iampando

[iampando]

Our Antipattern

Weve made an antipattern you and I. and keep it close and covered so sometimes when you hold it, it catches the light and glints and shines trying to be beautiful

but its only glass unordered and heavy, obsidian made from fights and shouts erupted like brimstone and cooled by the sea, turning water into smoking dragons and leaving deep calderas in the mountain tops.

Weve made an antipattern you and I- our Moloch is a growing web that weaves itself from nothing. catches our souls and waits.

The things we say add piece and piece, bound up like amber hard and brittle and trying to be beautiful but

Crystals never break they only split ever smaller- all ordered and selfsame. but weve made an antipattern you and I and its only glass. and when it breaks theres nothing left

[iampando]

All the Time in the World

time made concrete;

given vessel and voice to measure itself against oblivion.

And I’m floating

   I’m floating

       I am floating

I am drifting unimpeded

with a gigantic current

that is so big I can only believe it’s there.

and in it, I watch stifled lives stampeded down holes that went unheeded,

until it was too late.

No matter how often I tell myself

about the other things that happen before or after now,

   I relive the same moment a million times over.

I’m a man hit by a car who thinks to himself

“At last, something is happening!”

    --I only wake up in bursts.

Seeing the grandeur of the moment unfold before me,

only to fade away-

I am a flash of consciousness in a pan

of autonomy

And Time

is a measurement of space between two things that are the same.

Then why does the person that I was five minutes ago feel

so much farther

than you do

right now?

How can I believe that this distance I feel between us is not some illusion

distilled from

and manufactured by

decades of people

that I was;

convincing myself that I am all that is constant.

Because

it’s not egotistic to think that our solipsistic world views

make fundamental distinctions between “out there” and “in here” only because we refuse to see everything as a continuum, and prefer to have it meted out

like a film,

waiting desperately for the next frame.

SO

when I reach out to connect

with them,

with you,

with anything

Understand that I am reaching out of the hole of the present,

trying to see the light that illuminates everything

but does not penetrate far enough for me to see myself.

Because

crawling out scares me,

after spending so much time in

the dark.

My hands grope wildly, blindly,

feeling around for the everything that I know

is there.

and they always told me to look before reaching up on to an unfamiliar ledge

because there might be snakes,

waiting.

But maybe,

getting bitten by you

is what I need to remind myself that

“At last, something is happening!”

[iampando]

How we cast Spells

This is an old piece, and im going to resurrect it, because I can. Id like to rewrite it a bit: The other night I thought about magic. You know, the kind we see in  Harry Potter and lord of the rings, and every other fantasy. Part of me got lost in the wishful "if onlys". "If only magic was real, I would study it so hard, it would be so fun to have the universe listen to my commands." I always wonder why everybody in the books and movies isnt totally devoted to learning how to use that awesome magic. You know what? I bet its hard. Most of the movies and books make  it apparent that you cant just say words and have something happen.  Theres more to it- people have to devote themselves to it to become  good.

Sure, you can buy premade spells here and there, but the real  wizards learned how to make their own, how to use the already made ones properly, how to combine them. Its difficult. There are limitations. There are problems that have to be worked on. Magic in those universes is a fundamental law that someone had to study until it was figured out and perfected.

Well, isnt that already true? Science and technology have gotten to the point where we can manipulate the world   around us- we can make things move on their own, store energy, think for  themselves, display moving pictures, talk, respond to our voice, heat up, send information, fly, levitate, turn invisible, drive our cars,   connect to our minds, and even create any 3 dimensional object we can   dream of. Hell, we're even beginning to learn how to teleport.

But how many of us can actually command the universe like this? How  many of us are happy just downloading some premade "spells", and leaving their creation and contemplation to others? If you learned  electronics, programming, or any number of other skills, you can do  things that any previous civilization would have considered magic. And whos to say its not? Just because we understand it doesnt change what  its doing. Im sure all the wizards and witches in the books understand how their magic works too.

The universe and everything in  it is our playground, and to have our fun, we need to study how to  properly interact with it. So if you find yourself imagining what it  would be like to live in a world with magic, wonder no more.

This is it.

Our spells are written in computer code, our enchanted objects are  metal and plastic and silicon. They are ours to control and improve on,  yet most of us are happy to let other people do all the fun stuff while  we just get the things that are packaged and bottled up for easy use.If you dont have the will to understand and study our magic, what  makes you think you would fare any better in Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings?

[iampando]

The latest piece of art  I cant stop staring at. “The Caress”

[iampando]

My heart is a Quantum String

My heart is

a quantum string

with its endless permutations and

transfinite calculations

interfering and

decohereing

with all the things

its ever been.

