What is The Machine™

[Cain]

Yeah, the one where I disagreed!  I don't know, I think there has to be a way to find a compromise between the two models.

[Triple Zero]

Yeah, the one where I disagreed! 

:-D

I don't know, I think there has to be a way to find a compromise between the two models.

blah. (while typing i just finished an infuriatingly annoying MSN conversation with my "boss" about declarable hours laced with horrible unprofessionality and consequently have no more energy to write an intelligent reply. MWEH)

[Cain]

Welcome to the world.  I'm writing an essay/talk/essay plan on Al-Qaeda as we speak.  Admittedly, since all three are on the same topic its not too bad, but I have to go over everything and seperate it for the different assignments.

What do you do as a job?  I though you were in University still?

[Triple Zero]

my mood:

(oh i just LOVE that emoticon)

besides studying, i somehow gotta pay for my college and food and such. the government isn't giving me any money anymore (in my 9th year .. can't blame em). so i'm working as a freelance webdeveloper. mostly PHP (which sucks) and a teensy bit of javascript (which is a happy fun toy).
the problem is this guy (my "boss") set up this little webdesign company. he seemed very nice, but i should have known better when he told me he was a sports-teacher at a highschool that got kicked out into an outplacement traject. don't have much work-experience overall, so i didn't expect working with people so far below my level could be so tiresome and grinding.
basically anything anybody at that company does, I can do better. to lead a webdesign company you need to know about Software Engineering, you need to know how you can talk to your clients and convert their layman babble to a technical specification. i studied to do that. i can write better HTML and CSS than the guy that's supposed to do it (he didn't know about semantic HTML, nor the difference between ID and CLASS attributes). i completely pwn him in PHP. which becomes VERY tedious if you need to incorporate his write-once-never-look-back code into your well thought-out content management system. only the company's graphics design guy is actually better at what he does than me.
then the pay is about 3x too less for any serious freelance programmer. i'm so done there. i'll get my pay, i'll finish the 2 or 3 projects i have there (hey i promised), and i'll find some REAL programmers work.

[Cain]

Ouch.  Yeah, I can see how working with someone who isn't really up on the area of expertise could grind at the nerves....

I usually work in the holdiays, which literally sustains me for the 8 months I need it to (and not a week longer).  My work ethic is terrible, I couldn't study and work.

[P3nT4gR4m]

hmmmm that is a very interesting approach, i like the way that sounds. so basically our task is to bring the Machine in touch with itself, to "find itself" in a certain way, enlightenment for the Machine, or at least a significant improvement in its consciousness and/or yoga, feeling for its components.

to contrast, other people have said that the Machine is doing these bad things because it just wants to stay in existence. that it abuses its components because it is afraid (in a metaphorical way) that it be destroyed. in fact, like some of us are trying to do.

thanks sillycybin, you have shed a new and interesting light on the problem!

There is another aspect which bears mention here, one which I can only describe as 'fractal'. The whole paradigm seems to repeat as one 'zooms out' of this picture, malchut becomes keter, again and again. The components form a mind which forms components which form a mind.... This is an (potentially infinite) extension of the 'as above so below' formula which would go some way to explaining the madjyickqule principle of creating change in the macrocosm, via the micro.

I wrote down a meditation a few years ago which goes some way to illustrate what I'm talking about. If you haven't had enough of my lunacy by now then reading this oughta do it.

... I left the constraints of the anima behind me and thus, released from my earthly bondage, flew high above my body, an arrow of pure spirit, a shard of brilliant light, returning to the source from which it fell. I ascended, facing backwards, seeing the earth grow smaller, gradually receding as the light from the stars paled its twinkling beauty.
   And the stars became more distant, gradually merging into the vast, swirling nebula of our galaxy which, as I flew, ever outward, was joined by a multitude of others, each of them receding to a tiny pinprick of light, no bigger than a star, but in such greater multitude than our heavens display. As I flew back the galaxies shrank in the distance to the size of atoms, filling the void untill the impression they created was the play of light on the gently rippling surface of a lake, and in that mirror I saw my own face, staring back at me.
   A tiny piece of sediment, a billion times the size of the Milky Way, stirred up by the soft current of the water, flashed briefly in the light, catching my eye. Then a voice, which resonated from all around and within me, deep booming, stern but, at the same time, patient and caring, with a hint of laughter in it's notes;
   "GET BACK IN YOUR TREE YOU CHEEKY LITTLE MONKEY!!"
   I made my reflection stick out his tongue and the universe resonated to the sound of laughter. I dived into the water, sloughing off my body, like a little pea of conciousness ejecting itself from the pod. I suddenly wondered how I was going to find my way back home. "Oh well," I thought, "I've got eternity, and it's bound to be in here somewhere."

[LMNO]

I just wanted to re-jack and say that Badger's take on this is prettyy fucking excellent.


Hey, RBG, do you mind if I include your interpretation in an updated version of the pamphlet?

[Benaclypse]

The machine is the writhing mass of society.  It's a matrix, and its implications are indeed massive.  It reflects social ambitions at every angle, and amplifies them.  If and when the people are good, the effects of the Machine will be nothing short of miraculous.  The effects of neonanotechnology on our bodies will be purely beneficial and the singularity will be a sun, not a black hole.  If the people are malevolent, which they tend to be, the same technologies will present adversities more dangerous than the nucular bomb.  The new technology will be used for tyrannical and evil purposes.  The machine can be a God and/or a Devil.  It can enslave and murder us or messiah us.  Chances are, it will be both.  It always has been.  But it can and will change.  Will we be able to reprogram a demon glitch into an angelic anomoly?  Will we be able to reprogram the Devil in the details into God-- nay, something better than God?  Something beyond threats of genocidal war, however holy?  Hackers can do a little tweeking, but the Machine^tm is constantly upgrading its virus scanners.  We don't want to hack the Machine^tm with viruses.  We want to reprogram the virus that's already in the Machine.

[BADGE OF HONOR]

I just wanted to re-jack and say that Badger's take on this is prettyy fucking excellent.


Hey, RBG, do you mind if I include your interpretation in an updated version of the pamphlet?

Go ahead.

[LMNO]

Thanks.

[Benaclypse]

The Machine is a glitch in the Machine.

[the other anonymous]

The Machine is a glitch in the Machine.

The glitch is a Machine within the Machine.

[Dr. Cow Ass]

I apoligize if this was covered earlier in this thread, but is the Machine a term taken from One flew over the Cuckoo's nest?

[Cain]

Probably not.  Its most likely filtered down through leftist rhetoric and anarchist slogans which have informed counter-culture thought as to the nature of social relations in postmodern capitalist states.

Or something.

It may have, but I havent even read that book, so....*shrugs*

[Jenne]

It sounds like something that has come out of a post-industrial era, where the machine vs. man myth/meme was so prevalent.  Say...1890's to 1930's...

These days, if the picture were redrawn, I'd say it'd look molecular, bacterial or even viral in nature.  Biological weaponry, so to speak.