2014 starts here

You know that lecture that gave me pause in the last post?

Turns out it's gonna give me pause for a long, long time to come. So without further ado [skip to 6:40], get prepared to be politically, morally and rhetorically floored. In all the good ways.

Songs for the end of the world

According to sources, the world will end tomorrow. This being quite a pivotal even for us all, I figured we could all sit down and discuss the important things. Such as, say, the soundtracks the end of our particular lifeworlds might have.

I am going to share with you - right now, before it all ends - the four soundtracks of the end of all my things. Along with a short motivational string of words, to put the end times in context. Are you ready?

Here goes.


One might think the passing of a world is a big, sorrowful thing. But, in the words of Silver Mt Zion:
Let's have a parade
It's been so long since we had a parade, so let's have a parade!
Let's invite all our friends
And all our friends' friends!
Let's promenade down the boulevards with terrific pride and light in our eyes
Twelve feet tall and staggering
Sick with joy with the angels there and light in our eyes
Brothers and sisters, hope still waits in the wings like a bitter spinster
Impatient, lonely and shivering, waiting to build her glorious fires
It's because of our plans man; our beautiful ridiculous plans
Let's launch them like careening jet planes
Let's crash all our planes in the river
Let's build strange and radiant machines at this Jericho waiting to fall

It is a big thing, indeed. So let's go out with a parade. The last thing we will se is a multitude of smiles reflected in each others eyes.


I did mention that smile, didn't I?



Sit down, friend. You are among your peers. You, me and everyone we know. The world might end tomorrow, but there's nowhere else I'd rather be than right here, right now.


And, yes, I know. The very essence of the world ending is that we won't be here tomorrow, and that some sort of transition between now and then will be required. So I propose we make it in style - 747 style. The one last careening jet plane to close off the parade.

Smile, friends. The world is over. And now, it's time to do something else. -

The right answer, quick!

One of the allures of Twitter is all of the random conversations you happen to find yourself in. Not only those you partake of, but also those that happens around you, and that you help to create by being part of the inevitable process of subtweeting, inspiring and thought provoking. You never really know what you might be thinking in the next couple of minutes.

Recently, I happened upon this tweet. I say happened, because it just happened. And I've been thinking about it ever since.

A quick response team of philosophers and poets. What would that look like? What would they be quick to respond to?

And then I pondered it some more, and asked: why isn't there one?

There certainly is a wide range of everyday and extraordinary situations where there's a desperate need for philosophy and poetry. Where the magic, meaning and reason of the world seem to have disappeared, and where the services of that imaginary quick response team would be more than needed.

I dare say essential.

This merits further thinking.

Snow feelings

There are certain feelings that are very hard to translate or explain to someone who has never felt them. Such as the feeling that there's a snowfall just about to begin or in progress. It's a very specific feeling, and thus very hard to explain to those who don't live in snowy regions and for that reason isn't attuned to the snowier feelings.

I'm feeling it right now, that sense of half-expecting, half taking for granted that there will be snow when I look out the window. Even if I know that there probably won't be snow in another couple of weeks time.

This feeling always happens this time of year. Snow or no snow.

Life is full of these kinds of feelings. Moods. Sensations. They are very hard to explain or convey, yet very present in the lives and loves of just about everyone. And every attempt to describe them will undoubtedly fall short in some way.

This is not a reason for not trying. On the contrary, it is all the more reason for trying that much harder. To walk that extra discursive mile and explain what it is to have snow feelings.

There's no need to limit our range of discursively available feelings, moods, sentiments to those who happen to have words attached to them. There's not that many of them, after all. And there's too many other feelings going around and about being relevant to shove them off into the category of "ambivalent" or "other".

The world is made of language. So let's expand our world, shall we?

Share me

During my virtual rambling adventures, I often meet new people. Such as you. And somehow, my seemingly random rantings seem to make somewhat of an impression on these new people. A good one, to boot. Sometimes, they even tell me about it, and occasionally they ask what they can do to help me do more of what I do.

I always tell these kind souls the same two things:

Thank you, and share.

Retweet it, post it on the Facebook, Digg it, tell a friend about it - whatever it is that you do when you tell someone about something awesome, do that.

That helps me more than one would think. And it just might make the same impression on your sharees as it did on you.

Thank you again.

Let's friendzone!

There are people in our lives who we talk to. Who we really don't need to talk to. Who we can poke and prod without having a particular reason for doing so. Who know our faces (or avatars) and will wave at us if they see us from a distance. Who just hang around in our social vicinity and shares their random thoughts and impressions with us. Who have accepted us into their lives and like what they've done.

People who, for a variety of reasons, have Friend Zoned us.

There is somewhat of a movement among young confused males to turn the phrase "friend zone" into something pejorative, into something that unthankful females do to nice guys. Which is kind of a shame, for two reasons. The first being that they are wrong, and the second that it's way to useful a term to be wasted on resentful confusion.

