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

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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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.

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

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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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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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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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.

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.”

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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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.

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Here’s another of my dedicated South Africa Blasters which are focusing on the issue and for which I have developed the web graphics… with more to follow:

"Domain Hosting South Africa" by Bianca Gubalke

To be continued. . .

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According to psychologist Erich Fromm (and famed biologist E.O. Wilson) humans are endowed with biophilia, an innate attraction to living things. This hard-wired, genetic affinity for life and life processes ensured our survival in the past by nurturing our familiarity with nature. In joy we learned the secrets of the wild. The eons which our ancestors spent walking to find coveted herbs in the woods or stalking a rare green frog were bliss; ask any hunter/gatherer about their time in the woods. In love we discovered the boons each creature could provide, and the great lessons of hurt and healing organic forms had to teach us. This love still simmers in our cells. It is why we keep pets, and potted plants in the city, why we garden when supermarket food is cheaper, and why we are drawn to sit in silence under towering trees.

But we are likewise embedded with technophilia, the love of technology. Our transformation from smart hominid into Sapiens was midwifed by our tools, and at our human core we harbor an innate affinity for made things.  We are embarrassed to admit it, but we love technology. At least sometimes.

Craftsmen have always loved their tools, birthing them in ritual, and guarding them from the uninitiated. As the scale of technology outgrew the hand, machines became a communal experience. By the age of industry, lay folk had many occasions to encounter complexifying technology larger than any natural organism they had ever seen and they began to fall under its sway. In 1900 the historian Henry Adams visited and revisted the Great Exposition in Paris, where he haunted the hall showcasing the amazing new electric dynamos, or motors. Writing about himself in the third person he recounts his initiation:

To Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within an arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring — scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s-breadth further for respect of power — while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it.

Each summer tens of thousands of enthusiasts make a pilgramage to a nearby town along the Pacifica coast where I live to collectively bestow affection upon beautiful machines. The love-in, called Dream Machines, draws smitten fans of self-powered vehicles: cars, airplanes, steam engines.  Rows of restored 1950s Chevys, and vintage Packards, in candy-color deliciousness woo their admirers. Rare species of airplanes, rivets gleaming, recline in a field, their painted propellers and exposed engines beckoning. A parade of oddly mutant motorcycles stream by. Behind one roped-off area a dozen old guys in overalls and greasy baseball caps tend noisy, hissing contraptions. This is the steam-powered zoo. Unlike modern machines, the innards of steam machines are visible, a kind of living transparency which solicits admiration for their mechanical honesty. One capped fellow demonstrates an insanely dangerous steam-powered cross-cut saw. Its naked teeth, as long as fingers, rake across a sacrificial log in a reptilian frenzy. The onlookers nod in approval.

I was there to witness the love. I was born lacking the normal male gene for car-madness. I am oblivious to the subtle differences in automobiles; I can’t tell one sedan from another. I don’t even know the model of the old van I drive. But I came to see others venerate classic technology.  So it was weird to discover in one corner of this teeming rendezvous, three magnificent machines that snagged my soul as I tried to walk by. In an instant I was bewitched. I felt these were the most intoxicating vehicles I had ever seen. I had no idea what they were. A metal circular logo affixed to the front grill on each declared that they were Blastolenes.

Blastolenes are custom-built fantasies. They are oversized car-like monsters that retained the rough proportions of ordinary vehicles, only at a disturbing larger scale. Imagine your car three times its current size. One Blastolene was strapped down to a flat bed truck as if it were a trophy wild gargantuan captured by hunters, and it might bust its chains at any moment and zoom off. Like many vehicles it was animalish: the Blastolene’s exposed circulatory pipes suggested guts, its rounded wheel cases were muscular hunches, and its chrome tie rods were obviously bones. People crowded around, sighing in satisfaction at its remarkable beauty. I was seized with a deep affinity for the creature.

The second Blastolene on display was a convertible sedan built around a hulking M7 Patton Tank motor. The motor emitted percussions rather than sound. Its gigantism was irresistible. I suddenly realized that for 40 years I had been driving baby cars; this was the daddy car. Timidly creeping up to it (can I touch it?), I felt a childlike awe. I could feel its abnormal density; the solid gravity pulling me in toward it, yet its intimidating scale, like an elephant, warning me away.

No doubt much of the attraction of these machines are the way they ape, so to speak, animal life. Maybe our technophilia is merely biophilia in disguise. But some of the magnetism that draws us to them is also due to the dynamo that peeks from their interior. Its rotational energy twirls us. Many decades ago California writer Joan Didion made a pilgrimage to the Hoover Dam, a trip she recounts in her anthology, The White Album. She, too, felt the heart of a dynamo.

Since the afternoon in 1967 when I first saw Hoover Dam, its image has never been entirely absent from my inner eye. I will be talking to someone in Los Angeles, say, or New York, and suddenly the dam will materialize, its pristine concave face gleaming white against the harsh rusts and taupes and mauves of that rock canyon hundreds or thousands of miles from where I am.

…Once when I revisited the dam I walked through it with a man from the Bureau of Reclamation. We saw almost no one. Cranes moved above us as if under their own volition. Generators roared. Transformers hummed. The gratings on which we stood vibrated. We watched a hundred-ton steel shaft plunging down to that place where the water was. And finally we got down to that place where the water was, where the water sucked out of lake Mead roared through thirty-foot penstocks and then into thirteen-foot penstocks and finally into the turbines themselves. “Touch it,” the Reclamation man said, and I did, and for a long time I just stood there with my hands on the turbine. It was a peculiar moment, but so explicit as to suggest nothing beyond itself.

…I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated. The star map was, he had said, for when we were all gone and the dam was left. I had not thought much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is.

