Opensource discussion on O:MF and what comes after.

[Payne]

O.K. I'm going to start by addressing an idea from The Diceman by Luke Rhinehart. It's been coming for a long time now, I just need to shit it and get it out of my system.

I always felt this was an enjoyable enough book, with some clever ideas, principly the idea of our egos being made of a large number of conflicting desires and emotions, the large number of which are chained down and oppressed by One Self, a monolithic ego that we identify as being our "real Self".

I never really liked the solution in the novel, the idea of rolling a die to decide what you are going to do in any given situation and being absolutely bound by the dies decision.

It seemed inelegant - a destruction of any form of responsibility, which I personally feel is ultimately counter-productive. (Of course the complete abandonment of responsibility can lead to some really good opportunities for horrormirth, as long as you don't mind being the guinea pig).

Saying that, I don't really know if there IS a solution to this "problem" of chained mini-egos, but I'd like to find one. As Discordians, many of us try to stick crowbars under the One Self of ourselves and others, to break roles and habits and shake people up a little. We perform mindfucks in an effort to do this usually, or go straight to the root and attempt to change habits and roles directly (usually to ourself, using one self as a test bed).

There are some of us that will intentionally play a specific role for a time, let that mini-ego have it's time in the spotlight. We try to do it to others by making attempts to derail their One Self momentarily, allowing one of their mini-egos to step forward temporarily.

What other methods could we be looking at? Are there any new ideas out there to achieve these aims?

I feel that the larger the amount of tools at our disposal, the greater the chances of our success. The more cutting edge our techniques, the more likely we can avoid our targets in built defences, slicing past the scar tissue caused by years of a specific type of shrapnel.

I'm not talking about evolving the Mindfuck concept, I'm wanting some bluesky thinking on what we could conceivably replace it with in the future.

Go.

[Golden Applesauce]

The only thing that comes to mind is asking somebody who they are, and rejecting all descriptions of themselves as just a descriptor.  (No, that's your name, who are you?)  Start by asking yourself this, of course.  You look (and feel) really stupid if after a little bit of this the other person asks who you are and you don't have better answers than the ones they gave.  Not to mention the whole splinter vs. beam in the eye thing.


Also, I believe the Buddhists have some experience with this.  Which would make meme-bombs kinda like weaponized koans... ?

[Golden Applesauce]

Also: this seems suspiciously like saying, "I've found the best model of the human mind, what can I do to convince people that it's correct?"

[Payne]

Opensource discussion on O:MF and what comes after.

It's not like that at all.

[Valerie - Gone]

The only thing that comes to mind is asking somebody who they are, and rejecting all descriptions of themselves as just a descriptor.  (No, that's your name, who are you?)  Start by asking yourself this, of course.  You look (and feel) really stupid if after a little bit of this the other person asks who you are and you don't have better answers than the ones they gave.  Not to mention the whole splinter vs. beam in the eye thing.

How do you answer that, by the way? I never could figure out how to answer that question properly. Probably doing it wrong.

[Golden Applesauce]

The only thing that comes to mind is asking somebody who they are, and rejecting all descriptions of themselves as just a descriptor.  (No, that's your name, who are you?)  Start by asking yourself this, of course.  You look (and feel) really stupid if after a little bit of this the other person asks who you are and you don't have better answers than the ones they gave.  Not to mention the whole splinter vs. beam in the eye thing.

How do you answer that, by the way? I never could figure out how to answer that question properly. Probably doing it wrong.

Beats me.  That's why I've only ever done it to anybody once.

Right now, I'm leaning towards "a motley crew of desires, impulses, and experiences with a unique cognitive style."

[Cramulus]

Phil Hine on Invocation:

One of my colleagues had to sit a computer exam, and was wracking his brains trying to think of an appropriate god-form to invoke upon himself to concentrate his mind on programming. Mercury? Hermes? And then he hit on it - the most powerful mythic figure that he knew could deal with computers was Mr. Spock! So he proceeded to invoke Mr. Spock, by learning all he could about Spock and going round saying I never will understand humans. until he was thoroughly Spock-ified. And he got an A., so there!

[Rumckle]

The thing with rolling a die to make every decision is that it doesn't really completely rid you of responsibility, you still decide what each roll represents, and how you are going to follow the die's instructions. Further, there is a limit to the options a die can give you (6 for a normal person, 20 for a D&D player).

However, the mindfuck concept is rather broad idea, it may be better just to build on it.

Also, I like what you said, GA, about memebombs being weaponised koans, I/we/they should use that sometime.

[Payne]

You give yourself the options, yes, but after you do something because of it you say "The die made me do it". Unless they tell you that you can't say that.

I don't like being told what to do by anyone, or anything.

Building on the OMF idea, ok that's fine. If thats what comes out of this so be it.

My idea really stems from the fact that we seemingly aren't doing anything particularly new anymore, just slightly tweaking old ideas. Again, that's fine, but I personally feel it's better to brainstorm about where we might be headed next, and where everyone else might be headed next.

Preparing for eventualities and all that.

[Ari]

I am currently re-reading Luke's book. My first read was a good year ago and while having his ideas soak in I already started playing around with the dice. Little did I know back then that it was already an expansion of my selfexperiments to let out supressed impulses and free myself of habits and the boring self that was solidifying within me. Recently I started rereading the book - a whim of the die actually - and there are quite a couple good points in there...

