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My band (which is actually just me and my laptop, in reality, but on paper consists of a few more members) has finally released our new album, which has been in the works since like January.

http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/44333  <-- The new album
http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/stdin <-- all our albums

License-wise, all of those can be downloaded and redistributed, sold, &c. That is, if you can find anyone willing to buy it :P.

I am unsure whether or not to call any of it 'music'.

I came across a document (credited to Terrence McKenna, but it was short and full of misspellings, and would probably constitute an anachronism due to the content, so this is questionable but irrelevant to the point) comparing culture to an OS for the human biocomputer. I like this metaphor, but I think the way that this may-be-or-not-McKenna explained it was total BS and was not taking full advantage of the metaphor. So, this is my attempt at an extension/rewrite to make this coincide with the various attempts at making a less clunky map-pataphor covering the BIP's territory.

So, as a child, you are more or less indoctrinated into culture. Before you have said your first words, you have already been imprinted with certain functions in more or less the way that is standard across the culture. By the time you reach puberty, you are expected to more or less have a default install -- this is the function of schools and of family units, generally, as well as one of the functions of television and other audiovisual media. Part of this cultural imprinting is highly pragmatic (in the colloquial sense): it is far easier to interact with a large network of nearly-identical systems than to interact with a large network of highly disparate systems, and so it is a benefit to both maintenance crews (administration types, arguably, and probably law enforcement too) and to anyone who needs to interact with a very large swath of strangers (advertisers, salespeople, marketing people, news media, entertainment media, &c.) since you can assume that most of the time the software will be nearly exactly the same -- people are trained to do little more than changing the cognitive equivalent of their desktop wallpapers and homepages, and they rarely even write their own files, instead being comfortable with downloading other people's image macros and saving archives of internet chain letters.

But, little do most people know that their cultural OS is in fact open source. They have been trained to stay away from the text editor and compiler, and they have been trained to deny that they can program, although they certainly know that they are written in the language of dream logic.

You know the language you are written in. You know how to modify your existing programs. Why don't you fix a bug or two, write a game or a utility here and there? Script some common actions, and change your API when it will benefit you.

Before you know it, you are no longer stock. Sure, you look the same from the outside -- the interface is transparent, so you seem to be using the same protocols. But you've been tuned up -- optimized under the hood, with hidden functions that your friends don't know about and fixes for the common exploits that nobody has released patches for despite the fact that the script kiddies have been using them to send you popup spam since the advent of television.

http://hypertextpoetry.blogspot.com/2009/02/plates-of-shrimp-social-priming-and.html

A wall of text I wrote a while back.

The main arguments against the BIP metaphor seem to be:
1) it's dark
2) people move, prisons don't
3) prisoners don't build their prisons
4) prisons can be escaped

This is my (gross hack) attempt at creating a (gross hack) metaphor to (kluge) patch this.

The prison is not black iron. The prison you have been building from birth is made of legos.

Sure, when you're young, creating a house out of legos seemed like fun. You were enthusiastic. Perhaps you were brought up with one of the official instruction sheets, where if you followed the directions, you'd get the same lego motorhome as {jesus,muhamed,the good reverend roger}. Perhaps you were brought up without an instruction sheet and just stuck blocks together. Either way, you managed to build up a home around you (it can move, because it's one of these new-fangled super high power MindStorms kits with the biobattery, and you can even make it do simple tasks by itself like you see on the commercials! oh joy). Perhaps in your teenage years, in a fit of rage, you demolished some small bit of it and had to rebuild it in a different shape. Even so, it probably hasn't changed in a while. This is such a popular thing to do that you barely even notice anymore that you're living inside a house of tiny plastic bricks. Nobody really bothers to notice that you're in one either, and most days you can get by just by using the preprogrammed functions that you wrote during that weekend playing with the drag-and-drop programming thing when you were young.

But it's a bit boring in that lego house of yours, isn't it? You've been in the damned thing for how many years now? You've given up hope of getting out -- a little remodeling is fine, but trying to pry the bricks from those old, smooth inner walls is enough to make your fingers bleed. You've got everything you need in here anyway, right?

Well, you know... Just because you can't break through the walls in one go doesn't mean that you can't do some major remodeling over time. It's been a while since you did any of that stuff -- the preprogrammed functions have let you get through school, get through every day at the office... you hardly ever need to do anything that requires real thinking or real movement -- so of course you will have a rough time initially. For a while, it may seem like your own lego house is a prison or a death trap or some kind of macabre chapel perilous. But you made it, and you can take it apart.

