Thanks to Inner Traditions, who sent me this copy of surrealist critic Annie Le Brun’s book The Reality Overload: The Modern World’s Assault on the Imaginal Realm
A Situationist critique of our current Internet culture, The Reality Overload suggests that we are imagination-impoverished, lost in the endless distraction and meaninglessness of electronic media. That critique has been made before, but linking it to the degradation of the material world is a stroke of genius. What we think, of course, creates the reality we live in. And we tend to think we’re going to get on Facebook after we’re done watching CSI.
Recently I was reading about the Inklings, the discussion group that spawned C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, who would gather in a pub and create fantasy worlds out of the air. Is there any room for this kind of sustained imagination in our world? Hell, even kids these days are playing World of Warcraft instead of Dungeons and Dragons, let alone coming up with their own fantasy worlds. A tailspin of mental stultification… when you have all the information and entertainment you could ever need, the parts of the brain needed for creating those things out of nothing tend to atrophy. Diminishing returns…
An excellent book that makes a much-needed connection. Imagine a world in which we “green” the realm of meaning and fantasy in addition to just the material world!
From the jacket copy:
What underlies the many problems of the modern world—from accelerating rates of extinction and desertification to the increased alienation of the individual—is a reality overload, an increasingly invasive mechanization and homogenization of modern life that glorifies consumption and conformity. This overload has been created from the constant force-feeding of too much information, a phenomenon that dispossesses us of our deepest connections to time, our physical world, and each other.
Annie Le Brun explains that the degradation of the environment mirrors the devastation going on in our minds revealing a link between genetically modified foods and the transformation and decay of our language and communication. There is a direct relationship between the rupture of the great biological balances that govern the planet and the equally devastating rupture in our imaginal realm. The imaginal realm is the home of our dreams and the perceptions that feed our thoughts, individuality, and creativity. Without its influence we are forced to live a drab, alienated lifestyle based on consumption alone. If, as Shakespeare claims, “we are such stuff as dreams are made on,” this theft of our imagination by the reality overload threatens the very foundations of our existence.
(The Reality Overload: The Modern World’s Assault on the Imaginal Realm)
You Philly kids being spied on by your own school-issued laptops, this one’s for you:
We are looking for high school students and teachers across America to participate. Photograph A Recruiter is an online photography project that invites high school students to photograph the military recruiters posted within their schools. Through the act of looking back at the system that is looking at them, the project empowers students to consider the role of the government for which they will soon have the right to vote for.
(via Arthur)
Via the Lifeboat Foundation, here’s a good list of things we can do to make sure the human race survives. (Hint: Make sure the Hadron Collider doesn’t shit itself!)
1. Create the book “Guide to the restoration of civilization”, which describe all the necessary knowledge of hunting, industry, mining, and all the warnings about the risks for the case of civilization collapse.Test its different sections on volunteers. Print the book in stone / metal / other solid media in many copies throughout the world. Bury treasure with the tools / books / seeds in different parts of the world. 1-100 million USD. Reduction of probability of extinction (assuming that real prior probability is 50% in XXI century): 0.1%.
2. Collect money for the work of Singularity Institute in creating a Friendly AI. They need 3 million dollars. This project has a maximum ratio of the cost-impact. That is, it can really increase the chances of survival of humanity at about 1 percent. (This is determined by the product of estimates of the probabilities of events – the possibility of AI, what SIAI will solve this problem, the fact that it chooses the problem first, and that it solves the problem of friendliness, and the fact that the money they have will be enough.)
3. Krisave in the ice of Antarctica (the temperature of -57 C, in addition, you can create a stable region of lower temperature by use of liquid nitrogen which would be pumped and cooled it) a few people, so that if on earth there another advanced civilization, it could revive them. cost is several million dollars. Another project on the preservation of human knowledge in the spirit of the proposed fund by LongNow titanium discs with recorded information.
4. Send human DNA on the moon in the stable time capsule. Several tens of millions of dollars. You can also send the criopreserved human brain. The idea here is that if mankind would perish, then someday the aliens arrive and revive people based on these data. Expenses is 20-50 million dollars, the probability of success of 0.001%. Send human DNA in space in other ways.
Seen via Osocio, guerilla signs that have been sprouting up around the U.S. Nice work!
These signs are spotted in the streets of Manhattan, Miami, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia and Williamsburg USA. They are made by TrustoCorp, but who the people are behind this name is unknown. Very clever, some are hardhitting, others are hilarious. At least it will give passers something to think about.
Wired picked up on the Hexayurt—a $100 stable housing solution that can help put Haiti back on the rails far quicker than disposable disaster tents. (Hexayurts previously covered at Dangerous Minds here.)
With just $100 worth of plywood and screws, almost anyone can build a shelter known as a Hexayurt that can last three years and possibly even withstand a hurricane. The simple DIY structure could be a critical temporary solution for some of the estimated 1 million or more people left homeless in quake-torn Haiti.
