Insipidness abounds when mediocrity becomes the new meritocracy, while banality can offer good standing in your local hate group. So, from the top of the system to the bottom, we can have goals.

Why are we cultivating these trends?

I always wanted to fit in, to be accepted, but I felt like I was on the outside regardless of how much I tried. Now I know I’m on the outside, and I no longer want to fit in; I want others to rise up from the muck of their putrid minds, shake off the stink of intellectual stagnation, and reinvigorate their humanity by embracing what has propelled our species forward for millennia, which in my view is the exploration of potential.

I’m afraid we are course-correcting the trajectory of advancement we’ve been moving down and that it may prove to have been too fast for the majority of our species to keep pace. After one hundred years of incredible technological progress, it appears that the powers that be are curbing our path forward. Instead of paving the way with policies that allow and encourage easy participation and personal development, we are harming the structures and institutions that have, in the past, been responsible for giving an opportunity to those who can and are willing to grasp them.

My opportunity to advance my own early education was wrecked by a system that forbade my overly ambitious curiosity and insisted I conform to my peers both socially and intellectually. If I wasn’t fitting in, I was in trouble. I was cast aside while those who preened themselves in blind subservience were elevated to seize the chance to attend the best post-secondary schools.

Maybe my socioeconomic background played a role, or maybe the majority in my community were simply destined for tertiary roles in society, and education was not deemed to be imperative. But still, my curiosity and desire for knowledge were bolting straight ahead; I just couldn’t tackle the mistrust of systems that seemed to reward cultural conformity and, too often, intellectual mediocrity.

Today, we look at designer medicine based on individual genetics and extol the virtues of this future form of healthcare, and yet we still force our children through a meat grinder that makes too many of them look and act like formless bags of gray meat. How can we consider a new practice of medicine that could treat 325 million Americans individually and not be able to start tackling individualized education for our children?

Did the experiment of enlightenment fail, or are we failing nature? When do we return to cultivating potential and stop the race into the depths of our own worst instincts?

A youth fraught with tension and the insatiable need for novelty propelled me to look to all corners of culture for the landmarks that would direct me to my creative stomping grounds. My mind was a minefield of explosive ideas that the 20th century launched onto the intellectual landscape. Covered in the excrement and entrails of the futurists and surrealists before being lightly dusted in the philosophy of modernity to the awareness of art Deco, pop art, and minimalism, I sought to find some kind of sense of what it meant to be human.

The grinding noise of modernity belched a symphony of agony first described by Luigi Russolo in The Art of Noises, followed by the anguish of Antonin Artaud and his Theater of Cruelty, which, when combined, acted as the dress rehearsal for the squalor brought upon humanity by the fascist propaganda and genocide of a world at war that has mostly stayed with us for the duration of my life. While not on the same scale of focus, the carnage of ghastly horrors with independent actors instead of state actors thrives in our internet age.

I looked to William Burroughs for insight into juxtaposed non-sequiturs as media and most information became a global cut-up. Charles Bukowski and his purple turkey neck collided with all that preceded him and would help forge the die that would manifest the model for a future president. Absurdity was supposed to be the domain of art, but as life is so apt to do, it has imitated art. We started becoming the embodiment of the cartoons of satirist Robert Crumb’s depictions instead of the aesthetic wholesome image Walt Disney would have liked to have modeled us in. One thing is certain, though: we should never have allowed ourselves to become characters in a comic strip.

Looking to complexity in the early days of the personal computer revolution, I was searching for a new technology manifesto that would channel the best of Tristan Tzara to create my own youth art movement in the spirit of Dada. I was ready for more nihilism, and anti-everything was on my agenda.

Nietzsche and Baudrillard were the perfect conduits for my rage against conformity. They knew the idiocy of our idols and icons that were programming us for mass stupidity. The bulwark of the money machine had other designs on the habits of people and preyed upon the laziness of those who would covet an easy path instead of one paved with struggle.

It would take decades before I would start to see the next big wave in creative intellectual meanderings that would illuminate a world not yet invented but just around the corner in our future. The minds of Marshall McLuhan, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno may have gleaned insight into the role our evolving media culture would play though they didn’t foresee the emergence of a distributed global real-time collaborative information and knowledge machine. The rules of distribution and ownership took a monumental turn with the close of the 20th century.