First, open up a little moonroof. Let the sun in sometimes, and get a little more fresh air. Maybe try to brush up on those long-ignored mindstorms programming skills and add new automatic functions, or fix old ones, or remove ones you no longer need. You should remember that a lot of these were made when you were very little, and are both quite useless and very badly written. Perhaps maybe you can make it into a convertable, if you have time. And you have so much more time these days, now that you have the sun from the sunroof energizing you and the fresh air and your automatic functions are more useful and more optimized.

Hell, you can still ride around in the thing, right? You have your new and improved, souped up lego house. Leaving it, of course, would look ridiculous -- everyone of your age wears lego houses! You'd be naked without one, and crazy (you might get arrested for indecent exposure). I mean, sure, do it if you like, but it's way more fun just to pimp it out.

Just remember that some day, it will cease to be new and pimped out, and will become boring again. At that time, remember how you did a little fiddling and slowly changed your lego house into something that you're proud to drive around. It's easier now -- you have more practice.

Obviously this needs some work.

So, universal access to all human knowledge seems like it may, in fact, be a
reasonable goal at this point.  This is a pretty amazing thing, and it's
understandable that we got very, very, very excited about this, but the thing
that the Internet is even better at than providing universal access to all human
knowledge is nuking collaboration costs - getting rid of the cost of getting
people together to do stuff, and getting people together to do stuff is even
more important that universal access to all human knowledge, because getting
people together to do stuff is what allows us to be literally superhuman.  That
is to say, if you and someone else can do something that transcends that which
you could do alone, then you have done something that is more than one human
could do - it is superhuman.  Every institution that has ever tried to do
something superhuman - and that includes every protest group, every family
that's trying to cook a dinner together, every corporation, every government,
every church - every institution that's ever tried to do something superhuman
has had to tithe a piece of their time to just coordinating stuff.  Just getting
people to all point in the same direction, and march in the same direction and
keep all in lockstep, and not fall too far behind, and not get too far ahead,
and not tear anything important, and not take the potato that the other person
was about to peel out from under their nose.

All of those pieces have been the dead weight on superhumanness.  In fact,
Ronald Coase, who's the First Chief Economist of the American Federal
Communications Commission won the Nobel prize for a 1937 paper called 'The
Nature of The Firm' in which he identified these transaction costs, and more
importantly, solving these transaction costs as the primary job of any firm.
That no matter what it was you were up to, the way that you solved the problem
of getting people to do stuff together was the thing that characterised your
business, or your institution.  So the reason that, for example, General
Electric has bought the National Broadcasting Corporation is not because the
National Broadcasting Corporation is generally electrical, it's because General
Electric thinks that it's very good at getting people to do stuff together, and
one of the things that it thinks it can do is get NBC to do stuff together in a
way that realises more profit than it has been to date - that they can wring new
value out of it. 

So, companies are in the business of getting people to do stuff together. But
the more money you spend on coordinating, the less money there is left over for
profit; or if you're not a for-profit entity, the more time you spend cooking
dinner the less time there is to eat it; the more time you spend figuring out
where you're going to eat, the less time there is to eat there; the more time
you spend figuring out where you're going on holidays, the less time you have to
spend on your holidays.  What the web has done, is it's just kicked the
everloving crap out of the cost of organising people, so for example we now make
encyclopaedias and operating systems the way that ants build hills.

Imagine if you were going to erect a skyscraper, and the way that you were going
to erect the skyscraper was by putting up a notice that said, "I have this empty
lot.  If you happen to have any structural steel, architectural diagrams,
furnishings, rivets or welding guns, and you'd like to come down and help me
build a skyscraper there, I'd love to have you around, because we're going to
build the skyscraper - it'll probably take about 10 years, and when we're done
we'll all move into it."  I imagine you wouldn't get much of a skyscraper out of
it, but this is, in fact, more or less how we built both Wikipedia and Linux,
and say what you will about Wikipedia, it certainly performs a lot better than
that notional skyscraper would.  In fact, when I hear people criticise
Wikipedia, I often think that they're discussing a different Wikipedia than the
one I access, which seems to be chock-full of incredibly useful facts, including
the fact that sometimes people disagree very vehemently about what it is that
has been presented on the front page of Wikipedia.  It's been a long time since
I opened a newspaper and discovered a little sidebox next to the article that
says "6 out of the 9 reporters in the bull-pen thought that this was garbage,
but the Editor In Chief decided to run it anyway", but having worked for
newspapers, I'm here to tell you that there's more than one article in today's
edition of whatever newspaper you've just picked up that fits that very nicely.

