real.” Real means physical.

Information, on the other hand, lacks physicality. Unlike energy, which we can at least measure with physical instruments, a digital bit is disembodied. It weighs nothing. It takes up no space. It flows as mysteriously as a gremlin. We don’t have good measures for information. (If I make an exact copy of your song, am I increasing the amount of information in the world, or decreasing it because I am adding nothing new?) We are not yet sure if the total amount of information in the universe is conserved, nor if it is finite. Yet, we have come to see that life, even our own life, is a pattern of intangible information, rather than material form. Evolution – that great engine of creation — is a pattern of information. And mind, especially the mind, is a type of information flow.  So we know that the most powerful forces in the universe (that we are aware of) are constructed of the most intangible things we can detect: bits.

There stands the discontinuity: atoms vs bits. But lately, physicists have begun to suspect that atoms are composed of information in some way we don’t understand. As legendary physicist John Wheeler puts it, “its are bits.” The deeper we inspect the interior of sub atomic particles and their quirky behavior, the more they can be explained as information flows. Many physicists expect that when we get to the bottom of how matter works that we’ll find primarily a structure of information and the absence of anything “material.” Atoms will be understood as elaborate, dynamic arrangements of intangible signals. In an article published by the American Journal of Physics, entitled “What is quantum mechanics trying to tell us” solid-state-physicist David Mermin writes “matter acts, but there are no actors behind the actions; the verbs are verbing all by themselves without a need to introduce nouns. Actions act upon other actions. [There's] no duality between the existence of a thing and its properties: properties are all there is. Indeed: there are no things.”

As this discontinuity between the realm of the physical and the realm of the immaterial is erased, scientists have began to re-envision the laws of physics as complex algorithms of code. Energy also, is being restated in terms of information. The pulsating stars and iron planets will gradually be seen by science as wisps of intangible nothings.  Organisms and technologies, including mega structures such as skyscrapers, starships, and floating cites, will be defined as structures of computation, equivalent to software. Eventually the boundary between the tangible and intangible will be completely permeable, and the special status we assign to our physicality will be seen (again) as only one station on a long continuum. Within the realm of the real, we, the physical, are not set apart, but dwell in a continuum.

On the immense journey in front of us there will undoubtedly be many more smoothings ahead beyond the five we can already see. I don’t know if it will be the sixth, seventh or nth discontinuity, but another boundary that is already being challenged is the unique place we give to the past, to causation, and to objectivity. Physical phenomenon are caused via a long chain of actions originating in the past, and we, the observers, remove ourselves from the chain of causes in order to study the phenomenon. For instance, scientists do controlled experiments and double-blind experiments so that they remain objective, removing their own observational biases from the causes they are studying. Science, which has brought us so far, clearly holds the “outside” unbiased observer to be an essential position. In fact by many definitions, science is the invention of the objective.

Further, science holds that causation must originate in the past. An event in the present is the last result of a chain of actions begun in the past. That seems logical and intuitive – as did the circling of the sun. But the weirdness of newly discovered quantum effects is rapidly breaking down the discontinuity between object and subject, past and future. With new instruments scientists can shoot quantum wave/particles through two tiny slits to measure the pattern of their arrival on a screen. Wheeler investigated exactly this experiment. True to its dual nature sometimes the wave/particle passes through the slits as a wave and sometimes it passes through them as a particle. But the particular form the wave/particle assumes as it passes through the two slits is decided upon measuring or observing the results. This is called the delayed-choice experiment because it means that the wave/particle chooses which form to pass through the slits after it has already passed through. Theoretically, if the slits were far enough away from the screen, the choice of whether the wave/particle was a wave or a particle could be delayed by billions of years after it had already happened.  And this inversion of the ordinary arrow of causality is being driven by the observer.

Paul Davies suggests “the novel feature Wheeler introduced via his delayed-choice experiment was the possibility of observers today, and in the future, shaping the nature of physical reality in the past, including the far past when no observers existed.” Minds today could, in theory, shape the very foundational laws of physics in a delayed-choice action, since Wheeler claimed, “so far as we can see today, the laws of physics cannot have existed from everlasting to everlasting. They must have come into being at the big bang.” Since the laws of physics and information reside inside the cosmos, that gives mind a possible subjective role in shaping the cosmos via delayed choice. But since our minds and life are products of that cosmos, there is a necessary recursive loop. Davies writes:  “Conventional science assumes a linear logical sequence: cosmos -> life -> mind. Wheeler suggested closing this chain into a loop: cosmos -> life -> mind -> cosmos.” The universe was self-synthesizing. You can start anywhere along such a recursive loop. Wheeler observed: “Physics gives rise to observer-participancy; observer-participancy gives rise to information; information gives rise to physics.” Wheeler called this subjective self-creation, “the participatory universe.”

