I have no clue what you are talking about

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This is a short (and bit weird) morsel on not understanding a clue anymore, to have the feeling to encounter a completely foreign world.

I happened to me several times last months, that I read or meet something/somebody and I really don’t have a clue what they are talking about.

  • A friend shares with me her business plan for a new app, and I have no clue what it is about, even not after having (tried to) read the associated white paper
  • The book “What Algorithms Want” by Ed Finn
  • The “God is in the Machine” post by Carl Miller
  • The 1000 dimensions of algorithms in James Bridle’s “New Dark Age”
  • Eddie Harran’s (aka Dr.Time) Temporal Labs, Research lab investigating time’s impact on humanity

From the “God in the machine” post:

We sat there, looking at the computer, his creation laid out in multi-coloured type. “This is all to do with complexity,” he said contemplatively. “Complexity of input. Complexity of analysis. Complexity of how outputs are combined, structured and used.” 

 “Truth is dead,” he sighed. “There is only output.”

 After some 1-1 conversations with some of the authors, it looks like I missed a whole generation of aesthetic language that is only found in apps, games, and Netflix-ish series like Black Mirror, Mr. Robot, Tangerine, Ratter, and Skam.

black mirror

Black Mirror – Season 4 – 2017

It feels like digital incest. Trying to hide from your virtual self. A virtual loop of digital identities and personalities. Not knowing what is real and what is fake or sliced/looped faith.

It also makes me think of this extract from Bill Gates’ review of Capitalism without Capital:

It took time for the investment world to embrace companies built on intangible assets. When we were preparing to take Microsoft public in 1986, I felt like I was explaining something completely foreign to people. Our pitch involved a different way of looking at assets than our option holders were used to. They couldn’t imagine what returns we would generate over the long term.

It feels like I cannot imagine what these new aesthetics can mean on the long term, and how they are already influencing now Generations X, Y, and Z.

I am missing the @swardley’s situational awareness map, about movement and position. Where is the anchor? What is edge and what is commodity?

Visit Roger Raveel museum 28 Sep 2018

If you are still in for it, here are two soundscapes of my visit to the Roger Raveel Museum;

Still with me? Where am I? What’s next? Where is this going? How fast? How? When? With whom? Who is cheating? Who’s not?

Are we entering a digital matrix? Where real and surreal blur into an new perception?

Tell me if your understand.

Are we all lost?

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