Of course dams inspired dread and disgust as well as awe and admiration. Soaring, breathtaking dams frustrate the return of single-minded salmon and other spawning fish, and they indiscriminately flood homelands. In the technium revulsion and reverence often go hand in hand. Our biggest technological creations are like people in that way; they elicit our deepest loves and hates. On the other hand no one has ever been revolted by a cathedral of redwoods. In reality no dam, even Hoover dam, is eternal under the stars since rivers have a mind of their own; they pile up silt behind the dam’s wedge so that eventually their waters can crawl over it. But while it stands, the artificial wins our admiration. We can identify with the dynamo revolving forever, as we feel our living hearts must do.

Passions for the made run wide. Almost anything manufactured will have adoring fans. Cars, guns, cookie jars, fishing reels, tableware, you name it. Their fans lavish attention by comprehensively collecting all variants of the technology, or modifying the standard form, or by imitating their own version. Not surprisingly, fans of a feather gather together. I tallied up the number of online forums for manufactured items commonly adored. One might think of these as churches. I found over 40,000 online congregations dedicated to honoring various cars, more than 10,000 different fan groups enamoured of motorcycles, 6,000 assemblies really into boats, 5,000 fellowships serving avid gun owners, and 1,000 denominations obssessed with all types of cameras. The list for other artifacts, tools, and machines commanding their own smitten followers would run into the hundreds.

MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle calls a particular specimen of technology that is revered by an individual an “evocative object.” These bits of the technium are totems that serve as a springboard for identity, or for reflection, or for thinking. A doctor may love his/her stethoscope, as both badge and tool; a writer might cherish a special pen and feel its smooth weight pushing the words on their own; a dispatcher can love his ham radio, relishing its hard-won nuances, as a magical door to other realms that opens to him alone; and  a programmer can easily love the root operating code of a computer for its essential logical beauty. Turkle says, “we think with the objects we love, and we love the objects we think with.” She suspects that most of us have some kind of technology that acts as our touchstone.

I am one of them. I am no longer embarrassed to admit that I love the internet. Or maybe it’s the web. Whatever you want to call the place we go to while we are online, I think it is beautiful. People love places, and will die to defend a place they love, as our sad history of wars prove. Our first encounters with the internet/web portray it as a very distributed electronic dynamo – a thing one plugs into — and that it is. But the internet is closer to the technological equivalence of a place. An uncharted territory where you can genuinely get lost. At times I’ve entered to web just to get lost. In that lovely surrender, the web swallows my certitude and delivers the unknown. Despite the purposeful design of its human creators, the web is a wilderness. Its boundaries are unknown, unknowable, its mysteries uncountable. The bramble of intertwined ideas, links, documents, and images create an otherness as thick as a jungle. The web smells like life.

It knows so much. It has insinuated its tendrils of connection into everything, everywhere. The net is now vastly wider than me, wider than I can imagine, so in this way, while I am in it, it makes me bigger too. I feel amputated when I am away from it.

I find myself indebted to the net for its provisions. It is a steadfast benefactor, always there. I caress it with my fidgety fingers; it yields up my desires, like a lover. Secret knowledge? Here. Predictions of what is to come? Here. Maps to hidden places? Here. Rarely does it fail to please, and more marvelous, it seems to be getting better every day.  I want to remain submerged in its bottomless abundance. To stay. To be wrapped in its dreamy embrace. Surrendering to the web is like going on aboriginal walkabout. The comforting illogic of dreams reigns. In dreamtime you jump from one page, one thought, to another. First on the screen you are in a cemetery looking at an automobile carved out of solid rock, the next moment, there’s a man in front of a black board writing the news in chalk, then you are in jail with a crying baby, then a woman in a veil gives a long speech about the virtues of confession, then tall buildings in a city blow their tops off in a thousand pieces in slow motion. I encountered all those dreamy moments this morning within the first few minutes of my web surfing. The net’s daydreams have touched my own, and stirred my heart. If you can honestly love a cat, which can’t give you directions to a stranger’s house, why can’t you love the web?

Our technophilia is driven by the inherent beauty of the technium. Admittedly, this beauty has been previously hidden by a primitive phase of development that was not very pretty. Industrialization was dirty, ugly, and dumb in comparison to the biological matrix it grew from. A lot of that stage of the technium is still with us spewing its ugliness. I don’t know whether this ugliness is a necessary stage of the technium’s growth, or whether a smarter civilization than us could have tamed it earlier, but the arc of technology’s origins from life’s evolution, now accelerated, means that the technium contains all of life’s inherent beauty – waiting to be uncovered.

Technology does not want to remain utilitarian. It wants to become art, to be beautiful and “useless.” Since technology is born out of usefulness, this is a long haul. Robots will proliferate in a million different varieties and levels. Most will never be as smart as a grasshopper, and only few droids will surprise us with their intelligence. But the goal of every robot, and every machine and tool, is to exist for its own sake. To exist not only because it is useful, but because its existence is beautiful. There is evidence of that back on the fields of the Dream Machines, in the rows of mechanical glamour. While the Blastolene and lollipop 1950s Chevys are potentially useful – as transport – few are actually used that way. They are coddled, nursed and nurtured, repaired and improved, adored and honored, and sculpted into longevity by the sheer love of their innate beauty. They are art.

Today, at the start of the 21st century, there are tens of million species of tools and technologies at loose in the world. Assuming a modest increase of only 5% additional new tools and kinds of artifacts every year, by the end of the century our planet will be overrun by manufactured possibilities. Our own human needs are not expanding at this rate. The continual rise in technological variety is propelled by the needs of other technologies. You have a house, then you get a car. Now your car needs a house, too. It doesn’t have hands like you do, so it needs a garage-door opener for its house. It needs check up equipment to keep it healthy, and add ons to keep it comfortable. The same goes for other kinds of hardware. Handheld devices need jackets, houses need paint, computers need peripherals. I estimate that about half of the denizens of the technium are technologies serving other technologies.  If you remove a keystone technology from your home – say the computer – how many other devices and equipment would immediately become redundant? Remove your car, and what else can go? Remove your stove, and then count the pieces of gear no longer needed.

