Pokemon

In religion it is monotheism vs polytheism; in theoretical physics it is holistic vs reductionist theory; in Hindi it is Brahma with multiple faces;

in 1999 it was Pokemon. You became- through an epic adventure- a god (Master Trainer) of Pokemon. How you manifested your will resides in the faces you chose and manifestations they take on. Through the challenges waged throughout the game- and personal customization-the player becomes a balanced and optimized super deity of one trainers team.

The ultimate challenge of Pokemon is forming a balanced team- which involved fully developing yourself as six different projections who themselves had a balanced four moves; with sixteen different types- split into both physical and special attacks. Mastering Pokemon means having one character with one move of each type in order to have an option against any attacker.

This system is a metaphor for the modern social being. You are essentially one person- but you comprise yourself of six different beings in your pantheon of social thought. Just as one no longer knows ones own opinion any more because mass media has created a schizoid reality in which facts and lies depend only on the background color of the TV program you watch. Instead of one opinion you incline yourself to know all opinions-including the comedic radicals and the dangerous plutocrats. Knowing and parroting opposing and reinforcing political and social rhetoric create only one balanced reality in which you know which of your inner characterizations of a political persona know a set of ground rules that correspond only to opposing rhetoric: much like Pokemon's battle system.

The human of the new millennium is a set of personae with different cartoon-ish features and preset maneuvers. You have a facebook? a blog? an indie label? Why not have six more? Create your own fans who can give you all the puppet feedback you can create? Hit up spam software and jack your popularity online into a server crash. You can also allow your inner monologue to spittle wildly back and forth between one self-serving update to another. Charmander used Ember attack! Tabbed browsing already enables one to check updates often enough to lose track of time and cycle through stumble upon loops for hours.

You are ultimately you, the trainer. You choose which content that you encounter to capture- and what to train and manifest stronger in your ultimate end game pantheon. What to learn-what to forget-even moves that don't come naturally. They are ultimately what compose you-but you are ultimately what controls them. Without Pokemon there would be no game. Without you there would be no Pokemon.

We are all made of "Pokemon". They give us our abilities in life- they are what make us progress through our ultimate self-actualization. But ultimately you as a conscious being must be responsible for defining who these manifestations are.

The TV Triangle

Why do we tolerate TV? Why is it a passive media-that still demands activity? Why do men and women, young and old, all have different approaches to TV? I will address those questions and more in today's post.

There are three types of TV: Educating, Entertaining, and Involving TV. Every show exists somewhere with correlation to this triangle, but appeals to a specific individual within those groups.

The first, Educating, is composed of the two parts: Non-profit networks like PBS and C-SPAN, and for-profit networks such as the National Geographic network, Animal Planet, and Discovery networks. Pels in the spectrum of these channels are more green than others, and broadcast networks will often cater to this point of the triangle with doctor shows, quiz shows, film, and art/indie culture.

Entertaining is the masculine tip of the triangle. It's pels are more often blue, and the networks it encompasses are the sports channels, Comedy Central, kids networks, movie networks, USA, and MTV channels. Broadcast networks air shows about cops, criminals, and rebels- as well as music, movies, and nightly comedy.

Involving is feminine. This tip has red pels, and includes the news networks, Food and HGTV networks, politics and soap operas. The broadcast shows are dramas: both familial and social. Also, reality programming and contests are popular more on broadcast networks than on any one cable network.

More important the the shows and networks (at least in the eyes of TV's content creators) is the commercial. A media defined by it's limitations. The parameters of a commercial are simple- it has to be short, and it has to make customers want to buy a product. Today's TV features the product in an unrealistic emotional connection with the consumer. When you buy the object, or moreover the brand, you also buy what the object represents via the fabricator's advertising campaign: the champion of which remains the TV commercial.

Educating TV is owned by banking, pharmaceuticals, and political advertisers. The emotional contingents are about prestige, normalcy, health, social awareness, and age. Entertaining TV is owned by deodorant, junk food, consumer electronic, other media, cars/trucks, and toy advertisers. Emotional contingents are about fun, attractiveness, sex, individuality, trickster or chase plots, and product lust. Involving TV is owned by weight loss, security, credit, make-up and cosmetics, and minivans. The emotional contingents are about belonging, romance, love, family, safety, an us-vs-them dynamic, responsibility, convenience, and self-improvement.

Ultimately, the shape of the TV triangle, and what it represents can easily be modeled onto other media. The internet functions as an appropriations media today, which allows it to include all historical media environments. In doing so it actively adopts the ground rules of the past, only to mutate and reject them.

The TV triangle is based on a geometric approach to psychology that I first notated about in December. Simply put: emotion+inspiration=communication which accounts for the internal and external forces at play in thought. All behavior is communication- and thinking is not so much talking to oneself as it is listening to ones self. The communicative thought remains in the mind as a form of feedback (similar to a mic and amp) which is re-synthesized only with new emotions and inspirations in recombinant thought.

