Jason Silva "Radical Openness"

Jason Silva is a performance philosopher and filmmaker who has spoken at Ted Conferences about the co-evolution of humans and technology.

His video, Radical Openness, resounds with the notion that sharing intellectual property will accelerate the evolution of the species.

1: Digital Technologies are Heuristic

Susan Delagrange “Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Canon of Arrangement”

***

To understand the world, we absorb bit by bit
And we can only learn how to use one tool at a time.
In the digital world, learning-by-doing makes the strongest impact on a student, 
And makes a lesson stick to the brain. 

When we actively take ownership of ideas, chew them up, and spit them out as our own, we learn. 
Not just about the world – digital or physical – but about ourselves, too.
Through this rumination, we give of ourselves, and we take or own an experience.

Then there is the explaining.
What
the
hell
did you just spit out?

Well?

We think on our feet to defend it, and spout explanations that honestly hadn’t occurred to us before. 
But it doesn't matter that we just thought of it.
Past or present, the realization is still true.

Our creations
(or "products" if you're still working on the ownership notion)
were ours before we made them, 
before we thought to make them, 
and before we were ourselves.

***

"Until the end of the 18th century, wonder was defined as "a form of learning—an inter-mediate, highly particular state akin to a sort of suspension of the mind between ignorance and enlightenment that marks the end of unknowing and the beginning of knowing... Computers, software, and the social technologies in which they are embedded are contemporary devices of wonder.”

“Interactive digital media... provide new objects-to-think-with about our slippery, provisional, fragmentary understanding of the world, a framework for exploration and discovery of how its seemingly disparate and disconnected pieces can be joined and made sensible, and thereby help us learn how to act.”

2: Complete Understanding is Elusive

James Gleick "The Information" chapter 12, page 353

***

And you keep coming up with these realizations. 
"What are you talking about?
You made this thing, but your explanation changes each time you talk about it."

Well.... duh.
Who said anything was supposed to stay still around here?
That's why we picked this major in the first place, isn't it?

Sure, there are absolutes in code, word counts, and deadlines.
But the real reason you're here is because you hate that stuff. 
The real world is not an absolute – and neither is the Internet.

It's constantly changing, morphing, evolving – or, arguably, devolving.
We adapt.
That is the experience.

That's why they teach us how to think,
so that the doing comes naturally out of our fingertips when we sit down to keyboard.

I know a guy who goes crazy when things don't line up just right. 
He's NUTS. Neurotic. Anal, I dare say. 
Throw a wrench in his gears and all hell breaks loose.
That guy needs to be in geometry, or a church. 
Somewhere things stay the same for a long time.

That was a pretty quick lesson when we learned to "do the Internet."
Nothing stays the same for long.

Isn't that why you're here?

***

"But Shannon also considered redundancy within a message: the pattern, the regularity, the order that makes a message comprehensible. The more regularity in a message, the more predictable it is. The more predictable, the more redundant. The more redundant a message is, the less information it contains" (Gleick 329). 

3: Our Internet-Instilled Ethics

Jonathan Lethem "The Ecstacy of Influence" page 61

***

So if you are here to stay, you should know

We do things our way around here.

We steal
everything.

And we don't feel bad about it. 

An open-source culture is the future – 

– even if it's so far ahead we can't see it yet

and our elders think we're blind for looking.

Sure, we abide by protocol

To be able to participate.

But we use it to share our "stolen" goods.

... "Goods."

They can only jail so many of us.

With Internet in each of our pockets, the hierarchical powers will lose their grip

eventually

when they can no longer stop the flow of Information.

Music is just the beginning, and the end, and the all of it.

Lethem says, "Today an endless, gloriously impure, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of music" (60).

There are pirates and DJs to thank.

And since we actually don't need a degree to be creators,

very little is not up for grabs. 

We're a bit scrappy, I suppose.

Copyright laws no longer reflect the speed of our consumption, 

so we piss on copyright laws. 

These are not our parents' ethics.

We are not our parents.

See: Banksy

***

“The gun-book  wasn't  readable, exactly, but I couldn't take offense at that. The fertile spirit of stray connection this appropriated  object conveyed  back to me—the strange beauty of its second use—was a reward for being a published writer I could never have fathomed in advance. And the world makes room for both my novel and Robert The’s gun-book. There's no need to choose between the two” (Lethem 64).

4: No Tolerance for Creativity-Suppressants

Jonathan Lethem “The Ecstasy of Influence”

***

I don't mean to be facetious
...completely.

Thou shall not take all of life too seriously all of the time.

For now is relevant
We are in a place – or at least you are, and I am. 
And culture is not just for wise   cracks.

We are participants, in choice or reluctance.

It is just almost laughable – 
those who assert their power on others 
(whether they realize or not)
to bully them away from dreams,
"protecting our rights"
Bullshit.

Really, it's not laughable. 
Time is not renewable
Space is finite (the livable stuff, at least)
but ideas are not.

By making and sharing,
with the humility that comes
when we realize how stupid it was to think sharing would be a torment,
we puff our contribution into the atmosphere. 

We foster global consciousness
of consciousness.

***

“Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself.”  

"Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of affiliations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could  be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.”

 (Lethem 61)

5: All Falling Trees Need Ears to Crash

James Gleick “The Information” chapter 8

***

If a tree falls down in the woods,
But there is no one in the woods,
No ear for miles to receive the crash – 
– does it make a sound?

Of course not.
Haven't you heard this riddle since grade school?

There must be an ear present to interpret a disturbance in the air
as sound.

Of course the tree disturbs the air.
But sound is a gift for conscious beings.
Ones with ... eardrums.

School comes a little harder
than just happening to hear
what just happened to happen

That is why we are told to do. (midterms)

We procrastinate and slack 
but furrow our brows
through our opportunities to process the trees crashing down in the woods.
Can you picture – our professors running round with chainsaws?

Time to nail down my process.
Or at least it was, a day and a half and two cups of coffee ago.
I am learning my own "language"
One that translates the beeps into meaning.
Beth-meaning.

***

"There were 'beep beeps' but that was all, no information. The moment one transforms that set of signals into other signals our brain can make an understanding of, then information is born – it's not in the beeps" (Gleick 248).

6: Wub Wub Wub - Whu?

Flux Pavillion “The Scientist” 

I tried to talk to one of my friends about this song.

He was stoned at the time.

The two verses,

their contrast,

the old way and the new way – 

He hadn't given it much thought.

The words, I mean.

It's a compromise, the wub.

We turn our introspection off so we can hear the buzz and feel the bass.

A trait of the genre,

of our generation?

I like to let a song speak for itself:

7: Products of our Environment

“What technology did do was alter the spread, force, and especially duration of that reaction, by removing two old obstacles – locality of information, and barriers to group reaction.” 
Clay Shirky “Here Comes Everybody” page 153

***

You can take us away from the Internet

But you can't take the Internet out of us

For better or for worse

It has rewired a generation

And glued us together.

***

“What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind... even the minimal hassle involved in sending a newspaper clipping to a group (xeroxing the article, finding envelopes and stamps, writing addresses) widens the gap between intention and action” (149).

“In a world where group action means gathering face-to-face, people who need to act as a group should, ideally, be physically near one another.  Now that we have ridiculously easy group-forming, however, that stricture is relaxed, and the result is that organizations that assume geography as a core organizing principle, even ones that have been operating that way for centuries, are now facing challenges to that previously bedrock principle” (155).