But we won’t let these subordinate technologies go, based on the evidence so far. We don’t “need” a lot of what we maintain. We keep specific technology around not only because it may be useful, but because we like to have it around.  The gear, devices, networks form an interdependent ecosystem of interrelated parts, and we have a technophilia for its survival. We love the jungly mesh of the technium, and the way we can lose ourselves in it. We rebel at the negative costs of this interrelatedness, and its negative externalities such as pollution (global warming is a type of pollution), but we have a deep affinity for its web. We continue to manufacture new ideas and new artifacts, not because we always need them, but because the technium needs them, and because we find the technium attractive.

Most evolved things are beautiful, and the most beautiful are the most highly evolved. Cities display this principle clearly. Newborn, unrefined cities lack depth, and so, throughout history humans find new cities ugly. The first few versions of London  were considered heinous eye sores. But over generations, every urban block in that city and all others are tested by daily use. The parks and streets that work are retained; those that fail are demolished. The height of buildings, the size of a plaza, the rake of an overhang are all adjusted by variations until they satisfy. But not all imperfection is removed, nor can it be since many aspects of a city – say the width of streets — cannot be changed easily. So urban workarounds and architectural compensations are added over generations. Additionally, every available opportunity to build within a city is grabbed. The tiniest alley way is utilized for public space, the smallest nook becomes a store, the dampest arch under a bridge filled in with a home. Over centuries, this constant infilling, ceaseless replacement and renewal, and complexification – or in other words, evolution — creates a deeply satisfying esthetic. The most beautify places are those that reveal layers of time. They accrue forms uniquely fitted to that place. Every corner in a city carries the long history of the city embedded in it like a hologram, glimpses of which unfold as we stroll by it.

The superb special effects magicians working for Hollywood discovered how to exploit the principle of evolutionary beauty when filming made-up worlds. Their fantastic cities and convincing props of the future are in reality new items, having been imagined only days earlier. To give them the convincing heft of reality, and the attractive richness we associate with beautiful things, the effects wizards devise a layered evolutionary backstory for each item or place. Model makers layer on “greeblies,” or intricate surface details that reflect a fictitious past history. This artificial evolution produces objects and places that exhibit what George Lucas calls the “used future.” For instance a detailed ray gun arrives at its current design via an imaginary backstory in which its predecessors were once longer and powered by a different energy source; the gun thus contains vestigial ridges and tubes. We feel authenticity. A backstory assumes that a 22nd century city had been bombed in a previous age; its earlier primitive steel ruins under gird the foundation of recent crystalline towers. It looks beautiful.

Evolution is not just about complications. One pair of scissors can be highly evolved, and beautiful, while another is not. Both scissors entail two swinging pieces joined at their center. But in the highly evolved scissors, the accumulated knowledge won over thousands of years of cutting is captured by the forged and polished shape of the scissor halves. Tiny twists in the metal hold that knowledge. While our lay minds can’t decode why, we interpret that fossilized learning as beauty.  It has less to do about smooth lines and more to do about smooth continuity of experience. The attractive scissors, or beautiful hammer, or gorgeous car, carry in their form the wisdom of their ancestors.

Not all stuff will attract our emotions, and the same life-likeness and sentience will often infuriate us. Professor Sherry Turkle has spent her professional life studying (and worrying) about the human propensity towards technophilia.  For the past three decades MIT engineers have designed a series of robots that increasingly take on attributes of human personality. The latest one is called Nexi. When Nexi is not on, the researchers pull a curtain around it. One day a student came in late to work on the robot, but found no one else around, so she pulled back the curtain. She was startled and confused to find Nexi blindfolded.  What did it mean? As Turkle relates the story: “It raised the question in the mind of the perplexed student, are we protecting the people around the robot, or are we protecting the robot? The blindfold immediately brought up the fantasy of torturing the robot. You know, if it’s alive enough to need a blindfold, then maybe it’s alive enough to be tortured.”

We are so eager to love technology that Turkle is worried this love blinds us. In her laboratory Turkle observes how ordinary people feel about anthropic technology. She has been surprised at how little encouragement humans need to surrender love for machines. The merest suggestion of human-like eye movement, the tiniest hint of active eyebrows, and the roughest ready smile on an otherwise obviously metal machine can make a person melt before it. Even feel bad about turning it off. Humans will treat any minimally anthropomorphized droid like it not only deserves our affections, but in some strange way is returning our love. That worries Turkle because she is concerned whether we will diminish our own humanity in order to match this minimal humanity we spy in our creations. If we let robots take care of the elderly as they want do in Japan, will the elderly become robot like to meet them? As computer scientist Jaron Lanier, another worrier of technophilia, puts it: “We make ourselves stupid in order to make computers seem smart. I don’t worry about computers getting intelligent, I worry about humans getting dumber.”

In the future, we’ll find it easier to love technology. Machines win our hearts with every step they take in evolution. Like it not, anthropic robots (at the level of pets at first) will gain our affections, since even minimal life-like ones do already. The internet provides a hint of the maximal passion possibilities of the technium. The global internet’s nearly organic interdependence, and emerging sentience make it wild, and its wildness draws our affections. No human can turn away from the trick of anthropomorphism, and not be seduced by the humanity we project onto look-alikes, but the attraction of highly evolved technology is not only in its reflection of our faces. We are deeply attracted to its beauty, and its beauty resides in its evolution. Humans are the most highly evolved organs we have experienced, so we fixate on imitations of this form (quite naturally), but our technophilia is fundamentally not for anthropy, but for evolution. Humanity’s most advance technology will soon leave imitation behind and create obviously non-human intelligences, and obviously non-human robots, and obviously non-earth-like life, and all these will radiate an attractiveness that will dazzle us. 

As it does, we’ll find it easier to admit that we have an affinity for it. In addition the accelerated arrival of tens of millions more artifacts will deposit more layers onto the technium, polishing existing technology with more history, and deepening its embedded knowledge. Year by year, as it advances, technology, on average, will increase in beauty. I am willing to bet that in the not-too-distant future the magnificence of certain patches of the technium will rival the splendor of the natural world. We will rhapsodize about this technology’s charms, marvel at its subtlety, travel to it with children in tow, to sit in silence beneath its towers.

