Shopping Carts in Ravines

James Howard Kunstler’s 2004 TED talk “The tragedy of suburbia”
…AKA The End Of Suburbia in 20 minutes.

I had two ideas for books to write. 

Then I read this book, and only had one idea left. 

I strongly encourage you to get a copy and absorb it. 

(I bought it at a York U textbook store…
I really should’ve noted what course it was for!)

From the book Wholeness by Alex Gerber Jr.

DISCONNECTION

Reductionist, overspecialized education, information overload, and a host of other social, psychological, and economic factors have led to a society that is disconnected from wholeness.

Bombarded on all sides by “communication,” real connection that is fundamentally honest, open and forthright is hard to find.
Disconnectedness is exacerbated by the mass media, especially television and movies, which feature endless themes of violence, greed, murder, manipulation, deception, and domination. The fact that such behaviour exists in “real life” is no excuse for its relentless reinforcement.

At the same time, our desires for connection, certainty, and fulfillment are constantly stimulated by advertisements that combine state-of-the-art consumer psychology with sophisticated and seductive production techniques.

This disconnectedness has enormous social and psychological consequences. The philosopher Ivan Illich expressed the situation well: “So pervasive is the power of the institutions we have created that they shape not only our preferences, but actually our sense of possibilities.”

The theoretical physicist David Bohm (1917 - 1992) suggested an alternative:

Man’s general way of thinking of the totality, i.e., his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself.
If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, than that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken and without border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to mind in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.

…

Many people sense a void in their lives, an absence of purpose or meaning. Education, counseling, and meditation (for example) can address this situation. As people learn about wholeness and experience it directly, personal transformation occurs. A psychological/spiritual window opens and purpose appears or is rekindled.

As one group of students at an alternative high school learned about the holistic options that already exist for humanity’s success, in one hour their collective attitude transformed from lethargy, apathy, and cynicism to excitement, relief, and hope for the future.

Although hopelessness seems to engulf many people today, this outlook can change very quickly.

The energies associated with the direct experience of wholeness are transformative.

Okay, now this YouTube post is actually a serious one, on The North American Union / Security & Prosperity Partnership (NAU/SPP):

NAU/SPP information:
Stop the NAU (US)
Canada Free Press: NAU/SPP Articles
John Birch Society (US)
The Canadian Action Party

A protest is being planned for February 16th in Toronto (and hopefully other places as well). Facebook event listing for Feb 16th anti-NAU protest in Toronto

Have you ever read The Conscience of a Hacker, AKA The Hacker’s Manifesto?

I mean, for me, it’s such basic internet reading that it’s not even worth speaking of… but an awful lot of the folks on the ‘Net are much newer to it than I, despite our mutual mass assimilation.

There was a time, telneting around bit by bit, that just the act of finding, collecting and sharing text files like this had an unspeakably powerful feeling to it. We were on to something BIG, and every tiny step in any direction was a wild breakthrough simply because it was into another unknown.

Well, if you haven’t read it, here it is… and yes, this is required reading for comprehension of the digital age and the people who drive it. 21 years later.

The Conscience of a Hacker

by
+++The Mentor+++
Written January 8, 1986

Another one got caught today, it’s all over the papers. “Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal”, “Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering”…

Damn kids. They’re all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950’s technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?

I am a hacker, enter my world…

Mine is a world that begins with school… I’m smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me…

Damn underachiever. They’re all alike.

I’m in junior high or high school. I’ve listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. “No, Ms. Smith, I didn’t show my work. I did it in my head…”

Damn kid. Probably copied it. They’re all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it’s because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn’t like me… Or feels threatened by me.. Or thinks I’m a smart ass.. Or doesn’t like teaching and shouldn’t be here…

Damn kid. All he does is play games. They’re all alike.

And then it happened… a door opened to a world… rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought… a board is found. “This is it… this is where I belong…” I know everyone here… even if I’ve never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again… I know you all…

Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They’re all alike…

You bet your ass we’re all alike… we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak… the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We’ve been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike.

It’s not so much about an approach to computer network usage as it is an approach to life in general, and I’m greatly saddened to watch what was such a respectable information-seeking elite largely devolve into pure-money cybercrime.

The dude I grabbed the manifesto copy from is much more the type of thing I like to see having come out of all of our chaotic K-r4d “wild west” sort of Internet upbringing… his site clicks through to say, “This page is completely out of date. I’m at Stanford working on my PhD now.”

I like the definitions of the word hacker that are posted on his site, in particular the highlighted one:
“One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.”

It’s awfully nice to be able to be living in a time where my personal computer is a beautiful, friendly and tight UNIX implementation (it’s called a Mac), and all this Web 2.0 stuff is just fabulous, super-colourful and twice as melodic… but to be honest, I miss the feeling of simply being at a prompt, of feeling like I’m actually inside a computer.

Especially a remote one.

I’m not gonna embed the video, but here’s the link: Newt Gingrich gives speech in Second Life.

