I’m publishing this to clear out 2008. Like my 10 Ways article, this was written for Key 64 although it never got published.  With the ESP Bootcamp coming up, and ambient synchronicity going off the charts, I figured right now is a great time to re-examine the psychic potential of human beings.  This material is also relevant to the work/play I’m doing with Tim Boucher to develop MandalaOS and several other biocomputing systems for Omnivate LLC.  I’ve quietly started up a Brainsturbator Tumblr account—BRNSTRBTR—and my notes on Living Interfaces might be of interest to the curious future mutants among you. 

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Rebooted for 2008. A curated collection of documents, open questions, and new material for R. Buckminster Fuller’s original “World Game.”

This was one of the very first Brainsturbator articles I wrote: I’ve totalled it today and built something better.  I think now is a good time to be talking about Bucky’s vision of a World Game.  We have the technology to do this and a new administration could easily provide the funding.  I don’t think any of this material is Utopian or far out, but if you do, let me know why. 

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In the face of a global economic catastrophe, I’m not paying much attention to the news. “Our leaders” are lying like always. Sure, there’s Big Changes ahead—but scaremongering and cynicism are a waste of precious life.  I’m actually more optimistic these days than I’ve ever been, and it’s all because of Africa. The most innovative solutions and inspirational success stories I’ve found are coming from the Mother Continent, and I can’t imagine a better remedy for American Fear than this.  No matter what kind of nightmare collapse scenario you can imagine for the United States, Africa has already been there and back.

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Probably the biggest lesson I learned in 2008 is this: don’t make announcements about a project until that project is done. I apologize for the false alarms and empty hype, but finally, Brainsturbator is back.  This year I’ve moved across the country, started a business and lost my mind at least three times.  I’ve also been busy over-extending myself on dozens of projects, but I think that was a nescessary mistake.

Now I’m back and more focused than ever.  Brainsturbator is The One Project that’s worth sticking with, so this article is a summary of everything else I’ve been up to. 

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The first website I ever got lost in belonged to a rambling genius named Tony Smith, a cowboy from Georgia who’s physics theories were too radical for Cornell.  That kind of resume will definitely get a high school kid’s attention, and years later, one of the first Brainsturbator articles was a bunch of links to Tony’s site.  This is an expanded version, which quotes a lot of the material since the site has disappeared completely several times now.

Brainsturbator is here for the long haul, so I’m doing this for the good of humanity...kind of like our backup Paul Laffoley Gallery, which is also under re-construction.  (Meanwhile, check out Laffoley Archive. Like Laffoley, I honestly cannot understand a great deal of what Tony Smith is trying to tell me.  Like everyone else I consider a teacher, though, he provides so much to think about that even Not Getting It becomes an educational experience.  I hope you dig it.

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You’ve already noticed things look different.  Charles Blingus, the mastermind behind Back Brain Media, has been itching to re-design Brainsturbator for over a year now.  With some help from our friend Gomar, we’ve finally got a fully operational Brainsturbator 2.0 up and running.

I’m also working on a ton of new articles, and if you’re curious where things are headed, I did a rambling forum post outlining some of it.  Meanwhile, the most logical way to kick off the new design is a quick explanation of our new features.  It’s also an open call for user feedback, so if you’ve got some, please drop a comment here.

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I wrote this for Nick Pell at Key 64.  I’m very glad he asked me to write it, because it did me a lot of good to get my thoughts organized, and the response to this piece has been huge.  I’m backing it up here because I like my formatting more, plus I fixed a number of typos.

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“The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.”

--St. Augustine

I’ve been working on an article encompassing these themes, but I had a revelation.  If all I’m doing is re-organizing and synthesizing the work of other humans, why do I write so much?  Rather than burden you with my own meditations on “The Illusion of Control,” I’ve decided to abandon that illusion altogether for this piece.  I’m going to keep going for three more sentences and then I will step out of the way completely.

Everything assembled here is brainfood with a purpose: triggering shifts in perspective.  When you get used to the same perspective—or “stuck”—it can be alarming to feel yourself shifting, but that’s a good thing—that’s neurons waking up, that’s muscle tissue saying THANK YOU, that’s new hormone combinations in your bloodstream.  After all, even if your conscious “self” actually was in control, you’re only driving the car—you’re only manipulating something else.

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In the past century, human science has advanced beyond anyone’s wildest dreams: we’ve put humans into space, eliminated entire cities with a single bomb, industrialized the genocide process, poisoned our entire planet, and figured out how to stick over 5000 albums into a small plastic box.  We have peered billions of light years into the cosmos, we have unraveled the atom and discovered quantum weirdness, and even transcribed the human genome.  As a direct consequence of all this glittering achievement, scientists are understandably pretty cocky these days. However, I would like to pass anyone reading this the Silver Bullet to instantly deflate the ego of anyone who’s exponentially more intelligent than you are: just ask them to explain what time is.

Time is the single most universally constant of physical constants, and yet we barely know anything at all about it.  Here in 2007, we still don’t even have a working definition of what it is.

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