And this is as it should be because technology wants to be loved.

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Finally, it’s back to my dedicated South Africa Blasters which are focusing on the issue and for which I have developed the web graphics… with more to follow:

'Hosting South Africa' by Bianca Gubalke

To be continued. . .

Interested in having your own in style? Concentrated on YOUR Niche? And Google efficient?
Contact me!

Bianca Gubalke

For an Economy based on Healing instead of … Stealing

It is simply miraculous how the Universe works sending you the information you are thinking about at the right time, just when you are mentally asking the question or when being moved by something inside you… Just as you saw in the past articles I wrote on “Communicating with Dolphins” – which by the way attracted new interesting information that I will be coming back to in due time.

Bianca Communicating with PiuPiu

Intuitive Communication

Fundamentally, my whole life and work rotates around Intuitive Communication in one way or another… be it with ‘Source’, with Nature or with People… and this in various ways and forms of artistic expression.

As like-minded people, we are all inter-connected and the exchange of ideas, knowlege and concepts is happening faster than ever before – open to everybody interested or concerned! What a fantastic time to live in!

Today, some extraordinary text material reached me and I am given the permission by the sender to publish it here for my loyal readers who share the same Love for Life and our human duty to honour, heal, protect and preserve it for generations to come – thought by thought and step by step -  as I do.

The author of this speech somehow rang a bell in connection with Findhorn (Scotland). I looked into the astonishing environmental developments of the Findhorn Ecovillage long ago and I vaguely remember Louis Malle’s award-winning movie “My Dinner with Andre“ that revolved around the fundamental question of whether we should understand ourselves as living in a Dream or the so-called ‘real’ Life… – I am talking about  Paul Hawken.

Who is Paul Hawken?

Paul Hawken (8 February 1946) is being described as “… a renowned entrepreneur, visionary environmental activist, and author of many books, and most recently, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming.

I invite you to know more about the author on Wiki, but the following additional description is of relevance for what we are about to read in a moment:

“. . . At age 20, he moved to Boston to study macrobiotic philosophy under Michio and Aveline Kushi. He then dedicated his life to changing the relationship between business and the environment, and between human and living systems in order to create a more just and sustainable world.His work includes starting and running ecological businesses, writing and teaching about the impact of commerce upon the environment, and consulting with governments and corporations on economic development, industrial ecology, and environmental policy.

His principle of comprehensive outcome was influential in full cost accounting and the eventual emergence of ecological footprint and triple bottom line standards for sustainability. He lives in Northern California. Although his biography lists no formal education, as of 2009 he has been awarded six honorary doctorates [...].”

Paul Hawken was presented with an honorary doctorate of humane letters by University President Father Bill Beauchamp, C.S.C., in May 2009, when he delivered the following superb, inspiring and motivating speech – that I edited a little for better viewing and special emphasis without changing a single word -, and that I invite you to read and absorb like being personally addressed – yes YOU…

YOU… the Programmers for a new Operating System for Planet Earth!

"Dreaming Life" by Bianca Gubalke

The Unforgettable Commencement Address to the Class of 2009, University of Portland, May 3rd, 2009 By Paul Hawken

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” Boy, no pressure there.

But let’s begin with the startling part.

Hey, Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation but not one
peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement.

Basically, the earth needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, and don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food… but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING. The earth couldn’t afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint.

And here’s the deal:

Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same:

~ If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data.

~ But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.

What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.

The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after
age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.”

There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people.

No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen.

Rather than control, it seeks connection.

Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power.

Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says, “if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true.”

Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider.

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown – Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood – and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages.

And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit.. And today tens of millions of people do this every day.

It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, and non-governmental organizations, of companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart.

Life Creates the Conditions that are Conducive to Life

What do we know about life?

In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life.

I can think of no better motto for a future economy.

~ We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes.

~ We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets.

~ Think about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant.

~ We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it.

You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet.

At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.

An Economy based on Healing

We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it.

We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future.

One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering.

"ZOOM TERRE" by Bianca Gubalke

Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono.

We are vastly interconnected.

Our fates are inseparable.

We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells.

In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells.

Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, (a one with twenty-four zeros after it). In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

So I have two questions for you all:

First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end.

Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. What I want you to imagine is that, collectively, humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years?

No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God.

Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.

"VISION" by Bianca Gubalke

Be a Dreamer

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years.

Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation.

The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence.

Nature beckons you to be on her side.

You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer.
Hopefulness only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful.

This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.”

WOW… now I let you think… and I also thank Erica Linson for your help in making this valuable moment possible and to AR to sending it on to me, to us!

Bianca Gubalke

…

Communicating with Dolphins

My past articles on “Communication with Dolphins” and especially the tragedy of the mass beaching of 55 whales at Kommetjie, South Africa, this past weekend… have attracted more response within a shorter time than any other post before – sometimes even from unexpected sources. Which leads me to believe that even in a business driven environment like the Internet people are inclined to react to what’s sincere, what really touches their heart and to what they are passionate about.

Swimming with Dolphins

Casey Porter from California wrote and made me smile: “Bianca, your article is just plain and pure and as a result my Chi automatically self relined itself. I loved this article and hope that one day I will get a chance to swim with these glorious creatures of the sea and thanks for writing such a beautiful story.”

Thank you Casey… I hope you will… and yes, what started as a simple story then was just the forerunner to much more to follow  -  about precognition and connectedness… and what touched me most was the image of the human families surrounding these dying creatures and connecting with them quietly in love, in prayer.

While I saw my Digital Art on Touch Vision Talk coming dramatically to life here, it was all I could do for them without being there myself. CLICK ON THE PIC BELOW to enlarge it and see this Online Newspaper’s beginnings…

"Touch Vision Talk" by Bianca Gubalke

Intuitive Communication

The story raised some very emotional and sensitive discussions as to what I touched on earlier: while everybody was focusing with best intentions on ‘helping’ these whales survive and get back into their natural element, the sea… did they ever ask the whales for permission? Whether that’s what THEY wanted? Whether that’s what was right for THEM? Or simply… WHY?