When I asked the Piet Hut, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Institute for Advance Study at Princeton, what innovations in the practice of science he expected to see in the future, he surprised me by suggesting “the return of the subjective.”  In order to get a more complete picture of reality, he said, we need to focus on the subjective. “We have painted ourselves in a corner, scientifically, by describing the whole world in objective terms, and finding less and less room for ourselves to stand on.  We are now reaching the limits of a purely objective treatment. In various areas of science, from quantum mechanics to neuroscience and robotics, the pole of subjective experience can no longer be neglected.” A more recognizable thinker echoes the thought: “The histories of the Universe depend on what is being measured,” Stephen Hawking said recently, “contrary to the usual idea that the Universe has an objective, observer-independent history.”

The notion that minds in the future might evolve to the point that they could subjectively influence the laws of their own physicality is of course, only the most extreme speculation. But the delay-choice experiment is not. It happens now every time our minds observe something. I delve into the details of this frontier chiefly to illustrate how technology continues to level distinctions we once thought crucial, and how technology continues to forge a kind of unity in knowledge.

Breaking the discontinuity between the objective and subjective won’t be the last great unification either. As the technium advances, and mind expands, additional distinctions are primed to be blurred and unified. Looking ahead we can imagine that the keen distinction and superior status we assign to consciousness, versus the inert or non-unconsciousness (even if intelligent) of the rest of the material world could be unified into a continuum via technology. Likewise the discontinuity between reality and unreality (the imaginary) could likewise disappear with sufficient advanced technology.

It was not until we invented telescopes and mathematics that we could peer way past the Earth and see that it was not at the center of a revolving universe. It was not until we invented digital computation and could replicate life processes on intangible computer software that we realized that intelligence and life are not tangible. It was not until we devised sophisticated atom smashers that we began to perceive the true otherworldliness of our material world. Lasers, electron guns, charged coupler sensors, electronic chips – all these technologies made quantum mechanics visible. And once the quantum realm was visible, the paradoxes of the subjective mattered. Thus, through the medium of advanced tools, we saw a continuum where discontinuities had been seen before. In this way, as we expand the technium, upping our knowledge, we continually remove discontinuities in our perceptions.

The universe, as the sages in every religion teach us, is really one vast continuum. But to utilize knowledge of this universal continuum we need to expand our technology, which is really a way of expanding our collective mind. Technology’s long term evolution moves science – that is the interconnected, accumulated body of knowledge of all human minds – towards unity, or consilience. Consilience is a term coined in the 1840 by philosopher William Whewell and resurrected recently by E.O. Wilson to indicate the unity of knowledge. Consilience would entail, among other things, a common set of axioms that can be used to adequately explain (and predict) the phenomenon we experience in the ecology of a tundra, the interior fusion of stars, the behavior of teenage social networks, the physics of quantum computing, and the mutation of viruses. Today science is far from consilience.

In addition to uniting the principles of different scientific fields, consilience will also need to bind unrelated bodies of knowledge together, some of it ancient knowledge. Advances in communication technology and the scientific method are doing that.

We casually talk about the “discovery of America” in 1492, or the “discovery of gorillas” in 1856, or the “discovery of vaccines” in 1796. Yet vaccines, gorillas and America were not unknown before their “discovery.” Native peoples had been living in the Americas for 10,000 years before Columbus arrived and they had explore the continent far better than any European ever could. Certain West African tribes were intimately familiar the gorilla, and many more primate species yet to be “discovered.” Dairy farmers had long been aware of the protective power of vaccines that related diseases offered, although they did not have a name for it. The same argument can be made about whole libraries worth of knowledge – herbal wisdom, traditional practices, spiritual insights – that are “discovered” by the educated but only after having been long known by native and folk peoples. These supposed “discoveries” seems imperialistic and condescending, and often are.

Engraving by Samuel Calvert of the new gorilla display at the National Museum published in The Illustrated Melbourne Post of 25 July 1865.

Yet there is one legitimate way in which we can claim that Columbus discovered America, and the French-American explorer Paul du Chaillu discovered gorillas, and Edward Jenner discovered vaccines. They “discovered” previously locally known knowledge by adding it to the growing pool of structured global knowledge. Nowadays we would call that accumulating structured knowledge science. Until du Chaillu’s adventures in Gabon any knowledge about gorillas was extremely parochial; the local tribes’ vast natural knowledge about these primates was not integrated into all that science knew about all other animals. Information about “gorillas” remained outside of the structured known. In fact, until zoologists got their hands on Paul du Chaillu’s specimens, gorillas were scientifically considered to be a mythical creature similar to Big Foot, seen only by uneducated, gullible natives. Du Chaillu’s “discovery” was actually science’s discovery. The meager anatomical information contained in the killed animals was fitted into the vetted system of zoology. Once their existence was “known,” essential information about the gorilla’s behavior and natural history could be annexed. In the same way, local farmers’ knowledge about how cowpox could inoculate against small pox remained local knowledge and was not connected to the rest of what was known about medicine. The remedy therefore remained isolated. When Jenner “discovered” the effect, he took what was known locally, and linked its effect into to medical theory and all the little science knew of infection and germs. He did not so much “discover” vaccines as much as he “linked in” vaccines. Likewise America. Columbus’s encounter put America on the map of the globe, linking it to the rest of the known world, integrating its own inherent body of knowledge into the slowly accumulating, unified body of verified knowledge.  Columbus joined two large continents of knowledge into a growing global consilience.

