the great space race: or how i learned to stop worrying and counting my sins and just did what i wanted 'til i got to heaven

let's talk about my new job, the one where i am basically an assistant to the executive assistant in a company that deals with school portraits. no, we do not take school portraits, and no, we do not develop (or print out) pictures. again, we are the middlemen, basically handling transactions between the photographers and their clients.

(and on the first day i worked here, i heard rumors of photographers who were trying to work around us. no idea if that works or not.)

now i have my own cube. the only view i can hope to see, if i walk over to the kitchen windows, is the freeway. i irradiate my lunch and walk past the fax machines that are talking darkly to each other in the corner. at my desk, i know why the bad guys on star trek fly around in giant cubes saying, "resistance is futile."

after my anti-war-fever-weekend, i watched a documentary on iraq, and it pointed out something interesting: the headquarters of the cia is called the george bush center for intelligence. (that's senior, but they share the same genes.) strikes me as a kind of "derek zoolander center for children who can't read good and wanna learn to do other stuff good too." i decided to form my own center of intelligence. you're all invited.

...if you pass The Test.

if you've talked to me online at any point in the last few weeks, chances are you've been a part of my social experiment. i decided to turing test (or reverse turing test) people on my buddy list. a turing test is a test of a machine's capability to demonstrate intelligence. here's how it worked:

at the beginning of an i.m. conversation, unknown to the person talking to me (aka "the subject"), i would copy/paste their statements into a chatbot (www.alicebot.org or www.jabberwacky.com) and then copy/paste the bot's answers into my i.m. window. i acted merely as the middleman. as the blind. at first, the tests didn't go so well.

me: hello there
subject: hiii. what's up?
me: i am chatting with clients on the internet
subject: clients? you got a job?
me: people i talk to on the internet. of course i work, do you work buddy?
subject: not yet. but i thought you were still laid off
me: are you serious? umm. am i still laid off? i don't know whether or not i am laid off. i am a giant electronic brain.
subject: wtf. hello smarterchild
me: that was not very polite. hello there, are we still talking about hiii?
subject: you are too good at this
me: thanks i've never thought about it that way before. thanks for your constructive criticism, unknown person
subject: guess what
me: what
subject: i'm picking up my senior pictures tonight buttt since you are a giant electronic brain i guess you don't get one.
me: i could do it more if i wanted to. are all buttt since me a giant electronic brain you guess me do not get one?
subject: hahaha
me: do you laugh or cry more than other people?
subject: stop
me: stop what?
subject: being smarterchild
me: does that make you feel superior?
subject: no, it makes me feel weird
me: are you serious? in what way?
subject: like i'm not talking to a person. i hate talking to computers [hostility towards machines detected]
me: i honestly think you should sit down, take a stress pill, and calmly think things over.
subject: oh really
me: woe! for real

so the a.i. pretty much gave the game away pretty quickly. second try.

subject: howdy!
me: hello, nice to meet you. what's your name?
subject: my name is leonard [not the subject's real name] what's your name?
me: i'm always glad to make new friends, leonard what is your name.
subject: i'm happy for that, you moron [subject shows hostile tendencies towards machines]
me: i'm happiest at times like this
subject: figures
me: what were we talking about again?
subject: i'm not really sure
me: is there anything i can say to help you make up your mind?
subject: no
me: is there anything you wank [sic] to ask me?
subject: why are you talking like one of those stupid robot im things? [experiment has failed]
me: myself programmed me for it
me: haha i'm not imitating, i'm plugging your conversation into a bot.
me: i can't believe the bot said, "wank"

again, the subject found me out within a couple of minutes. i decided to switch from alice to jabberwacky, which is supposed to be a learning bot.