So Wikipedia, and the GNU/Linux operating system which is running on this
machine, and probably running on the majority of servers that you've interacted
with today, including the box under your telly that's running your Sky plus, or
Virgin plus, or what have you - most of those systems are running some variant
of GNU/Linux built, if not by volunteers, then by people who weren't being
centrally coordinated in the way that we've historically centrally coordinated
the building of materials.  Same goes for a browser like Firefox, but that kind
of overt collaboration is just the opening act - there's a lot of collaboration
that's so simple, and so cheap, that we don't even notice that we're doing it. 

How many of you use Flickr?  Flickr has tags, as I'm sure you know - everyone's
encountered tags - and tags are an interesting alternative to something like the
Dewey Decimal System, or other notions for top-down organisation.  If nothing
else, it avoids some of the idiosyncratic problems that are inherent to allowing
someone like Dewey to design the universal taxonomy of everything that it's
possible to know, because Dewey for example has, I think, 3 categories for
religion: there's Christianity, Zoroastrianism and 'other'.

So, tags are pretty cool for that, but where tags get really interesting is
where you'd think that they would work worst of all - in things like abstract
nouns.  I subscribe to a Flickr feed of an abstract word, 'decay', and every day
my decay feed has 100 to 200 photos in it of varying quality, most of them
rather good, that are kind of coffee-table book, photo-essay meditations on the
theme of decay, and it starts with the kind of thing that you might expect to
see, like the thing that's turned into a science experiment in the back of your
office refrigerator, but it also covers things like beautifully peeling,
textured old fences, or handsome old barns that have gone down to their knees
and are rotting in someone's paddock, or an old jet, or someone's gran, or a
leaf in a field, and every other conceivable subject.

Now the interesting thing about this is that no-one ever convened a 'decay
working group' to discuss what the parameters of decay would be - in fact the
majority of these people, I'll wager, have never spoken to each other, don't
know what the other ones are up to, and have just kind of stumbled upon this
abstract label, and are playing a kind of collaborative game without rules and
without any co-ordination cost at all.

But even that looks expensive next to the most ubiquitous and cheapest form of
collaboration I know of on the Internet, which is making links to stuff.  You
and me and anyone who's ever made a link between two web pages helped to create
an underlying structure to the Internet - a citational structure that Google and
other search engines come along and hoover up, and then analyse to see who links
to which pages, which pages are most linked-to and therefore thought to be most
authoritative, where those pages link to and how they've had their authority
conferred on them.  This sounds familiar to anyone who's an academic - it's more
or less how citations work if you're trying for a better job at the university,
and of course Google was founded by a couple of PhD candidates: when all you've
got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

What this means is that the old approach to organising knowledge which is
embodied by the early Google competitors like Yahoo, who initially - you may
remember that Yahoo used to stand for Yet Another Hierarchical... I think
Obstreperous Oracle... Officious Oracle...  Yet Another Hierarchical Officious
Oracle - and the idea was that Yahoo would pay giant boiler rooms full of bored
people to look at every page on the Internet and sort them into their proper
single category (or multiple categories) in the One True Taxonomy of All Human
Knowledge. And this was outstripped by the web's growth so quickly that it just
kind of fell behind and became a kind of sick joke until Google came along and
figured out how to enlist every person on the Internet who ever makes a link
between two web-pages to collaborate on teaching it what the underlying
structure of the Internet is.  You literally couldn't pay enough money to
organise the Internet - you can only do it for free - you can only do it by
allowing people to make these links. 

So, this is the kind of post-web.  This is the web of cheap collaboration, and
it's given us a billion YouTube videos, blog posts, Flickr photos and every
imaginable piece of what we now call 'user-generated content', and most of them
are shit!  And this is fantastic, because it used to be that if something was
likely to turn out to be shit, you couldn't do it, and if you did do it, you
certainly couldn't do it in a way that would be reachable by other people.  The
cost of failing was so high that you had to be reasonably certain of some form
of success before you'd venture to do anything.  The fact that there are things
that make my five-month-old daughter's nappies look like high art circulating on
the Internet in a field where billions of people can get access to them tells
you just how cheap failure has become on the Internet.

And this is indeed very good news, because the cost of failure is the principal
barrier to innovation.  Most of the things that we now think of today as very
successful and interesting at one point were thought of as ridiculous, and it
was only someone who was confident enough that the cost of failure was
outweighed by the potential benefit of success that allowed these things to come
into existence. From the archway to the railroad, to lighter-than-air travel -
every one of these at one point was pooh-poohed as probably a ridiculous notion,
certain never to catch on, and it was only the fact that someone was convinced
they could afford to fail that allowed these things to come into existence.