Think about it - what other term do we have for people who just exist in a positive way in our general vicinity?

There's somewhat of a shortage of words when it comes to these kinds of things. And here we have a couple of words that's ready to be used, and which furthermore don't need that much of an explanation in order to convey that sense of general friendly coexistence we all know and need.

It would be a waste indeed to let it sink into misuse. So let's go ahead and start using it. Just like that.

The love, the situation, the solution

Friends! Enemies! Friends of friends! Enemies of enemies! A Situation has arisen, and your help is needed!

You see, there are two people who are in love. And they make those generic pop songs you hear on the radio pale in comparison. We're talking the real deal here, bona fide true love, straight out of the dictionary of things that are hard to find. If love ever moved mountains, this is what it looks like.

The situation here is that the two lovers are just about as far from each other as it is possible to be on this planet. One is here in Sweden, which is far away to begin with. The other is down in Australia, which (somehow) is even further away.

This is not the way true lovers are supposed to be.

It gets worse, though. It turns out both of them are struggling hard just to make ends meet, and that the economic reality is that love does not move people. Whatever the mountains may have to say about it.

But. There is hope. There is after all you and me. And there is this book they are selling in order to finance the epic journey of love that we all know needs to happen.

So I urge you to buy it. In the name of love.

You can also follow these two lovebirds on Twitter, in order to see how it turns out. Just click here and/or here and you are good to go.

Let's hope they will be good to go too.

Soon.

Sext: My feminist material dialectics brings the boys to the yard

Consider the sext:.

You may already know what sext is. It is - to use this very Wikipedian word - a portmanteau of sex and text, and is used to denote the activity of being very explicit in various forms of social media. Preferably to people one knows, and that one knows approve of such things.

That this happens isn't really that big of a deal. People use the new form of media to talk to each other, and when people talk to each other, sex is bound to become a topic.

This is a given.

Then we have the sext:. Which is a genre all of its own, found primarily on Twitter. It takes the form of tweets that start with the opening "sext:", and then proceeds with what might or might not be a sext proper.

Let me show you some examples of what this might look like.

sext: lets embrace the incompleteness of the moment, of our lives and appreciate our lack of knowledge and mastery over ourselves/the world
— SUBTWEETING GOAT (@hippodamos) May 3, 2012

sext: they told me that this phone line isn't hooked up to anything anymore but it feels like you're still there. hello, maybe. I miss you.
— kimmy (@aRealLiveGhost) April 27, 2012

sext: i spend my evenings reading tvtropes for the sole purpose of getting mad at it. you think my brain is beautiful. we die of cancer.
— Rick Sanjortsum (@jorticulture) May 3, 2012

Sext: Monoliths begin dotting the landscape, their shape different depending on the viewer. You're laughing and I'm perplexed.
— creeping horror (@redfivetwo) May 3, 2012

Sext: the fallout looks like snow. we make ash angels as our skin rots away. Goodnight
— avril lavigne(@Sloth_Bhutto) May 2, 2012

sext: lateral memories of us, talking; a smile; a gesture; a nod; a sudden laughter as we realize we're in love.
— Johanna Drott (@sargoth) May 3, 2012

You may notice that the sex part isn't really that present. It might be, but it is not the point. Rather, it is the inferred relation between sender and reciever that makes the sext: what it is: a fragment, taken out of context. A piece of intimate - or not so intimate - conversation, giving hints and clues about the persons involved in the exchange. A piece of ecorelative plant life, transplanted to right where we are sitting now.

We don't know the people involved. All we know is what can be inferred from the fragment at hand, - but what can be inferred is a great deal indeed.

The reason there is a post about this, is because I absolutely love the infoecological density of the genre. First off, one need to know about sexts - a topic worthy a lengthy discussion in itself. Then there is the question of who is sending that message to who. What are they doing, thinking? What is what we see a response to? What are the discursive and material conditions for the production of the sext that we have in front of our eyes? -

What's going on in the implied fictional universe of the sexted: narrative? Why is that message?

And why is is a sext?

Getting to know

Love makes you do strange things. One of them is that you lower your boundaries. Things that one wouldn't normally do become very doable indeed, and things one would never tell anyone else are suddenly open for deep discussions.  Being in love is truly an eye-opening experience.

You may recognize this from your own experience.

One of the boundaries that suddenly gets lowered is the infoecological one. Before love happened, you walked about in your own context and vaguely knew about things outside of it. After, you find yourself listening to new music, reading new texts, visiting new places and on the whole doing the strangest new things. Things you really wouldn't have imagined doing in that state of things before love struck, but started doing as a result of getting to know the other.

Suddenly, you find yourself interested in all manner of interesting situations. I'm sure you can think back to loves past and find examples of these.