My body is

a fractal set

composed of people that ive met

branching off and growing in

repeating in the changing wind

through topologies of time and space and

twisting souls and

saving grace

like mobius I find

myself rewinding

back in place

The coordinates may come and go

the passions change

and jungles grow

but leave me unobserved and free

inside my naked singularity

coz

My mind

is an infinite summation;

my unsolvable equation

that eats the heart of my elations-

there is no transubstantiation

to turn philosophy to flesh

or dreams to sight

just math that turns my constants into night-

recursively, like snake to tail,

with hidden variables of light

that solve themselves, though incomplete,

and make my heart remain discrete

[iampando]

Intro to book, first draft.

Who are you, really? How many ideas are your own? What have you put together for yourself, and what was given to you? Maybe it would be better to ask another question: where are you? Does that seem easier? Its not. To see what I mean, lets look at another animal: a rabbit. Rabbits are born with instincts to mate, flee, eat, burrow, and many others- these are mostly unmodifiable. Everything else that the rabbit needs to become, every other bit of information it will ever learn, it must learn on its own. What time is safe to eat from the vegetable garden? Can a rabbit outrun a dog? Where is the softest earth for a burrow? There are no shortcuts. Very few animals can even learn by observation, i.e, learning to solve a problem by watching another animal solve that problem. But unlike the rabbit, we have thousands of years of written and spoken history to draw on when we need to learn something new. So where does this leave you? Yes, we are born with instincts- walking, breathing, eating, drinking, recognizing faces to name a few. But if were to ask you to imagine the qualities that make up your identity- what ideas and concepts are at the core of your being- almost nobody would list these as being important. We see ourselves as mental creatures- not physical ones. Your identity is made of memories, thoughts, and ideas. Except for language, our genetic birthright is no more impressive than any ape or mammal. It is only through millenia of trial and error, wars and conflicts, enlightenment and dark ages that we are given the tools and ability to achieve far more than any other species ever has. Put any modern infant in the stone age and rest assured they wont have any intellectual advantage over its native inhabitants. Language is just one of many tools used in the nature that accomplishes the same purpose: information transfer. Other options include pheromones, bird calls, vibrations, beauty, or body movements. Spoken language in particular is unique and spectacular in that it can precisely recreate the informational content of one mind in another. By merely hearing a series of noises, I can understand almost exactly what the speaker was trying to say. Of course, there is always miscommunication, but for the longest time it was the best way to move complex information around a group of individuals. Language gave us ideas. Then humans invented writing. Writing may seem to be no different than speaking; after all, words are words. But writing gave us something else, something spectacular: precision. No longer need we only remember the ideas we heard, now we could refer to the contents of someone else's language exactly, no matter how much time had passed or how much distance it had travelled traveled. The written word is protected from the ravages of time and the fallibility of human memory. Before writing, we had only stories. Now we had history. Now we had a real memory. Of course, the story does not stop there. With the internet, mass media, and social media we completed the next major step in our social evolution. We now have connection. Distance means nothing to an email or blog post. Our capacity for connection is now based only on our ability to discern relevant data and to broadcast our own information to relevant receivers. We share and distribute information in networks spanning the entire earth. These networks are self optimizing and efficient, with a structure that is so complex and intricate it has only one other parallel in nature: the brain. While comparing human society to a biological brain might seem like an either an extended metaphor or a forced contrivance, there are simply too many parallels and potential benefits to ignore the comparison. Only in the last ten years, many peoples lives are reaching levels of connectivity never before experienced by species on earth. Even great colonies of ants and bees humming together can only send and recieve simple directions and actions to one another. With email, printed words, and social media we have crossed the gulfs of time and space and rendered the possibility of global inter-human networks well within the reach of anyone in a first world country. Human interaction has never been so fast, precise, and flexible. Obviously, we are not literally a giant brain, nor are we some kind of superorganism. Humans are discrete animals (unlike neurons) and driven by individual motivations (unlike ants or bees). But if we were to step back and look at the big picture, what if something else is happening? What if it is more than a metaphor? What if human life is rapidly becoming some other kind of a distributed computational network- something that solves problems in fundamentally different ways than anything else on the planet? Does it feel any different? Do we need to change the way we interact? How much should we rely on technology to mediate our lives? Is our culture fundamentally different than that of our ancestors? How do ideas travel through society, and whats our role in the process? How did we get here? A fair amount has been written about the “global brain” or the “social organism”, and almost all of it is either too abstract, too far removed from everyday life, or simply wishful thinking. My aim in this book is to describe and support what it means to be part of an globally interconnected society, where it came from, how ideas spread in it, and how we can help to shape it.

Starting from the beginning, we have a lot of ground to cover. From the origins of society to the structure of the brain to what it means to share a post on facebook or watch an ad on TV. So before we begin, ask yourself this question again: When all your memories are saved in photos, when all your thoughts are remixes of things youve read or heard, when all of your ideas are spread around the world in a thousand different computers, where does that that leave YOU? If I have seen any farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants. -Iassic Newton