Journal aphor's Journal: Preparing for The Matrix
I am a Solaris admin by trade, whic leads me to peek at what the market chatter has to say about SUNW. I'm concerned about Bill Joy leaving Sun. He's a really smart guy, and that's never a good sign for a company. That makes me wonder, looking on the bright side of things, where Bill Joy is going next. That leads me to this old Wired article: Why the Future Doesn't Need Us by Bill.
Just in case you're trying to stay a little focused (even though I can't), I'll try to spare you the RTFA. The article is the premise behind The Matrix and the Animatrix, etc... Moving right along: you must understand why you are here--why you are reading this text. The future is already happening, the causes of what will be are right now churning actual new things from the fog of possibilities.
Open Response To Bill Joy:
I can remember having the moment of the first matrix episode when I was eight or so. I reasoned this: am I a special chosen being with an important and unique destiny? If yes, then I only need to choose. If no, then my choices have no consequences. However my choices always have consequences however small they may be. Sometimes my choices have greater consequences. I get into trouble when I underestimate the consequences of my choices. I only learn bitter lessons when I overestimate the consequences of my actions. To err on the side of caution, I always believe my choices have more consequece than I can appreciate at the time I must choose. Therefore, I must act as if I am the chosen one whether I am or not. I must also accept that not every choice will be as important as another, whether I am the chosen one or not.
I practice my art in computers. Life is often too messy for me to experiment cleanly with my principles. It is harder to learn from failure if you have to do without a backup, RCS, or undo/redo log. Computers provide a slightly more concrete than imagination, but slightly less concrete than reality hypothetical universe through which I can learn to better understand the burden of authenticity. Authenticity and authorship require literacy.The problem is that while we have technological ears and toungues, we lack sophisticated language or even the ability to understand such a language. There is no metaverse, perception is reality, and "virtual reality" is no refuge from the cold truth that is always dawning upon us all. We don't know what the hell we are doing. It's something that Heidegger yammered out and nobody understood: it's different being with machines . I can take some ideas, and put them in a box, and let them mix it up, but having watched that happen, I haven't really understood the big picture. I am changed by it. I have screwed up the experimenter. More than anything else, I have blinded myself to the difference between my ideas in the box and those ideas leaking out of the box mutated by the experience.
It's really best said by Ray Bradbury in his younger years: The Flying Machine . The parable puts us in both shoes: first the inventor, and then the Emperor who tries to contain the consequeces of the inventor's creation. In the end, flying machines are trite, and the Great Wall of China fell to the popular form of the Emperor's conservatism: Chinese communism. Flying machines did render the wall obsolete, but the Emperor failed to see that the man's invention was in fact a cute little diorama of what was going on in the bigger picture. The lesson is that teleology has only hypothetical value, and that the hypothetical perspective can actually impair our judgement.
Maybe other people have said it better, but I haven't reflected on a better parable for this point. I guess there are innumerable little Zen stories that hammer the point home one little peck at a time. The key is, you want to create, and you want to understand and enjoy what you are doing. The trick is to stay connected with your world while still exercising judgement: or rather just remain constantly aware of how you are connected while you go about your mundane and great choices.
At this point I am spent, and by myself I can only think myself in circles.
All I can say is that if you truly feel "unhinged from the Sun" (as Nietzsche put it), I can tell you what you can do to get what you want, but it isn't going to be the kind of comfort you probably expect. I assure you this, I wish we all could get past this grief and get on with preparing for the storm. There's always one coming. It's a blessing to smell it before you get caught in it. Enjoy it.
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