Kinda weird, kinda interesting, kinda really annoying waiting for the introduction to finish. My favourite part is how everyone is wearing political gear… the furry in the Obama shirt, the dude in the back with the anti-fascism protest sign, the girl with the large breasts and small shirt with a well-placed campaign button (I don’t recognize the person in the photo, though).

In case you’ve ever wondered where I got the handle ‘Orbz’ from (I bet it keeps you up at night, right?), here’s the explanation.
I can’t guarantee you will find this the least bit interesting, but the more time goes on, the more appropriate it seems.

I never wanted to be called Orbz. I mean that in two ways - I never actually came up with the particular four-letter combination, and I also never intended to have anybody actually use anything like it to refer to me to my face or in actual, real-world conversation with anyone.

Around ‘94/’95, I first started using the Internet via a 1200/2400 bps text-only dial-up connection, jumping from the highly-restricted (AOL-like) Toronto Freenet to the National Capital Freenet in Carleton, which granted access to the Lynx web browser, as well as to the gopher networks.

If you’ve never connected to another computer over a 1200 bps connection, let me try to convey the speed to you: I have memories of countless hours on these old computers literally watching screens of nothing but text load character by character. Completely literally, and I’m talking over a direct connection, not routed through a global network of servers like web traffic is.

Back then, the web wasn’t really any more meaningful or impressive than simply using gopher. Heck, back then, we still didn’t think anything of writing something like ‘94/’95. Crazy days, crazy days.

Anyway, someone on the NCF IRC (chat) told me about MUDs, the multi-user text-based games that were the predecessor to and which have largely been extinguished by MMOPRGs like World of Warcraft. You can look up any of these acronyms you want for yourself, I’m not gonna bother linking to stuff when you’ve got the same Google search box at the top of your screen as I do.

They told me how to get to a list of MUDs hosted on some gopher server, I think via MIT, and I chose one at random.

This MUD, a Swedish one named IgorMUD, is the game I’ve played more than any other video or computer game in my life. I’ve almost certainly spent more hours on it than every Mario game I’ve played put together. There is no other game that I played consistently (though to significantly varying degrees, from addictively to infrequently) for so many years… and occasionally flipping on a random NES to play Mario Bros 3 doesn’t compare at all to logging into this multi-user universe as the character whose stats, social network and, well, character I’ve been developing for so long.

I haven’t really played or even visitted more than a handful of times in years, though, and since the rise of MMORPGs I only ever find the place deserted. But hey, considering it was founded in 1990 (see IgorMUD’s early history), was rocking solid well into the 21st century, and is still online and running now, over a decade and a half later… not too shabby at all. I’m betting the big MUDMeets that used to happen around Europe and the States ain’t too common these days, though.

Anyway, the nerdy Swedish game isn’t the point, the point is that I had two characters there, the first named Bullet, later to be replaced by Orbitz.

I dunno where ‘Bullet’ came from, like I was 10 years old and made something up. Bullet With Butterfly Wings, perhaps.

‘Orbitz,’ on the other hand, was directly taken from the name of the Clearly Canadian soft drink which was famous, and infamous, for its gimmick of containing edible gelatinous balls (much softer than bubble tea tapioca) that were of equal density to the surrounding liquid and thus would stay suspended no matter where they happened to be in the bottle.

While most people reacted to these products with distrust, disgust and dismay, my mind was fucking blown.

For the first time in my life, I experienced a feeling that I’ve since come to encounter more and more, but the unprecedentedness of this experience when I had it makes it irreplaceable.

I was living in the future! This product, the ultimate in post-modern refreshment, really sold me on futurism.

And if anything really sums up post-modernism for me, I think this is it.

No one else bought them and Clearly Canadian discontinued the product line.

“Future’s over! Everybody go home.”

Orbitz became the name of a discount travel agent instead.

Well, I still played Igor sporting the name, and the people that I got to know from around the world in that game universe would tend to call me Orby or Orbz as we became closer friends.

From that, I started to use it around the Net as a handle / username. This just served as a screen name for a while, until I started joining rave and party networking sites and message boards.

Now, many people would get to know me online before actually meeting me in person, and when meeting in person I would clarify who I was and that they already knew me by giving them my online name in addition to my real one.

By no means was I intending for them to stick to calling me by it, but people would go on to introduce me to others by it. In order to distinguish me from others who shared my generic real name, Chris, I would be referred to in third-party conversations as Chris Orbz.

As well, people began directly calling me Orbz rather than Chris, most especially when calling out to me, trying to quickly get my attention.

When I started this blog, at first I just didn’t bother moving past anonymity, but eventually decided to throw up an e-mail address, and used my default username again. When I started with blogTO, I decided to just go with it and let myself finally accept the name that had grown onto me, Chris Orbz.

If the crazy Europeans who I used to run around slaying monsters with could see my business cards printed with this name and everyone around me referring to me by it, they’d piss their pants laughing, I’m sure of it. I really doubt Garlix or Muckypup would want their character names becoming integrated into their actual names, and those aren’t even close to being the weird ones.