What did the whales want?

Maybe, they have a very different perception of Life and Death and the natural cycle of constant transformation… and the necessity to pass on at specific times to protect the whole… something I wrote about in my Book Review “Graceful Exits” not long ago.

Love, respect and intuitive communication between Man and Nature in any form are essential for living in Peace and Harmony with one another. I grew up with this form of interdependent understanding in Namibia; in my humble view it’s the one and only path to save our beautiful planet.

My inner question “What did the whales want..?” came back with a clear answer – as it always does when the question is asked with pure loving intent.

Communication with Animals

It put me in touch Anna Breytenbach, a well-known South African animal communicator. I invite you to get a feeling for who this powerful human being is, what she does and why… and how strong our synchronicities are… by watching this brief but insightful Interview that’s of value to everybody  – just click on the picture below:

Living your Purpose

Anna gave up a successful business career in Silicon Valley to follow her intuition and… Passion. This is what Life is all about… to discover what drives you – meaning your REAL purpose – and then follow your Dream… while continuously expanding your Knowledge and your… Giving.

Here is what Anna Breytenbach wrote regarding the whale beaching in Kommetjie:

“I was deep in the Knysna forest tracking wild elephants when the whale tragedy at Kommetjie happened yesterday, so I rushed back to Cape Town today and have just finished a long afternoon/evening at the beach. This is a summary of what the pod of 55 whales conveyed to me after I connected with the group:

The majority of the whales were sick and dying… as a result of swimming in some sort of chemical effluent in the ocean, to the northwest of Cape waters. This invisible toxic stream affected them internally in such a way as to cause slow die-off. With that their immune systems also crashed, making them very susceptible to and ill from parasitic infections. A few of them were physically fine, having withstood this – but they weren’t going to leave their family members. So they swam ashore with the dying ones. One for all.

They beached because they wanted to die.

They chose the Cape beach so as not to have to navigate the stormy, rough seas around Cape Point in their weakened state, and because they want humans to witness (the) whales’ dying. On the bigger/planetary level too. They said “the Mother” (the ocean) is being poisoned, and so are they. It’s time humans woke up to this and witnessed the effects.

They predicted that there will be more strandings in the next moon cycle (which I found interesting given that the International Whaling Commission sits again in the last week of June apparently.)

The whales appreciate the compassion and care that people showed in trying to return them to the water, but would have wished to be given the choice, i.e. pointed out to sea/re-floated once, and then left to die in peace if and when they returned.

Humans holding vigil for them with understanding would have been far better than the forceful, violent means ultimately used.

Inbetween the above thought forms are the emotions and soulfulness of their consciousness that cannot be expressed in words by this mere human…

With honour and reverence for all whales,

Anna B”

Permission

Thank you Anna… and let’s learn from this that we should always ask for permission first – verbally or mentally… and wait for the answer. And then trust our intuition and accept and respect it.

With compassion and understanding.

I know there will be more. . .

Bianca Gubalke

Humans are the reproductive organs of technology. We multiply manufactured artifacts and spread ideas and memes. Because humans are limited (only 6 billion alive at the moment) and there are tens of millions of species of technology or memes to spread, none can reach full 100% ubiquity, although several come close.

Nor do we really want all technology to be ubiquitous. It would be best for ourselves if remedial technology like artificial hearts never became very common. Preferably, we would engineer away the need for replacement hearts through genetics or drugs or diet. In the same way, the remedial technology of carbon sequestration (removing carbon from the atmosphere) would ideally never become ubiquitous. Best would be an energy system based photons (solar), fusion (nuclear), wind, or very least, burning hydrogen rather than burning carbon. The spread of fuels relying on zero carbon, or little carbon (wood, coal, oil and gas have a ascending percent of hydrogen per carbon in that order) would thus negate the spread of carbon sequestration technology. Thus rival technologies keep themselves in check.

Individual species of technology, like species of weeds, tend to multiply towards ubiquity to fill their available niche.  But a technium packed with remedial technologies does not have a long-term trajectory, just as an ecosystem composed only of weeds will not survive as long as one with less opportunistic components. Artificial hearts do not offer as many long-term options to a person, or society, as does a natural heart kept healthy by other technologies. Remedial atmospheric solutions do not offer as many future options as superior energy sources. The niche for replacement hearts, cataract surgery, pollution reducers, data recovery, and so on are in the long run – at civilization scale – narrow places for ubiquity. Once their niches are filled, they lead no where else. They are stop gap and self-limiting. Like a small pox vaccine. Ideally a vaccine has no future if it is universally successful.

Rather than self-limits the technium favors the type of ubiquity found in open-ended technologies, that is, those technologies that effectively increase the arrival of other effective open-ended technologies. This expansion unleashes cascades of other technologies that spread pervasively.

From a planetary biosphere perspective the most ubiquitous technology on Earth is agriculture. The steady surplus of high quality food from agriculture is vigorously open-ended in that this abundance enabled civilization and birthed its millions of technologies. The spread of agriculture is the largest-scale engineering project on the planet. Nearly half of Earth’s land surface has been altered by the mind and hand of humans. Native plants have been displaced, soil moved, and domesticated crops planted in their stead. Great stretches of Earth’s surface have been semi-domesticated into pasture land. The most drastic of these changes – such as uninterrupted tracts of giant farms — are visible from space. Measured in number of square kilometers, the most ubiquitous technology on the planet are the five major domesticated crops of maize, wheat, rice, cane sugar and cows.

Other more subtle technological alterations are visible in the ecological history of a place. By many experts’ account, there have not been any wilderness areas on this planet for perhaps five thousand years. Most of the areas we ordinarily consider wild (like the Amazon or the Congo, or the American West) are in fact the result of thousands of years of human intervention. By setting seasonal fires, by selectively hunting certain species, or by selectively harvesting certain plants, tribal people groom the landscape for food production over the centuries. No territory on the planet has completely escaped the inquisitive and disruptive impulses of the human mind to tame the environment. Hunter/gatherers now live or have lived everywhere (except for some Antarctic areas) and wherever people dwell, they use technology to modify the “natural” ecology and terraform their continent.