Aid agencies have distributed around 10,000 tents to Haiti so far, according to to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), one of the dozens of charity groups in Haiti focused on emergency shelter. But 200,000 are needed, and even then, the tents won’t stand up to the weather.
“Tents are a three to five month option in the midst of the dry season,” said Vincent Houver, IOM Chief of Mission in Haiti, in a recent press release. “But emergency and transitional shelter solutions sufficiently durable to last at least two years need to be found before the heavy rains arrive in a few months.”
Tents do have the benefit of a supply chain already in place that makes it easy to ramp up production when disaster strikes, and they can be transported to remote sites and set up relatively quickly. But they run around $300 to $400 and only last about a year, in good weather.
This lost gem of late-sixties psychedelic erotica by “Mary Sativa” (har har) documents the sexual exploits of a young woman while on seven different drugs (one after the other). Now that’s proper journalism, about actually important things. Check out this customer review:
Acic Temple Ball describes the loves and lovemaking of a young lady during the very peak of the psychedelic era of the later sixties, the height of glorified sex, drugs, and rock and roll. This book is truly a classic of it’s era. Our heroine in “Acid Temple Ball,” experiences lovemaking while using at least seven different types of drugs popular or available at the time. Her experiences while on LSD and other chemicals is both surprisingly seductive and amazingly accurate and believable and actually well written. Sharon Rudahl, shows her talent as a writer capable of fascinatingly realistic descriptions of feelings and emotions even in hallucenigenic and altered consciousness affected states, even at the young age of 21 when she wrote this paperback. This is clearly a paperback for adults only, something you wouldn’t want even mature young teenagers to read without some adult supervision. Nevertheless, this book is an unique trip into it’s time, focusing on the pleasures and sensualism of a young female during the height of the love generation and her experiences through the use of at least seven different types of drugs in various combinations. I recall reading this book in 1969, the year of it’s first edition. I think my beautiful Sri Lankan cosmopolitan girlfriend gave me a copy (or should I say “turned me on to it”), before she threw me a surprise birthday party in an old historic stone church in the University district of Minneapolis, complete with rock band, light show, and mescaline punch sponsored by the cosmic vendors association. “Acid Temple Ball,” by Mary Sativa, (Sharon Rudahl Peters), is part and parcel of the time, seen through the looking glass and mystic smoke of mind blowing sexual narrative unbalanced by the bummers, by-products and general downers of drug use - but what a trip it was. Sharon Rudahl later was a pioneer of “underground feminist comix” and most recently released the 2007 paperback novel “A Dangerous Woman: the Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman”, which is also well written and has been well received.
Numbers stations (click here to listen to a sample) are shortwave radio stations that broadcast weird-ass strings of numbers, voices, and other randomly generated effluvia. Messages from aliens? Spies? Sock gnomes? The dinosaur-men who live in the center of the Hollow Earth…? None may know…
Numbers stations (or number stations) are shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin. They generally broadcast artificially generated voices reading streams of numbers, words, letters (sometimes using a spelling alphabet), tunes or Morse code. They are in a wide variety of languages and the voices are usually female, though sometimes male or children’s voices are used.
Evidence supports popular assumptions that the broadcasts are used to send messages to spies. This usage has not been publicly acknowledged by any government that may operate a numbers station, but in 2001, the United States tried the Cuban Five for spying for Cuba. The group had received and decoded messages that had been broadcast from a Cuban numbers station. Also in 2001, Ana Belen Montes, a senior US Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, was arrested and charged with espionage. The federal prosecutors stated: “Montes communicated with the Cuban Intelligence Service through encrypted messages and received her instructions through encrypted shortwave transmissions from Cuba”. In 2006, Carlos Alvarez and his wife Elsa Alvarez were arrested and charged with espionage. The U.S. District Court Florida stated: “defendants would receive assignments via shortwave radio transmissions”. In June 2009, the United States similarly charged Walter Kendall Myers with conspiracy to spy for Cuba and receiving and decoding messages broadcast from a numbers station operated by the Cuban Intelligence Service to further that conspiracy.
It has been reported that the United States uses numbers stations to communicate encoded information to persons in other countries. Numbers stations appear and disappear over time (although some follow regular schedules), and their overall activity has increased slightly since the early 1990s. This increase suggests that, as spy-related phenomena, they were not unique to the Cold War.
io9 posted this hilarious/awful video that appears to be a “We Are the World” type affair except that the purpose behind the song, the message if you will, is to save Doctor Who, which was at the time (1985) in danger of being cancelled. So in typical 80s fashion, a bunch of egotistical pop stars, most of them now consigned to the pop culture junkyard from which oldies shows never beckon, got together to make a charity single (for cancer) and to save their favorite TV show.
Amongst the now total nobodies, you can see the sixth Doctor, Colin Baker who’s singing holding a beer (nice one, Colin), members of Ultravox and Bucks Fizz and Justin Hayward from the Moody Blues. This video goes from terrible to laugh out loud funny about halfway through.
