ORGANELLE

“One of the »most dangerous signals you could possibly receive would not be about space, situations in space, or anything similar. Rather, it would be comprised of a retrocausal signal from the future, and its ‘fingerprint’ would comprise evidence of the sudden desychronization of various temporal characteristics, and their otherwise common coherence. Those sensitive to this would realize the danger, but nearly none of them would be capable of articulating it… in part because our common language treats time as singular, universal, and flowing from the past into the present, and from there to the future. None of our existing analogies or metaphors are capable of suggesting retrocausality… or demonstrating the strange dimensionalities of temporal manifolds… and what happens to them when their coherence or ‘harmony’ undergoes sudden degradation…”

— an anonymous informant

“Modern media is like playing Russian Roulette with three blanks, one bullet — and one neurotransmitter.”

— Bobby Yingo at Netflix

“Where do you get your ideas?”

“My mind was effectively obliterated and reforged by extended contact with a nonhuman intelligence in 2002. Most of what I can see, say and perceive emerges from the sequelae of that experience. I am still a human in form, but most of my mind is something else entirely….”

— an anonymous informant

∞ “The way we think changes the structure of our minds and behavioral potentials. This means that you cannot really tell which kind of thinking, say, logical or fantastical, is developmentally more sound in general, for a number of peculiar reasons. The first is that the choice you make must influence your perspective on the argument itself, directly, and continuously. That alone is astonishing, but that is not even the beginning of the problem. The second is that what is developmentally sound is never universal, but contextual — thus it cannot be meaningfully referred to in the abstract. As yet, very few can see just how important this tiny problem is. But they will. If they survive it long enough. They will.”

— an anonymous informant

“I realized as I was walking around in my neighborhood that people select ‘where to live’, to some extent, according to their need to be ‘seen in comparison’ with certain specific cohorts, ‘scenes’ and contexts. In some cases, this is due to identification with those comprising the social or cultural milieu. But in others it’s a game of up-one-man-ship, where my capacity to demonstrate superiority is the primary attraction…”

— infraheard

“… are all you need for an artisanal pour-over experience.”

But if I have to concern myself with artisanal pour-over experiences I will deftly rip my own head off and tenderly feed it to nearby hungry goats.

— Bobby Yingo at the Sleepy Hollow

“Consider that discovering the true nature of the universe might be the criteria that decides when first contact is initiated.”

— reddit post in r/aliens

Consider instead that no one and nothing (actually intelligent) cares about abstract knowledge at all, because everything that actually matters is relational. In such a case, what initiates contact isn’t ‘the discovery of the true nature’ of anything, but rather… enacting the purposes implicit in true relation with and as a filial extension of all beings in all of time…

∞ More and more people are finding it urgently suspicious that our modern collectives act like petulant children who throw something analogous to stupidity and aggression tantrums every time they are not allowed to dominate, destroy and subjugate vast populations of living beings, human beings, and living places. The answer isn’t curing collectives whose structures demand they demean us. The answer is revising our ability to form and become collectives… with and for each other and our world. The days of Governments as towering monoliths of stupefying authority are numbered. The future lies in something that is an evolution of the concept of a tribe. Small, highly intelligent, profoundly intimate groups who live and act as unities in their own right, and for their own purposes. But we do not have to wait for the future. In fact, we must become it.

∞ Our older technologies, analog technologies for example, encoded principles that are directly derived from nature, and the structure of our own minds. In this sense, from a creatively inspired perspective, any artifact of human culture became a sort of ‘infinite book’, in which the curious intelligence could ‘read’ and thus rediscover, principles so fundamental as to be nearly universal — however peculiar their local implementation. The structure of the cassette tape is an excellent example; this physical metaphor is intrinsically expressive of fundamental aspects of natural and cognitive systems, and in its structure presents or refers to nearly endless constellations of observable ‘principles’ in nature, mind and thought, yet is based upon a transmissive geometry of little circles embedded in rectangles. And a flexible membrane that can be coiled in spirals.

But there is another more profound example from the onset of digital technology: the dialing/protocol exchange sequence required by modems to establish an active link. This process is derived from a foundation of extremely general features of communication. Discovering the depth of this is a shocking experience… that, for example, communicants check and match speed of transmission, that one plays host, the other guest, that identities are locally and universally determined during initial contact, that purposes and methods are selected and extended, that transmission and verification are handled with care according to specific protocols, and that there are dangers relating to imposters.

These same protocols are observed throughout nature, from insects to ecosystems. In every human communication we can see, through this metaphor, a profound structural system which we ordinarily ignore, take for granted, object to, or simply and unconsciously comply with. Yet understanding the structure of a communications act allows us to achieve a ‘second order’ of relation and awareness with communication in general, and prepares us to see and understand these principles when detranslated into their natural (i.e. ecological) contexts. By seeing into our own technologies and the way they relate to identity, transmission, reception, replication, eradication, and translation, we can learn to see into the fundamental principles from which we took inspiration, principles embodied in our potentials and their dangers… as human representational sentients.

We moderns endlessly ‘sign on’ to malignant agreements we never forged together and which demean and punish ceaselessly. So why is it that we so rarely choose to intentionally form the agreements that would nourish and liberate us? It’s absolutely simple for us to do so, and once we do we are immediately endowed with forms of liberty we will nearly never experience within the labyrinth of prisoneering traps that we find ourselves enmeshed in. So let’s remember, together, with and for each other, how simple and crucial it is to step beyond the prefab cages on offer in our societies and cultures, and forge behaviors, adventures and agreements that we actually trust, and which deliver on the power of the abilities that arise in tightly-knit, mutually aware and concerned cohorts.