The third most ubiquitous planetary technology are roads. Simple clearings for the most part, dirt roads extend their root-like tentacles into most watersheds, criss-crossing valleys and winding their way up many mountains. The web of constructed roads forms a reticulated cloak around the continents of this planet. A string of buildings follow along the dendritic branches of roads. These nodes are made of cut tree fiber (wood, thatch, bamboo) or molded earth (adobe, brick, stone, concrete) and may be fourth commonest technology.

This map of the world shows travel time to major cities, closer is lighter, farther is darker. In essence it is a map of the global road network. (via New Scientist)

Not as visible, but perhaps more pervasive at the planetary level, are the technologies of fire. Controlled burning of carbon fuels, particularly mined coal and oil, has led to changes in the Earth’s atmosphere. Reckoned in total mass and converge, these furnaces (which often travel along the roads as engines in automobiles) are dwarfed by roads. Though smaller in scale than the roads they ride on, or the homes and factories they burn in, these tiny deliberate fires are able to shift the composition of the globe’s voluminous atmosphere. It is possible that this collective burning may be the largest-scale technological impact on the planet.

While magnificent stone and silica cities and their sprawl symbolize our technium, they are far from ubiquitous. Their footprint is small compared to agriculture, but megalopolis have rerouted the flow of materials so that much of the technium circulates through them. Rivers of food and raw materials flow in, and debris flow out. Every person living in a developed country in moves 20 tons of material annually.

Then there are the things we surround ourselves with. From the perspective of daily modern human life, the list of near-ubiquitous technologies include cotton cloth, iron blades, plastic bottles, paper, and radio signals. These five technological species are within reach of nearly every human alive today, both in the cities and in the most remote rural villages. Each of these technologies open up vast new territories of possibilities: paper — cheap writing, printing, and money; metal blades — art, craft, gardening, and butchering; plastic — cooking, water, and medicines; radio –- connection, news, and community.  Fast on their tracks follow the nearly ubiquitous species of metal pots, matches, and cell phones.

Total ubiquity is the end point all technologies tend toward but never reach. But there is a practical ubiquity of near saturation, which is sufficient to flip the dynamic of a technology onto another level. In the developed world and urban places everywhere, the speed at which new technologies disperse to the point of saturation has been increasing.

Whereas it took electrification 45 years to reach 90% of US residents, it’s taken only 20 years for cell phones to reach the same penetration. The rate of diffusion is accelerating. A straight line extrapolation would suggest that the rate of technological adoption should continue to accelerate until it occurs instantaneously. By the year 2100, a personal teleporter, say, should be adopted by everyone alive the year it is introduced. A new immersive VR suit the day after it is released. And a new wireless wearable communicator the hour after it is invented.

Rates of diffusion of consumer technology (via NYTimes)

However that scenario is unlikely to happen because technology specializes as fast as it becomes common, so most technology will not be adopted by most people. In fact the more complex the technology, the less likely it will reach near-ubiquity. The peak global penetration for the average technological innovation will drop over time. We can see a hint of that in the chart above. The level of peak penetration at which diffusion plateaus is falling over time. Any particular new species of communication device in the next century is unlikely to every reach the same ubiquity as machine-woven cotton cloth, or even the television.

But something strange happens with ubiquity. More is different. A few automobiles roaming along a few roads is fundamentally different than a few automobiles for every person. And not just because of the increased noise and pollution. A billion operating cars spawn an emergent system that creates its own dynamics. Ditto for most inventions. The first few cameras were a novelty. Their impact was primarily to put painters out of the job of recording the times. But as photography became easier to use, common cameras led to intense photojournalism, and eventually they hatched movies and Hollywood alternative realities.  The further diffusion of cameras cheap enough that every family had one in turn fed tourism, globalism and international travel. The further diffusion of cameras into cell phones and digital devices birthed a universal sharing of images, the acceptance that something was not real until it was captured in a camera, and a sense that there is no significance outside of the camera view. The further diffusion of cameras embedded into the built environment, peeking from every city corner and peering down from every room ceiling forces a transparency upon society. Eventually every surface of the built world will be covered with a screen and every screen will double as an eye. When the camera is fully ubiquitous everything is recorded for all time. We have a communal awareness and memory. That’s a long way from simply displacing painting.

I met a fellow many years ago who spent ten years wearing a tiny camera in front of his left eye. This head-mounted camera captured everything that happened in his life and transmitted it back to his website. When Steve Mann started his experiment of recording and broadcasting his life as a grad student, he was a lone eccentric. While he was standing there talking to you, with one eye open and the other filming, his unconventional approach to documentation seemed like performance art. One could not really object to it, because, well, he was such an outlier.

In the course of his years of living ordinary life as a one-eyed camera, going shopping, to school, to events with his friends, Mann discovered that ironically the more surveillance cameras a particular store, plaza, or gathering place had, the more their guards objected to individuals like him recording their own view. The watchers hated to be watched. Mann calls his inverse surveillance, sousveillance, a word coined by replacing the French “sur” for above, with the French “sous” for below, as in watching from the bottom up.

After he graduated from MIT, Mann became a professor and his grad students used the next generation of smaller circuitry to craft their own miniature sousveillance gear. Some were tiny enough to fit unobtrusively into sunglasses. The students would record each other. In the meantime, cell phones sprouted hi-res cameras and video cams connected to the net, which performed the same sousviellance actions. Suddenly, there were millions of public eyes watching each other. Sousveillance had gone from a node of one to near ubiquity. A few years ago when all this sousveillance was new, a girl on a Korean subway let her dog crap on the floor without cleaning up the mess. Her transgression was captured by several sousveillance phonecams and eventually broadcasted on national TV. She was shamed into apology by a new ubiquity.