The thing is, of course, that you really don't need to be in love to learn new things and add new loci to your internal context. It's a very effective motivator, to be sure, but it's not necessary by any means.

We could all do with a bit less boundaries in our lives, I think. And the infoecological ones are the easiest to lower. The rest follows, once you get going.

Have fun!

Love 1/0

I fell in love on Twitter. I fell into someone's words, and I would have kept falling if I didn't eventually hit the ground.

I fell in love on Twitter. With someone who could talk - sweet, sweet talk - all night, about everything. All day, all night, all ways - and always with the appropriate links to follow. Funny, quirky, quick, fantastic -

I fell in love on Twitter. With someone I knew nothing about, except for the constant stream of awesome that came into my timeline.

I fell in love on Twitter. With someone's good side.

Nothing prepared me for the context. All those things that really doesn't translate into the 140, no matter how many of them you read or write.

But how many we wrote! How many we read! And how many we retweeted! We never made love, but oh the love we made between the lines!

I still keep some of them around, on sheets of unmade, undone love.

You see, I fell in love on Twitter. With someone I knew everything about. With someone I once shared a life with, but also parted ways with - with someone it seems I never really knew when we were together.

I fell in love on Twitter. With my ex. And the love we shared there was stronger than any we had shared in our previous lives.

Everything that falls, must eventually hit the ground. We fell twice. Only this time, we also hit the ground together.

In that awkward moment, when we both thought - "it's you".

The strangest thing is that I might have kept falling. Might. If I only knew then. If we only knew then. -

Found in transit

A presence in my life sent me a book some time back. Unfortunately, it got lost in transit - or is still on its way here, on some extravagant detour through the postal services of the world.

But, like Lacan said - a letter always reaches its destination.

By which he meant that the past will always catch up to you, like a letter sent from the past. It doesn't really matter what you have done in this past of yours. Any past will be your past, and when you think back upon it - wham! The mailman rings.

Twice, rumor has it.

While the book tried to make its way from there to here, we hyped, bantered and generally built up a lot of expectations about it. I didn't know at the time what book it was, so every day when the mail arrived was a time of excitement. For both of us. Is today the day when the Book will arrive?

In parallel to this, something else happened. A letter started to arrive, and to rewrite the past as it did so. And the closer it came, the more I realized that this was very much a call for action. Either I let it catch up with me and knock me out flat, or I do something about it.

I'm not sure how that will turn out, as I'm constantly swinging between being knocked out and doing things. But somehow, these two things in transit comingled. Talked to, at and with each other. And even more somehow, the book not yet here came to symbolize that better future that lies at the end of the tunnel. And the longer it took to arrive, the stronger the symbolism.

It helped.

At this point, we have both more or less given up hope on the Book getting here. Which is rather a shame, because it is the perfect book for me. Not to read, necessarily, but as a platonic idea of what kind of book I would/should have around.

It still makes me smile. And it makes me hope for that better future that has yet to happen.

Thank you.

A hymn to the Horse

The biggest promise of the Horse is that it will never love us back.

It will astound us, confuse us, make us laugh, sing, hug a nearby creature or just make us pause - but It will not love us back.

In fact, it will never even acknowledge our presence, our thoughts or needs. It will just Be, in stoic virtual bursts of fragmentary randomness. And whatever we happen to be, think or do - It will just continue to Be.

It will move our minds and mountains, but It will not care about them. And this is the greatest thing the Horse will ever do for us.

It may come as somewhat of a surprise that an anonymous twitter account gives rise to such words and feelings. And a quick reading of Its discourse will probably only yield a slight increase of the confusion felt. What in the name of making sense is It saying?

Well, nothing, really. That's kind of the point.

But It will make some sort of sense, anyway. And by forcing our ever so habituated minds to come to their own conclusions, we suddenly get a glimpse of ourselves. It's not about what It says, but rather about what we say in the aftermath of Its saying it.

And there are a lot of us out there, talking about the Horse. Not to expound Its meaning, but rather to bypass it into each other's. Or, sometimes, just talk Horse, just to see what might come out of it - leaps of lateral thinking, unexpected associations or conversational forks that end up being as meaningful as any philosophical treatise on virtual semiotics will ever be.

Many a discussion has ended with at least one of the participants discovering that they need to ponder their lives in more depth than they thought they had.

Now, the Horse won't care about us. Our joy, laughter, tears, revelations or sudden lapses into despondency - it's all the same to the Horse. It will just continue on Its merry way, doing whatever It is doing for whatever reason It might have.

And this is Its biggest promise to us. To never love us back, but to continue in equine indifference.

May you carry the Horse with you. But may the Horse never be with you.

To love a cyborg

We are all cyborgs.