But what defines an event as memorable isn't the event itself- so much as the other events that are forgotten in the repressive mundane. A movie seen once is more memorable than a commercial seen dozens of times- likewise a tour of another city is only memorable in the context of the boring routes of your hometown. The body of a memory exists only in it's survival over time.

Stay tuned for more pages of my psychologia. Next time: How do we forget?

The World Beyond Objects:

The information age has trended an impressive and never before experienced sensation of hope in society. Kurzweil predicts exponential returns and the idea of singularity (a point in the human timeline where AI takes control of the civilization of man). Books on technology deal in "good life problems" such as having too much information for decision making or having a net culture that over nurtures the ideals of estranged individuals. But youth culture is born unto the internet and will ultimately demand it to pervade into the world offline with a means of total integration. Because, although the TV generation fears a media of unfinished sentences, the internet generation dances primal around the hub of the new global village.

Unemployment is a success of humankind. Equality means less workers, because capital stays the same despite changes in discriminatory policy. Progress means less workers, because one microchip can now do the job of twenty men. And what will you do when the circuit is designed to do your job? Why bother to pay a professor's tuition when the children of the future have wikipedia in the palm of their hand? Why bother to pay a journalist when wikileaks breaks government and corporate scandals and press mad celebrities pageant and disservice themselves in front of a reality TV camera? Why allow corporations to exist, when the innovation of 3D printing this century, and online shopping last century, have already made the wasteful process of retail outmoded?

But no man is an island, and off-the-grid libertarians choose their lifestyles because off their own paranoia (which is the number one reason they aren't trustworthy). What, if not money, will motivate the masses will turn the wheel of progress?

But progress can end. Singularity, and the promise of a non-material life is a political ambition today, not a pipe dream of tomorrow. Time itself now seems only as a matter of relative distance from the first human thought and the last human thought, the stage of change where the unspoken drive behind civilization- the human ideation of omnipotence is realized.

Augmented reality (such as 3D cameras and projectors, and hologram overlays in image software) is the current reality. Now, changing the rules of the environment we live in is more akin to lucid dreaming than to a lifelong toil. We have planned, and plotted, and fantasized about Heaven, Eden, Nirvana, since our ancestral prototype form. We have designed it so that we can build it.

Is it Walden 2, the utopia of BF Skinner? The behavioralist society of communal childcare and scientific and artistic progress? Is it Brave New World? The sedative narco-consumerist culture of Aldous Huxley? Is it Marshall MacLuhan's Guttenburg galaxy? Where our media is our ecosystem and the others and the self become one? Are we the Borg? Star Trek's android-insectoid hive-minded army?

No. We'll be Americans. Before plastic, the atom bomb, the train, the city, the Spanish, or the Aztec. We'll return to the America of Sir. Thomas Moore. Once again a tribal society where your identity is determined by your tribal "role" and not the factory-specialization "job". Without distance, the need for delegation dies. And with it dies the indirect democracy of the last 44 regime changes. No longer is the elected official of the power party the single voice for an entire community. Open sourced legislation, starting with ordinances and budgets and eventually expanding to encompass the whole legal system, will close the gap between public opinion and governing reality.

The government, money, law enforcement, war, all dissolve in the post-material stew. Identity is the new commodity and decision-making is the means of merit. Uniqueness defines value, as more and more messages are consumed and created by more and more advanced users. Suddenly, no man is an island- but every man is a city with his own music scene, economy, public services, and infrastructure. Holding no opinion of his own, he instead holds the opinions of everyone known and balances judgments in a quantifiable measure of fairness. Like the schizophrenic, he is composed of multiple avatars that communicate with the avatars of other users until our actualized self becomes the fractured self wherein the personality behaves less as a single entity and more as a pantheon of separate, aggrandized selves.

In the post-material age psychology takes on new meaning, and the disorder becomes something to celebrate. Our abnormalities are normal as human mortality becomes weaker and weaker. Those we classify and quarantine are now accepted as elements of the self, i.e. your inner rapist, wristcutter, drug addict, or murderer- and the interplay of the extremes of the psyche form the balanced fantasy/anxiety complex of consciousness, only an ecosystem that can shift in terms of predator and prey balance depending on environmental variables.

How will the material world dissolve? First, the middle class will go extinct. Then technological proliferation will advance to the point where, what were once mere status symbols, become the second hand artifacts that drive the hungry masses to a point of digital independence from the materialist ruling class. Simply put: unless you are rich you will lose your job, and you will have to form an identity in order to participate in a community that will support you. If you are rich you will spend all your money on technology that is advancing too fast for you to keep current and your garbage and scrap technology will be used to form a new, non-value society that excludes you.