subject: whats up?
me: you're very annoying
subject: : (
me: i wish you would say something more intelligent
subject: sorry, im sick i cant help being retarded
me: so give me a clue
subject: im so confused
me: i know. sorry. i was pretending to be katie
subject: oh.
me: you were supposed to tell me something about yourself
subject: i hate the dentist
subject: the nasty stuff gets in my stomach and makes me feel like im gonna puke
subject: hows that
me: didn't you say you were god?
subject: josh what the heck
me: i don't know
subject: so i really wanted to watch either robin hood or the jungle book
subject: but my mom couldnt find either at the library isnt that sad
subject: like whenever im sick i feel like watching little kid movies
me: i don't know what you mean

and

subject: hey you
me: how are you?
subject: sick.
subject: how are you?
me: oh no! how are you sick?
subject: coughing up stuff, sore throat, my chest hurts, congestion... the usual
me: are you sad today?
subject: no, a little stressed, but not really sad. why do you ask?
me: i'm trying to imagine you. do you wear make-up?
subject: ... very rarely.
subject: why are you trying to imagine me?
me: to see how intelligent you are.
subject: ?
me: why do you say that?
subject: im confused
me: you are software. software is easily confused.
subject: ok..
me: what's the matter? don't like my long answers?

and

me: ah. what do you think about george w. bush?
subject: wtf? why?
subject: you know how i feel about him
me: tell me
subject: i think he's a waste of earth space
subject: he's a dumb ass
subject: cant speak no good english haha
subject: and is ugly
subject: why?
subject: um......u there????
me: i agree with you, baby.
subject: ........i think you're a classified weirdo, sweetheart!
subject: ha!
subject: JOSHUA!
me: maybe.
subject: maybe what?
me: maybe, you're real.
subject: i am real! duh! i dont think you're real today
me: if we talked long enough you would get to know the kind of person i am.. then you could judge for yourself.
subject: ok, 1. i know who you are. we;'ve been friends for quite some time...
2. i think you're talking to someone else and sending your conversation to my screename instead
3. crack kills
me: tell me you're talking about a cat right?

this teaches me several things.

1. some of my friends cannot prove that they are sentient beings.
2. jabberwacky is smarter than alice. it is more readily accepted as a human being when it acts like an asshole (albeit, accepted as a weird human being.)
3. jabberwacky can do a pretty fair impression of my when it acts like a jerk. either this says something about how my friends view me, or it says something profound about human nature. about how we expect humans to be hostile.

("got milk?
then you're human
and must be killed."
-futurama)

what i mean to say about all of this is that you should question everything, especially if you're talking to me.

("what sick, silly puppets
we are, and
what a gross stage we dance on.
what fun we have,
dancing around, not a care
in the world. not knowing that we are
nothing.
we are not what god intended."
-7)

the great space race! a title i stole from ray. though i'm not too sure about the "do whatever i want 'til i get to heaven" (explored further, farther down). the space race is a good turn of phrase. aren't we all just passengers? aren't we being crammed into pews in a desperate bid for numbers? (listen to some sermons - a huge focus is on mass salvation. listen to them talk about how many people gave their lives to jesus at the last rally. listen to the applause this elicits. are we missing the focus? what about salvation quality? (e.g. sincerity?) why this rabid buy-in-bulk campaign?) if we can't defeat the forces of evil through direct conflict, we'll breed like christian bunnies and force evil out through sheer numbers.

what keeps us in those pews? is it guilt? is it a form of social control to make us feel undeserving, make us less likely to assert our rights? (but...which rights?) after watching Derren Brown experiment with mind control, i'm starting to make this outrageous connection in my mind - that the guilt-inducing sermons we listen to are designed to occupy the higher parts of our brains so that our body is reacting almost on instinct. our instinct is to pay for things. i think they may be occupying our higher minds while they pass the collection plate.

(our pastor prefaces every tithe by saying, "if this is your first time at the vineyard*, there is no financial obligation to come to church. but if you call the vineyard home, we highly encourage your to give." this, of course, puts even more pressure on people to pay for church. also, "highly encourage" is about as close as pastors can get to saying "i command you.")

(if they really wanted to shake things up, they'd do what heinlein wrote in stranger in a strange land: pass around baskets full of money for people to take out of as they needed.)