The reason science absorbs local knowledge and not the other way around is because science is a machine we have invented to connect information. It is built to integrate new knowledge with the web of the old. If a new insight is presented with too many “facts” that don’t fit into what is already known, then the new knowledge is rejected until those facts can be explained. A new theory does not need  to have every unexpected detail explained (and  rarely does) but it must be woven to some satisfaction into the established order. Every strand of conjecture, assumption, observation is subject to scrutiny, testing, skepticism and verification. Piece by piece consilience is built.

In this way consilience is a type of technology, expanded by technology. Unified knowledge is constructed by the mechanics of duplication, printing, postal networks, libraries, indexing, catalogs, citations, tagging, cross-referencing, bibliographies, keyword search, annotation, peer-review, and hyperlinking. Each epistemic invention expands the web of verifiable facts and links one bit of knowledge to another.  Knowledge is thus a network phenomenon, with each fact a node.  We say knowledge increases not only when the number of facts increases, but more so when the number and strength of relationships between facts increases. It is the relatedness that gives knowledge its power. Our understanding of gorillas deepens and becomes more useful as their behavior is compared to, indexed with, aligned into, and related to the behavior of other primates. Our consilience is expanded as their anatomy is related to other animals, as their evolution is integrated into the tree of life, as their ecology is connected to the other animals co-evolving with them, as their existence is noted by many kinds of observers, until the facts of gorillahood are woven into the encyclopedia of knowledge in thousands of criss-crossing and self-checking directions. Each strand of enlightenment enhances not only the facts of gorillas, but also the strength of the whole cloth of human knowledge.

And as in any networked system, the larger the pool of nodes that are being linked up in the network, the more powerful it is. Doubling the number of nodes more than doubles its value. To a rough approximation, as the nodes of a network increase linearly, its value grows exponentially. This exponential growth in power means that one larger network is vastly more valuable than two smaller networks with the same total number of members. Let’s say that community “A” has integrated 10 facts into its pool of knowledge. If each fact is related in some way to the others, then the collective knowledge swells exponentially by 10^2, or 100 assertions. At the same time on another part of the planet, community “B” has integrated a different set of 10 facts with a similar value. If a Columbus or encyclopedist were able to combine those two pools of knowledge, the 10 A nodes with the 10 B nodes, and then interrelate those 20 facts into a single integrated web of knowledge, the value of that unified pool is twice the value (400, or 20^2) compared to the sum of the two isolated pools (2 x 100). The mathematics favors a single seamless carpet of knowledge over separate disjoined knowledge. When a self-contained patch of information can be woven into a global consilience it increases the value of all parts.

Today there remain many unconnected pools of knowledge. The unique wealth of traditional wisdom won by indigenous tribes in their long intimate embrace of their natural environment is very difficult (if not impossible) to move out of their native context. Within their system, their sharp knowledge is tightly woven, but it is disconnected from the rest of what we collectively know. A lot of shamanic knowledge is similar. Currently science has no way to accept these strands of spiritual information and weave them into the current consilience, and so their truth remains “undiscovered.” Certain fringe sciences, such as ESP, are kept on the fringe because their findings, coherent in their own framework, don’t fit into the larger pattern of the known.

The perceived divisions between types of knowledge, between levels of knowing, and between distinctions in our own standing in the universe are all being steadily leveled by the advance of the technium. Bit by bit technology illuminates the continuum that connects everything. In the usual self-amplifying circle of upcreation, each advance in knowledge also facilitates new inventions, unleashing yet more revealing technology. While our system of science can increase ignorance faster than it can increase knowledge (see the Expansion of Ignorance), new instruments amplify our ways of seeing and powers of systemic thinking. New tools fatten our collective memory and deepen our understanding. Just as the technium is currently in the process of connecting all humans to each other (via the internet), and all devices to each other (ditto), it is also in the process of connecting each idea to all other ideas, so that there is a one unified body of knowledge.

Over the long haul, as the technium becomes more complex, accelerated and sentient, technology tends toward consilience.

By Bianca Gubalke

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