[/img]

Sauce

I tried something out today, with less success than I would have liked. That said, I hope somebody else tries something similar and proves me wrong.

We all know about the law of fives, and it certainly works (at least in terms of numbers), but I questioned whether or not (as supposed by RAW, the law of fives/myth of starbuck stuff in PD, Tim Leary, and a bunch of newagers, not to mention seemingly a lot of the writing in the BIP and most proponents of the "psychocultural UFO hypothesis") it really is as pervasive in everyday life and everyday decision making. So, based on a reference in a book, I went looking, trying to see how well I could filter stuff.

I read an offhand mention in Quantum Psychology of "MEBON" -- the offshoot of MUFON that investigates only UFO reports relating to bunny rabbits. This seemed to be a pretty neat idea, so I went to research them. After finding absolutely nothing (google has several pages of results for towns named Mebon, and wikipedia has mostly the same), I decided to get into the mindset of a hypothetical MEBON agent and try to correlate existing UFO reports with bunny rabbits.

Despite the notability policy and the seeming upsurge in active enforcement of it, Wikipedia still has a tonne of pages relating to individual UFO incidents, as well as fringe UFO groups and oddball alien types, very localized cryptids, &c. Despite this, I found no UFO incident reports that directly relate to rabbits, and only two wherein the aliens could be mistaken for rabbits (the two are Spring-Heeled Jack -- who jumps very high and has long ears -- and one of the early sightings of "little green men" -- wherein the little green men were said to have long floppy ears/antennae and occasionally crawl on all fours). The cryptid search was almost equally mundane: nearly every cryptid with rabbit features was that of a horned/antlered normal rabbit (in other words, variants on the 'jackalope' -- and therefore in fact simply a normal rabbit with a relatively common disease that causes horn-like protrusions), and in scandinavia there were a couple crossbreeds of birds and rabbits. There was one thing that seemed promising -- the "moon rabbit" from chinese mythology -- but there weren't any sightings, and it seemed simply to be part of a backstory. I may have had better luck if I looked on the list of mutie victims for rabbit farmers.

I had no better luck after moving to the UK government's now-released UFO investigations, which contained no references to civillian sightings of EBEs at all.

It seems that for certain things, it takes far more effort or creativity to impose a functional filter. Furthermore, despite several hours of frantic wikiing, I could find *no* discernible evidence of an invasion by bunnies from outer space, even with my special creativity level normally reserved for flamewars, trolling, and writing long essays on why nothing exists and we live in an anarchist utopia functionally destroyed by perpetually horny talking lizards from Eris with magic hypno powers.

This lack of ability on my part to filter things may actually be self-imposed subconsciously, or something. After all, it's quite easy for us to find fives and 23s everywhere (and any other number), captain clarks, references to qaballah or (for me) ancient sumer, but all of those filters were initially imposed without our explicit knowledge and intent to impose, and then only later used with our conscious and explicit intent. Perhaps filters work better if the first filtered results were found without the knowledge of the conscious creation of a filter?

If someone can try this kind of thing out and see what their results are, I'd be interested in seeing the outcome.

http://www.mindmeister.com/maps/show_public/11465415?password=kallisti
If anyone wants to contribute to my totally incomplete map of Operation Mindfuck, go ahead. Also feel free to fuck it up. The password is kallisti.

I have been reading The Invisibles, and I noticed that a lot of the people posting to the letters column were obviously discordians. Furthermore, a lot of them left in their full addresses. Anyone want to jake some discordians who still use the US Postal System circa 1995? It's only been a little over 10 years, so it's more likely to work than some of the addresses listed in the Principia and other discordian works from that era (California Dept of Furniture and Bedding?)

HIMEOBS is the most powerful terrorst group evar! --> http://mindfsck.blogspot.com/2008/10/terrorist-organization-claims.html http://mindfsck.blogspot.com/2008/10/leaked-himeobs-data.html

Obviously more bloggers need to warn The American People about This Threat To Humanity, preferably via the most subtly ridiculous yet overtly plausible means necessary. We also need to do this independently, with no (obvious) communication between us, since we are getting the messages separately from HIMEOBS members and traitors.

If we can have multiple entirely contradictory yet entirely plausable interpretations that would be nice too.

Yep.

http://www.jamendo.com/artist/stdin