One thousand live cameras always-on make downtowns safe from pickpockets, nab stop-light speeders, and record police misbehavior. One billion live cameras always-on serve as a community monitor and memory; they give the job of eyewitness to amateurs; they restructure the notion of the self, and a billion cameras demote the authority of authorities.

One thousand automobiles opens up mobility, creates privacy, supplies adventure. One billion automobiles creates suburbia, eliminates adventure, erases parochial minds, triggers parking problems, births traffic jams, and removes the human scale of architecture.

One thousand teleportation stations rejuvenate vacation travel. One billion teleportation stations overturn commutes, enhance globalism, introduce tele-lag sickness, re-introduce the grand spectacle, kill the nation state, and end privacy.

One thousand human genetic sequences jump-start personalized medicine. One billion genetic sequences every hour enable real-time genetic damage monitoring, upend the chemical industry, redefine illness, make genealogies relevant, unravel the packaging industry and launches “ultra-clean” lifestyles that make organic look filthy.

One thousand screens the size of buildings keep Hollywood going. One billion screens everywhere become the new art, create a new advertising media, vitalize cities at night, accelerate locative computing, and rejuvenate the commons.

One thousand humanoid robots revamp the olympics, and give a boost to entertainment companies. One billion humanoid robots cause massive shifts in employment, reintroduces slavery and its opponents, and demolishes the status of established religions.

In the course of evolution every technology is put to the question of what happens when it becomes ubiquitous? What happens when everyone has one?

Usually it disappears. Electric motors, born large, rare and obvious, quickly became invisible and everywhere. Shortly after their invention in 1873 modern electric motors propagated throughout the manufacturing industry. Each factory stationed one very large expensive motor in the place where a steam engine formerly stood. That single engine turned a complex maze of axles and belts, which in turn spun hundreds of smaller machines scattered throughout the factory. The rotational energy twirled through the buildings from that single source.

Machinery for grinding crankshafts at the Ford Motor Company, 1915. (From Hounshell)



By the 1910s electric motors started their inevitable spread into homes. They had been domesticated. Unlike a steam engine, they did not smoke or belch or drool. Just a tidy steady whirr from a 5-pound hunk. As in factories, these single “home motors” were designed to drive all the machines in one home. The 1916 Hamilton Beach “Home Motor” had a 6-speed rheostat and ran on 110 volts. Designer Donald Norman points out a page from the 1918 Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog advertising the Home Motor for $8.75 (which is equivalent to about $100 these days). This handy motor would spin your sewing machine. You could also plug it in to the Churn and Mixer Attachment (“for which you will find many uses”), and the Buffer and Grinder Attachments (“will be found very useful in many ways around the home”). The Fan Attachment “can be quickly attached to Home Motor”, as well as Beater Attachment to whip cream and beat eggs.

One hundred years later the electric motor has seeped into ubiquity. There is no longer one home motor in a household, there are dozens of them, and each is nearly invisible. No longer stand-alone devices, motors are now integral parts of many appliances. They  actuate our gadgets, acting as the muscles for our artificial selves. They are everywhere. I made an informal census of all the embedded motors I could find in the room I am sitting in while I write:

5 spinning hard disks

3 analog tape recorders

3 cameras (move zoom lenses)

1 video camera

1 watch

1 clock

1 printer

1 scanner (moves scan head)

1 copier

1 fax (moves paper)

1 CD player

1 pump in radiant floor heat

That’s 20 home motors in one room. A factory or office build would have thousands.  We don’t think about motors. We are unconscious of them, even though we depend on their work. They rarely fail. We aren’t aware of roads and electricity because they are ubiquitous and usually work. We don’t think of paper and cotton clothing as technology because their reliable presences are everywhere.

In addition to a deep embeddedness, ubiquity also breeds certainty. The advantages of new unknown technology are always disruptive. The first version of an innovation is cumbersome and finicky. A new fangled type of plow, waterwheel, saddle, lamp, phone, or automobile can only offer uncertain advantages for certain trouble. Even after an invention has been perfected elsewhere, when it is first introduced into a new zone or culture it requires the re-education of old habits. The new type of waterwheel may require less water to run, but also require a different type of milling stone that is hard to find, or it may produce a different quality of flour. A new plow may speed tilling but demand planting seed later, thus disrupting ancient traditions. A new kind of automobile may have a longer range but less reliability, or greater efficiency but less range, altering driving and fueling patterns.  That is why only a few eager pioneers are inclined to adopt an innovation at first, because the new primarily promises uncertainty and the unknown. As an innovation is perfected, its benefits and education are sorted out and illuminated, it becomes less uncertain, and the technology spreads.  That diffusion is neither instantaneous nor even.

In every technology’s lifespan then, there will be a period of “haves” and “have nots.” Clear advantages may flow to the individuals or societies who first risk untried guns, or the alphabet, or electrification, or the internet, over those who do not. The distribution of these advantages may depend on wealth, privilege, or lucky geography as much as desire. This divide between the haves and the have-nots was most recently and most visibly played out at the turn of the last century when the internet blossomed.

The internet was invented in the 1970s and offered very few benefits at first. It was primarily used by its inventors, a very small clique of professionals fluent in programming languages, as a tool to improve itself. From birth the internet was constructed in order to make talking about the idea of an internet more efficient. Likewise, the first ham radio operators primarily broadcasted discussions about ham radio; the early world of CB radio was filled with talk about CB; the first blogs were about blogging; the first several years of twitterings concerned Twitter. By the early 1980s, early adopters who mastered the arcane commands of network protocols in order to find kindred spirits interested in discussing this tool, moved onto the embryonic internet and told their nerdy friends. But the internet was ignored by everyone else as a marginal, teenage male hobby. It was expensive to connect to; it required patience, the ability to type, and a willingness to deal with obscure technical languages; and very few other non-obsessive people were online. Its attraction was lost of most people.