The destruction of the personality, to become egoless, to be the the "Random Man" and live with consistent inconsistency - this is what he is after. I particular like the passage where Luke writes about the multi-lie society which conflicts directly with the tradition idea of a one-lie personality. Humanity, he argues, suffers from the illusion that only a few selected selfs are allowed to be lived out and thus a lot of minor selfs are repressed. Were we to live out all of our impulses we'd need a just "system" or higher power to decide when to act upon which. A conscious decision would always be subject to the impulses that currently the strongest.
I should try to find the quote from his speech at the PANY meeting; my English is insufficient to properly explain this.

Personally speaking... I wonder; am I outside the cell or just in another box where I finally get to be DM? Am I just redecorating my prison, bursting bubbles within bubbles in an infinite effort to get somewhere that doesn't exist? The more I get to consciously explore my erratic, chaotic multiverse of a personality, the more I feel liberated but also isolated from the rest. And I don't get the feeling like I am waking anyone up, non-thinking people usually just put the blanket a bit tighter while turning around.

Do I have to yell louder? How loud may I yell before security comes around the corner to pummel me down?
I am full of questions, and have few answers. So I keep on gathering misinformation, processing it and then shitting out some wall of text here and there.

Shaking up other people by rattling at their cage, forcing them to change position is a start. But these slight nudges don't really wake people up from the coma they are in. This is not sleep anymore! The situation I have been observing in Germany and Sweden during the last years is disgusting.

To cut this short: I see the internet becoming a powerful tool to spread information fast and wide. What if we can create a piece of misinformation that is an effective mindfuck, but also plausible enough to actually spread around through office emails, digg, youtube, fakebook, the chans, fauxnews even? Maybe a delayed mindfuck, something to build on with successive pieces which culminate in one giant orgy of mental rape...

[Valerie - Gone]

To cut this short: I see the internet becoming a powerful tool to spread information fast and wide. What if we can create a piece of misinformation that is an effective mindfuck, but also plausible enough to actually spread around through office emails, digg, youtube, fakebook, the chans, fauxnews even? Maybe a delayed mindfuck, something to build on with successive pieces which culminate in one giant orgy of mental rape...

I think you may have something there. The internet is a very effective tool for spreading information. Take, for example, the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyers. I would never have picked up those books if it hadn't been for flair on facebook. I saw so many of them, and heard about the books from a couple of friends, that I felt compelled to read them so that I could keep up with popular literary culture. Obviously, if we could do a mindfuck of that magnitude, it wouldn't work out that way, but the example illustrates the magnitude of the power of the internet, or even just the potential of the internet to influence people. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir on this one, though...

Anyway, I think Cram would probably be the best one to talk to about that.

[Verbal Mike]

Well that's exactly what OMGASM is about... It's about making O:MF viral. It's also been successful so far and is still growing.
I think Payne is right, we need new ideas, but I'm a bit skeptical about whether this kind of thread will really yield them... It may at least get us thinking, which is important, but the ideas themselves will probably come out of other discussions (like the GASM idea started in a hate thread about the FSM spags...)

[Payne]

Well that's exactly what OMGASM is about... It's about making O:MF viral. It's also been successful so far and is still growing.
I think Payne is right, we need new ideas, but I'm a bit skeptical about whether this kind of thread will really yield them... It may at least get us thinking, which is important, but the ideas themselves will probably come out of other discussions (like the GASM idea started in a hate thread about the FSM spags...)

Yeah, well, I don't hold much hope for this thread either to be honest.

I'll keep thinking about it on my own.

[Ari]

It might be worth thinking about efficiency...
Do we really get something worthwhile for our time and energy spent?

There seems to be a big part of people out there who just won't respond to classic mindfuckery any longer. The moment of confusion is too short and there is no lasting change occurring in the targets. The coma continues and we end up with nothing but giggles and that warm fuzzy feeling of "at least we tried". There's nothing particular wrong with that of course, but we might want to rid ourselves of the illusion that the current course of action is actually changing anything.
These robots need to get a bigger dose of their own illusionmechanisms... They are comfortable living in a society with multiple conflicting lies, adding one more here and there will not shake them up enough since they can just adjust easily and forget about it again later.

In order to overwhelm a person that is used to deal with a complex system of conflicting illusions we need something with more punch to it. The details are still out of reach for my young discordian mind but I imagine a mindfuck so powerful that it will rock the very foundation of average joe's personality: something that can't just be unseen, unheard and most of all - unthought.

A global project with several groups preparing the right materials, other groups that are specialising in getting these materials up on the tubes and on tv, in papers - into the heads of joe and mary everyman. Misinformation to get mainstream journalism cover it during primetime, mislead the whole fucking bunch until the actual bomb goes off after a month of wild goosechasing. Play on their fear, their horniness. I don't know; maybe it's impossible to do...

thoughts?

[Payne]

I think going large scale has it's benefits, but as you say, we need to be sure that the result is actually worth the effort.

Just because it's bigger doesn't necessarily mean it's better. It's doesn't mean it's worse either, of course.

But really, I think efficiency is a good route to go down, even though that is more about refinement than it is about getting around the defenses that are building all the time to what we do.

We have to remember that the media, large corporations and even governments are starting to do things like what we are doing now. Thinking in memetics, communicating in cut-ups. They do it for different reasons and results than what we are doing,but people are becoming more and more immune to it through exposure.