This may come as somewhat of a surprise. You would think this is one of those things you notice as you walk around in the world, feeling all soft and biological. This sudden change from non-cyborg to cyborg should have had some sort of visible sign, shouldn't it? It's not like these things happen over night, right?

Right?

Just as Rome wasn't built in a day, so our cyborghood wasn't built overnight. It was a process that took time, effort and many sleepless nights to accomplish. And many more sleepless morning, where many hard working persons struggle out of bed and back to the never ending work of building the world we live in.

Because, let's face it: we don't live in the natural world any more. We built this city, with concrete, steel, hard work and endless city council meetings (and a certain amount of rock and roll). And we built this economy, with all of its supply chains, complex interdependencies and the million things that just have to happen for the whole shebang to work.

And for us to be able to go to the store, get some food and live another day.

And that is how we became cyborgs. Depending on the machine, becoming the machine - speaking the machine language. Doing the biddings of the machine.

We are the machine. We are all cyborgs.

But don't ask yourself what it means to be a cyborg. Or even what life as a cyborg means. Those are the wrong kinds of questions, and will not lead you anywhere.

Instead, ask what it means to live. And, more importantly, what it means to love.

Back to basics

Whoever you are, whatever you do, whenever you see this - think about all the things you can do.

Who be you?

Ponder this question: What is a person?

This is not as abstract a question as one might think. In fact, it is one of the most down to earth question there is. Especially when you've met a new person, and try to find out who that really is.

If you are born on this temporal side of the Berlin Wall, the first step in finding out is to search the Facebook. There are many clues to be found there - liked pages, places visited and photos aplenty. And, more importantly, a list of friends to investigate.

One can say much about a person from the company they keep.

Which is even more relevant on Twitter, where company is everything. Who is the target of communication, retweets, favorites? What goes on in that timeline, and what can the implied flow of connections tell you about the new person?

With time to spare, these findings can be augmented with a close reading of the relevant blogs, Tumblrs and Livejournals. What could be more telling about someone than their own words, written about anything they like when they like?

What kind of ideas and discourses flows though this persons mind?

The question about what a person is suddenly starts to become less mysterious. An answer starts to emerge, and it says something to the effect that a person is not a monadic, isolated entity. Rather, a person is a mesh of - meshed in - interrelated networks of people, conversations, ideas and flows. And by getting a glimpse of these relations, networks and interrelated networks, some sort of understanding of the person in question happens.

Someone might argue that this is only true in an online environment. That these conversations and networks are an artifact of the abundant flows of communication, and that the predigital world was - in this and many other regards - different.

I'm not so sure about that. After all, what would a person be without these networks of people, discourses and ideas?

Some things change. Others tend to stay remarkably stable. Persons do both, at the same time. Without even questioning it.

Sharing

Sharing is telling someone about something.

Sharing is creating an experience with someone.

Sharing is cooperation.

Sharing is the making of friends.

Sharing is linking.

Sharing is helping those in need.

Sharing is expression.

Sharing is the freedom of action.

Sharing is the act of freedom.

Sharing is the essence of the art exhibition.

Sharing is exhibiting essence.

Sharing is the eternal moment of now.

Sharing is giving.

Sharing is recieving.

Sharing is both of the above, at the same time.

Sharing is what makes the world go 'round.

Sharing is right, right now.

Sharing is caring.

We share this world.

Share it with care.

Valentine's Day

The thing about humans is that we create communities. And traditions, both communal and personal. Sometimes these traditions coincide, sometimes not.

Interesting things tend to happen in either case.

In my case, I have this tradition of starting a new blog every year on Valentine's Day. Whether the world needs one or not - it's a ritual of love for the written word as much as it is a continual process of renewal.

If being is doing, then doing the same thing year in and year out is maybe not the best thing to be.

Which takes us back to the roots of tradition. Tradition is, in part, doing the same things year in and year out. With proper variations on theme, of course - people, circumstances and the world changes over time, and it would be asking the impossible to ask them not to. But in principle, a tradition is a present rendition of the past.

The key point is how we vary these themes. And how much we allow our fellow human beingdoings to vary their presences.

Many prepare for Valentine's Day by sticking to the script. Doing the bare minimum, going through the motions, getting it over with. Every year. Which might be the limit of what's possible, given people, circumstances and the world. Not everyone has the time, the means or even the motivation to make it grand on this particular date each year. Sometimes, you just find yourself in that big project and can't release yourself of its grip in time.

Such is life.

The thing about Valentine's Day is that it's more of an excuse than a must. Any day can become a day of love, after all, and having February the fourteenth marked in the calendar doesn't change this.

But then, every day can become a day of sticking to the script. Doing the bare minimum, going through the motions, getting it over with.

Don't just settle with remixing today. Remix every day -  like it's the last variation of the theme of life. Or the first.

This post is crossposted in two languages. You can read it in lokalspeek here.