DIM Human

DIM Human AS VARIANT

Human = ARRAY( 6.66^9, 6.66^9, 1)

^^^You can do better than this ^^^ 

-10pts... 

an array to hold the number of the beast is (57707,57707,1)

      ***

To begin with, let me say this: 

There is NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH.

I was asked a question last night, a good question. The question revolved around my attitude towards all things "internet" based. To answer the question I was asked, answer it in full truth, requires I set down the foundation thought which established the environment and the judgment parameters wherein the answer exists.

I, being old and cynical, do not trust ANYTHING that involves something that claims to be free. To say "a beautiful sunset is free" I'll buy into... the sunset is a fact of nature, it will happen with or without someone watching to bestow the title of beauty on the colors in the sky. No human expended any tiny fraction of life‑energy to create a sunset. But when a massive technology that has for decades fully occupied a significant fraction of mankind's better brains and a significant chunk of natural resources is presented to me as "free" my first thought is to say "BULLSHIT."

What is this massive new thing which claims to be free? What does it do? It moves information point to point, a magnificent system of communication and organization unparalleled in human history. It has made possible the entire content of the human knowledge base available anywhere to anyone. A magnificent accomplishment of technology.

Still though, that technology does not and did not exist in nature. Energy, the life energy of human beings, was used to create it, and that energy MUST be returned to its' source in some manner. A minor portion of that technology, the structure of the core format, the seed stock if you will, was created by the military and the energy spent creating that critical and yet minor portion is explained. But the remainder evolved into being from that government sponsored beginning, and it is that remainder where exists a vast discrepancy between what was expended and any visible way or means of balancing the expenditure.

Since the expenditures involved in creating the technology tapped from the resources of every society of humanity it would seem reasonable to examine the situation at the macroscopic level, the level of the global society of humanity. Of course when considering the flow of life energy on such a scale the value parameters involved must be adjusted to fit the scope of the exchange, it isn’t practical to measure the lake with a teacup.

If the exchange were say me walking into the local quick‑rip store for a cup of coffee and a pack of smokes the value system is rather straight forward: money. I give them money, they feed my addictions. Fair enough. But when the exchange is between the sum of mankind's societies and, in theory, every individual whose self definition creates those societies the exchange is a great deal more complicated. The concept of "money" never has and never will fully encompass what is considered of value by that creature called "society."

Money is part of the equation of course, but far from the total exchange involved, there are other and larger things in play. At full resolution money might well be the lesser portion since money ultimately resolves as a thing of value to individuals, singly or as subsets of the full society, but the creature called "society" is larger than the sum of its’ parts and has needs which cannot be answered with money (doubt this? look at the track record of the "liberal" politicians throwing money at social problems and changing nothing!).

If money, the tokens and talismans of commerce, cannot bring the exchange to balance then what can? What values are traded by creatures of such scope as a Society in such transactions? For thirty years the societies of the world have committed very large expenditures of  available brain power to the creation of the internet and all the associated offshoots. That energy could have been committed elsewhere, from renewable energy resources to medical science to restoring the environmental loading on Planet Earth to sustainable levels without the need to provide such levels of communication to every individual who would benefit by them. What was hoped for, what value is demand in return to balance the energy expended?

Society… ours, theirs, any… is in fact a Collective Entity, a CE, whose existence is established by a common template of thought used by its’ component members as a portion of their self definition. The creature ce-Society is larger than the sum of its’ members by reason of its’ competition for survival against other collective entities of the same sort, those who barter a different vocabulary and mode of thought as the value exchanged with the individuals within who host its’ life as a portion of their own. This is a competition in more than name, if enough individuals choose to leave any one definition in favor of another the original collective entity essentially dies, starves to death for lack of host individuals.

The energy expenditure powering the meteoric rise of the internet is easily understood from within the perspective of any daughter entity of CE‑Society: ce‑American, ce‑Japanese, ce‑Russian etc. et al, all of those entities who reside on the scale of a “society.” Once these entities perceived the tiniest hints of even the possibility of such communication it was obvious: establish your presence or be prepared to suddenly evaporate into history should one of the competing collectives avail themselves of it to usurp your host base and arrange for your destruction.

The rise of the internet was driven by the most primal need of any social structure considered as a singular entity constructed of a collective thought: the need to survive. For such an entity the speed of its’ life is equal to the speed of communication between its’ host individuals, and equally so is the speed with which it can respond to a threat or die. Theirs is no easy existence, the life experience of any collective entity is every bit as raw and primal as found in any jungle, the same law applies.

I, as an individual, predate the internet. Neither it, nor any but the crudest forms of the foundations technologies involved with it, existed when I was a child. I remember radios where there was a strangely clear new second band called FM and they boasted of how many transistors were used as part of the sales pitch. I accidentally ended up in possession of the best radio in my clan of kids, discovered what it was like to have someone eyeball a possession with envy in their eyes: mine had a good size speaker, boasted sixteen transistors and could listen to perhaps four or five stations on the FM band. It was made by an all but unknown Japanese company called Sony.

Things have changed a great deal since then, the largest of which have been the social changes associated with the essential awakening of the collective entities as creatures enabled into awareness by the emergence of the technologies of communication. It is not the same world it was, it is fundamentally different. To set a perspective? I once observed that you could cross the divide between my grandfather and my father’s generation in a canoe, that between my father and I you’d want a clipper ship… but the divide between myself and my son would demand something with generational life support and capable of trans-warp speeds.

Such would be the environment where landed my friend’s question: “Why is it you only speak of chat rooms and blogs when you speak of any online experience?” The answer is simple, considered in the full environment. I only speak of those experiences which were shared with individual human beings: the beautiful women who befriended me when I wandered into a self supporting psych experiment, the retired professor who did not know how to live without teaching and so conducted a classroom at range from her blog, the thinkers and the dreamers, the poets and the artists. Human beings.

I do not speak of the other things on the internet because I do not indulge in them, I am not willing to pay the ultimate price they demand. I have no taste to subject myself to the various collective entities busily, nay, frantically attempting to secure their own existence by engineering the existences of their host individuals: the fusion level peer pressure to assure conformance being conducted in parallel with the efforts of ce-Education to the same intent; the blood and guts and gore of entertainments whose only real function is a veiled threat of the consequences of resistance; the various online “games” designed to sublimate and satiate the heat of emotions compressed to the point of ignition; the endless drone and hum of the hive awakening.

No, I have no taste for such as that. I would rather die as I’ve lived, a free individual, than continue on in such an existence as that. To me engaging with the full spectrum of what is found on the internet is like watching a human soul chained in a puddle of the stinking primordial goo whence originated our single cell ancestors and told to assemble itself a body. You get right down to it? It’s gross.

I’ve said it before elsewhere, I’ll say it again here: why oh why when the first rumors of a spider big enough to trap the entire world in her web to drain away the life blood of humanity for a meal did the world’s military not cry foul and let fly the birds of war, launch every strike fighter at their disposal with orders to hunt the bitch into extinction, find her and cook her where she sat with tactical nuke authorized if napalm and thermite isn’t hot enough? Why? 

And the answer to that is of course it was the military mindset got the whole damn mess started trying to make sure they would be able to communicate in the event the much slower thinking collective entities of their day called upon them to make war upon each other. A rather full circle fuck up in my opinion.

(these thoughts will eventually migrate into the third reality of man series, but for now I'm just gonna toss 'em out there)