But once the early adaptors modified and perfected the tool to give it pictures and a point and click interface (the web), its advantages became clearer and more desirable. As the great benefits of digital technology became apparent, the question of what to do about the have nots became a bothersome issue. The technology was still expensive, requiring a personal computer, a telephone line, and a monthly subscription fee – but those who adopted it acquired power through knowledge. Professionals and small businesses grasped its potential. The initial users of this empowering technology were – on the global scale – the same set of people who had so many other things: cars, peace, education, jobs, opportunities.

The more evident the power of the internet as an uplifting force became, the more evident the divide between the digital haves and have-nots. One sociological study concluded that there were “two Americas” birthing, as well as two worlds. The citizens of one were poor people who could not afford a computer, and of the other, wealthy individuals equipped with PCs who reaped all the benefits.  During the 1990s when technologists such as myself were promoting the advent of the internet, we were often asked what we were going to do about the digital divide? My answer was simple: nothing. We didn’t have to do anything, because the natural history of a technology such as the internet was self-fulfilling.

The have-nots were a temporary imbalance that would be cured (and more so) by market forces. There was so much profit to be made connecting up the rest of the world, and the unconnected were so eager to join, that they were already paying more per minute of telecom connectivity when they could get it. Furthermore, the costs of both computers and connectivity were dropping by the month. At that time most poor in America owned televisions and had monthly cable bills. Owning a computer and internet access was no more expensive and would soon be cheaper than TV. In a decade the outlay would reach a $100 laptop. Within the lifetimes of all born in the last decade, computers of some sort (a connector really) would cost $5.

This was simply a case, as computer scientist Marvin Minsky once put it, of the “haves and have-laters.”  The haves (the early adaptors) overpay for crummy early editions of technology that barely works. Their purchase of flaky version 1.0 of new goods finance cheaper and better versions for the have-laters, who will get it for dirt cheap not long afterwards. In essence the “haves” fund the evolution of technology for the have laters. Isn’t that how it should be, that the rich fund the development of cheap technology for the poor?

We saw this “have-later” cycle play out all the more clearly with cell phones. The very first cell phones were larger than bricks, extremely costly, and not very good.  I remember an early-adopter techie friend who bought one of the first cell phones; he carried it around in its own dedicated briefcase. I was incredulous that anyone would pay that much for something that seemed more toy than tool. It seemed equally ludicrous at that time to expect that within two decades, the $2,000 devices would be so cheap as to be disposable, so tiny to fit in a shirt pocket, and so ubiquitous that even the street sweepers of India and the rickshaw drivers of China had one. While internet connection for sidewalk sleepers in Calcutta seemed impossible, the long-term trends inherent in technology aim it towards ubiquity. In fact, in many respects the cell coverage of these “later” countries overtook the quality of the older US system so that the cell phone became a case of the “haves” and “have-sooners,” in that the later adopters got the ideal benefits of mobile phones sooner.

The fiercest critics of technology still focus on the ephemeral “have and have-not divide,” but that flimsy border is a distraction. The significant threshold of technological development lies at the boundary between common place and ubiquity, between the have-laters and the “all-have.” When critics asked us champions of the internet what we were going to do about the digital divide, and I said “nothing,” I added a challenge: “If you want to worry about something, don’t worry about the folks who are currently offline. They’ll stampede on faster than you think. Instead you should worry about what we are going to do when everyone is online. When the internet has 6 billion people, and they are all emailing at once; when no one is disconnected and always on day and night, when everything is digital and nothing offline, when the internet is ubiquitous.”

When a technology saturates, or even supersaturates, a culture, it unleashes patterns not seen in lone examples of it. A few isolated manifestations of a technology can reveal its first order effects. But it is not until technology fills a vast, thick interacting pervasion do the second and third order consequences erupt.  Don’t worry about those who don’t have a car; worry what happens when everyone has a car. Don’t worry about those families who cannot afford genetic engineering; worry what happens when everyone is engineering. Don’t worry about those who don’t own a personal teleporter; worry what happens when everyone has one. Most of the unintended consequences that so scare us in technology usually arrive in ubiquity.

And most of the good things as well. The trend toward embedded ubiquity is most pronounced in technologies that are open-ended: Communications, computation, socialization, and digitization. And no technology is as open-ended as the mind. The mind is nearly the definition of open-endedness since its limits are imperceptible and unimaginable. We see no closure to the possibilities of an ever-diffusing intelligence. If a human mind can upfold a greater mind, ad infinitum, this upcreation represents the ultimate open-endedness.

The all-pervasiveness of open-ended technologies settle further and further into the matrix of infrastructure. We are busy right now infusing our shoes, clothes, household appliances, vehicles, sports equipment, handhelds, pets, landscape – everything that we touch and touches us – with communication, computation and intelligence. In this ubiquity they open up more new technology, and trigger new levels of consequence.

Because of their open-endedness, the amount of computation and communication that can be crowded into matter and materials, stuffed into the environment, and invested into everything we make seems infinite. Like the magician who keeps pouring water into the bottomless cup, we can keep pouring mind, intelligence, and information into the technium without limit. There is nothing we have invented to date that we’ve said, “it’s smart enough.” In this way the ubiquity of technology is insatiable. It will absorb all mindedness.

The ever-expanding base of our creations works like a vacuum sucking technology toward it. It is constantly stretching the technium towards a pervasive presence. Pulled by open possibilities and pushed by relentless duplication, technology wants ubiquity.

"Happy Birthday Zo" – by Bianca Gubalke

Happy Birthday, Zo Nicholas

May this special day be filled with Joy and great Expectancy for New Life and lots of Sunshine and Laughter for many years to come!

Bianca Gubalke

PS: Click the Pic!

"Happy Birthday, Yorgo!" by Bianca Gubalke Art

Happy Birthday, Yorgo!

For a very Special Day with Family and Friends… to which we all contribute with our love, gratitude and admiration for all you have achieved and graciously shared with us, your virtual YORGOO Family.

Cheers to another happy, healthy and overwheelingly successful year!

Bianca

PS: Don’t forget to click the pic!

A Present for Bianca

YORGOO Mini

On Click the Mini becomes Maxi.