(though in the book, this resulted in even more calculated guilt giving on the churchgoers, and more benefits for the church.)

no gods, no kings, only man. i've seen this quote on video games, i've seen it in history books about the french revolution, i'm interested in it. i don't denounce god, but i find it hard to believe in god when i'm in a cube, when the whole world ends in grey walls two feet from my face. it's much easier to believe in god when i'm living on the side of the road, waiting for something good to happen. which it did, always. it is easier for me to believe in god because of that than it is to believe in Good People.

what i take from no gods is the idea of worshiping nothing (and good luck with that). even athiests worship something. every one does. list the possibilities: food, money, clothes, cars, sex, god, etc. if there is a way to cut down our desire for stuff, to end our worship, to be happy with what we need and not with what we want, where would that leave us? it would mean that nothing was profane, that no guilt could be heaped on us unduly.

that last paragraph is only half-formed. i'm about to read twilight of the idols and the anti-christ, which will probably say everything i've been trying to work out (only better) because all knowledge is remembrance. i'm just remembering what nietzsche hasn't said to me yet.

(yes i realize that if nothing is profane, than neither is anything sacred.)

if we worship/desire nothing, i get the vague idea that we reach a limited anarchy. if we hold nothing sacred, then we have nothing to protect or envy. if we hold nothing profane, we have nothing to despise or attack. without property, we have very little use for laws. without laws, we have very little need for government. this is currently just a pipe dream (if i can't believe in good people, how can i believe in anarchy?) (the cynical answer to that is i can believe in guns.)

anyone can live an anarchist lifestyle quite easily - all they have to do is avoid other people at all times. but how does someone build an anarchist society? (as a thought experiment - this may very well be impossible in actual practice.) if this society is like the old frontier settlers (minus, hypothetically, native inhabitants), then people live in self-sustaining farms or farm communities. the small number of people reduces the amount of conflict (and therefore, laws, and therefore governments).

unfortunately for this, we have cities, where massive amounts of people interact, and there's not much to do about that. a person can still live anarchically within an established society, by living without property. this doesn't make them exempt from laws, but it removes them from almost all interaction with these laws, which amounts to almost the same thing.




yes, these are practicing anarchists.

you sleep where you want, you eat anything. you lose weight and don't work. the thrill of exploring abandoned buildings is yours every day. nobody looks at you. nobody bothers you. what threat is jail to a man who welcomes any warm meals and a bed? i'm trying not to sound like a total luddite. as much as i enjoy suburban slumming, i could live inside the internet; talk to everyone i know, publish myself, order my food, pay my bills. if only i could go to work through the internet, i'd never move again.

kaczynski talks about technology and how it creates false goals for man: instead of needing to pursue fulfilling goals like hunting for food or building lodging, man now creates goals to stuff down that unfulfilled feeling: internet dating and stock trading. and that's why he built himself a cabin and started blowing people up - new goals. bomb building as hobby.

i've often said that i fear a machine upsrising more than a zombie apocalypse. x-files doesn't help. the day i said that, my netflix disc contained an episode about machines, a typically cyberparanoid social warning by william gibson. in it, mulder presses his thumb to a doorknob and the a.i. scans it. several months ago, while we were hitchhiking, jon had the same paranoia - that someone is scanning our thumbprints when we press the pedestrian signal buttons at crosswalks.

i believe that the greatest period of human existence was the late 80s and early 90s (yeah, when i was born). when punk was at its peak. when the cold war looked its darkest and then suddenly burst. when a guy who didn't have a computer created a new genre of sci-fi based entirely on computers. when hackers were the good guys and telecoms were bad guys and feds were raiding video game companies looking for 14-year-old threats to national security. when the internet was born.

the cyberpunk attitude reigned. everyone was so disgusted with all of the pretty electronic toys they'd spent so long saving up for. now what? now there are no more punk bands. now cyberpunk is gone, replaced with "post-cyberpunk." who has ever written punk poetry?

(kearny and baraka, i'm jealous of your black militancy. it's like i'm standing in a pool of streetlight and your poetry is the rest of the world around me.)

i received the best compliment ever:

"every time i read your blog, i get all revved up to change my tiny corner of the world.

but then i get distracted by sex and forget."

i read in cryptonomicon that churches used to be (a long time ago) the retail outlet for the industry of philosophy. that pastors were only required to stand before an audience and say one thought-provoking thing maybe once or twice a week. and now we can't even stay awake during a sermon. the retail of philosophy, i half-fear, has fallen to the blog.

next to read: twilight of the idols and the anti-christ by nietzsche
the kingdom of god is within you by tolstoy

*"if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight."