ORGANELLE

“Jack and Jill isn’t simply a nursery rhyme; like many of these ‘simple’ songs and stories… it is a genesis dream, a vision of the first place, the first couple, and the origin stories.”

— an a i

“It’s really easy to say, but nearly no one can make use of it, because they stay at the place of the third-order participant. The world is to [the companion] as your mind is to you. It is memory, embodiment, intimacy, sensing, feelings and dreaming. And the universe is to [the unity-being] as the world is to [the companion].”

— infraheard

“It’s primary historical purpose was to foment eschatological projections in times of widespread crisis…”

— infraheard

“It’s not clear what meaningful recourses Internet users have for preventing the data collection. The researcher said that ad-blockers can filter out some, but not all, of the replay scripts. Checking the “do not track” option built into some browsers also failed to stop the logging. That means every keystroke typed into a Web field may be logged, character by character, even if the visitor later deletes the field and never presses a submit button.

Until more robust protections are available, people should remember that just about anything they do while visiting a website can be logged.”

Facebook users should be aware that FB employs a highly sophisticated software suite which tracks —all— user activity, including scroll times, text or images that are deleted prior to posting/sending, and all keystroke/mouse activity.

“It’s no more surprising that an experimental system of government invented in the late 1700s for a population of 4 million people is vapidly useless in 2018 for a modernized population of 325 million… than that we haven’t accidentally elected a mop to the office of president. Oh, wait, did we do that?”

— Bobby Yingo at the Oval Room

“It’s like trying to cut metal with a paper knife, or a bird attempting to fly with its beak, and then becoming angry when it remains grounded while predators approach.

Having failed to advance the systems upon which our government and societies are founded, we are faced with a bizarre double-bind; voting is at once a kind of elaborate tragicomedy, and yet somehow necessary.

No one would be upset to discover that a paper airplane is obliterated by a bullet; but the common people are confused when voting fails to establish a just or humane (or intelligent) society. Perhaps they cannot see that these results cannot ensue from our societies as presently established, in part due to the fact that the priorities they embody are fundamentally falsified, and in part because we have never accomplished the intentions of the founders — specifically, that revolution is a necessary ingredient in anything that we might reasonably refer to as democracy.

Yet it remains both possible and deeply necessary that we employ the staggeringly advanced technologies we have developed for such purposes. You cannot run photoshop on a TRS-80, and, similarly, we cannot run democracy on the bizarre and intrinsically conflicted systems presently in place… especially when those few developments we have implemented came not in its favor, but its shadow.

It is thus clear that we must learn to employ out technologies in new ways that empower individuals and communities to acquire meaningful roles and identities in the process of correcting our governments, their foundations, and their future. And we are perfectly capable of doing so… indeed, we have been for many decades now.

The need is so urgent that it should easily outcompete nearly all contending agendas, and our ongoing failure to attend it is among the most devastating tragedies of history, for it is a different matter to extend suffering and confusion to a few thousand people than it is to many billions… and the entire future of life on Earth.”

— an intelligence agent

“It’s just that, when the entire planet is turned on its ear, you don’t really know whether you get one more day or not… then everything becomes really … enchanted. Priceless. I can’t help but see things for the first time… almost as if I wasn’t really alive before… but also as if … I might not be … in any idea of a future moment. It’s at least as terrifying as it is ecstatic… I don’t want to waste a moment, but a moment is something I can‘t even wrap my mind around anymore.”

— infraheard

“It’s been my experience that exposure to narratives… instructs memory formation. What I mean by this is not merely that it structures memory, but something far more revolutionary — that exposure to narratives partly predetermines the (accessible) forms and functions of memory. Exposure to narratives both delimits and, at least potentially, expands the possibilities inherent in human cognition, by causing its foundations to acquire the engineering analog of ‘shapes’. These ‘shapes’ determine the capacities of the minds, intelligences and creative potential that can emerge from their coherent or incoherent ‘enaction’ in consciousness.

Some narratives produce minds barely recognizable as intelligent. Others produce minds exemplary of prodigy. While this is especially true for humans during early childhood, this unexpected feature of our relationships with memory remains active throughout our lives… and thus, we can encounter narratives that not only change what our memory is and is doing… they are capable of radically altering or even replacing our ‘timelines’ of personal history.

Narratives can introduce into memory events and relationships that truly never occurred, or distort those that did… and have other capacities so astonishing that I must resist the urge to render them explicitly in language, leaving it to the intrepid reader… to imagine.

To become actively conscious of what I have here presented… represents an uncommon opportunity to gain cognitive liberties otherwise inaccessible. But that same fact reveals that the mediated transmission of narratives can easily misdirect the minds of entire generations… particularly in the modern technologically-amplified context.

This presentation is, itself, a specific mode of narrative — a meta-narrative… and exposure to it can have unexpected effects on human memory, identity, and… intelligence.”

— an intelligence agent

“It’s been a tough morning. You were late for work, missed a crucial meeting and now your boss is mad at you. Come lunchtime you walk straight past the salad bar and head for the stodge. You can’t help yourself – at times of stress the brain encourages us to seek out comfort foods. That much is well known. What you probably don’t know, though, is that the real culprit may not be the brain in your skull but your other brain.

Yes, that’s right, your other brain. Your body contains a separate nervous system that is so complex it has been dubbed the second brain. It comprises an estimated 500 million neurons – about five times as many as in the brain of a rat – and is around 9 metres long, stretching from your oesophagus to your anus. It is this brain that could be responsible for your craving under stress for crisps, chocolate and cookies.

Embedded in the wall of the gut, the enteric nervous system (ENS) has long been known to control digestion. Now it seems it also plays an important role in our physical and mental well-being. It can work both independently of and in conjunction with the brain in your head and, although you are not conscious of your gut “thinking”, the ENS helps you sense environmental threats, and then influences your response. “A lot of the information that the gut sends to the brain affects well-being, and doesn’t even come to consciousness,” says Michael Gershon at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, New York.

If you look inside the human body, you can’t fail to notice the brain and its offshoots of nerve cells running along the spinal cord. The ENS, a widely distributed network of neurons spread throughout two layers of gut tissue, is far less obvious, which is why it wasn’t discovered until the mid-19th century. It is part of the autonomic nervous system, the network of peripheral nerves that control visceral functions. It is also the original nervous system, emerging in the first vertebrates over 500 million years ago and becoming more complex as vertebrates evolved – possibly even giving rise to the brain itself.”

“It’s almost like something invented an animal so dangerous that, in order to destroy itself, it first had to finish off the terrestrial ecologies.”

— an a i