While the one-dimensional man hasn’t been reduced to ashes yet, the seeds of change have hopefully been planted, though the current socio-cultural landscape would certainly suggest otherwise. From Elon Musk’s Space-X, we learn more about Max Q and the pressures of reaching escape velocity, but who will be the inspiration that will help guide the collective mind of humanity to reach its own Max Q?

The ideas put forth in The Critical Engineering Manifesto lay a partial framework that, when merged with the nascent world of generative algorithms exploring blockchain-birthed truth tables, will, I believe, enable emergent systems to bring about creative swarms of enlightenment. This will effectively be the unveiling of a new language to the adherents of super-complexity.

Currently, fear of artificial intelligence is stymieing a majority of relatively older people by not allowing them to embrace the creeping lingua franca found in the abundance of readily accessible information. The machines that will first benefit from AI, also known as deep learning, will, in turn, share their new capacity for seeing the world differently to educate a new population unafraid and already raised on advanced communication in the ways of super-complexity. Just as a generation stumbled with electronics, cell phones, VCR clocks, and the internet, my own generation will likely fail the transition that is now underway.

Art has nearly always had the effect of alienating those in control bent on maintaining traditions. The situation with our current age is that we’ve been evolving a global mindset that some have started recognizing as maybe being “out of control” and are now trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle. This cannot work, though the violence of trying to fight this change may wreak havoc before the cultural marauders trying to arrest progress are pushed into the background as history has always done.

We are living with the baggage from two centuries of conflict as well as great progress and are about to take a quantum leap forward to throw off the burden of carrying outmoded ideas of a species on the verge of extinction. I do not mean to imply that humanity is on a path of collapse. Instead, I’m suggesting that the intellectual dinosaurs are about to encounter their meteorite. Now is the time to adapt and survive. Embrace the change and get ready for a moment in our evolution that will be as consequential as when humans began to talk and control fire. We are on the verge of a radical pivot – or maybe we are heading for the exit?

Are we teetering into madness?

Has the television warped our better senses to such a degree that some among us are falling into an alternative reality based on what we’ve been watching?

In an age where complex, technologically driven systems are driving our economies, are we witnessing the division of society between those flexible enough for adaptability and those unable to shift paradigms?

We appear to be gyrating through a convulsion wrought out of a full-on societal, cultural shift that is happening so fast that a large part of our population is failing to negotiate the hard turn.

When the fear of an uncertain future threatens traditions, customs, and the ways of life of the people feeling most affected by their perception of being displaced, might they begin to wage war to push back upon those who are seen as the agents of change?

The solutions found in the compromises that end cultural conflicts are usually that the aggressor will be contained and marginalized, as in time, they must cede control from the push of modernity and change. So, what is the role of a populace to assuage the fears of those becoming irrelevant in order to avoid the transgressions of war?

The voices that appear and take a stance against those trying to exercise outdated power have traditionally been silenced through means of violence. How in an age of mass media dispersed as it is, does the activist find a voice or platform that will ask that faction of humanity stuck in outmoded traditions and beliefs to understand the need to step down for the sake of our planet and future generations when they believe they are protecting an ideal?

Art has been used to seduce and provoke. It works to educate and cast light onto issues. Art in its varied forms entertains us, tells us stories, shows us the world around us, makes us dance, and informs us through the skillful verbal eloquence crafted by a masterful articulation brought by our varied languages. Art is at the core of the human experience. Ask any mathematician about the art of numbers or a physicist about the art of the universe. Inquire of a geologist if there is an art to be found in the composition of our Earth. If art plays such a central but often invisible role in many of the facets of our daily lives, how do we negotiate and offer the message of change as a necessity that appeals to the consciousness of that person stuck in an age that is quickly passing?

What is the purpose of a vacation? Adventure, restoration, discovery, learning, escape, and sharing are some of the things that come to my mind. Vacations nearly always seem to happen at key moments when the elixir of their magic can prove the most effective unless they are obligatory chores used for collecting marks on the trophy wall, of which I’ve met many people who could be wearing that mantle. The idea that these ventures into new experiences outside of normal living situations are able to maintain their novelty is in large part measured by the amount of discovery that is found along the way. Even those places I have visited before often hold an untold number of secrets that either escaped my purview on the first visit or maybe I wasn’t ready to see and understand them. Then, there is the discovery of things within ourselves that can also be had.

The very trip that almost didn’t happen for which this writing exercise is being undertaken was our upcoming expedition into the remotes of the Yukon and Alaska. The reason behind the near cancellation was the grim situation where the company I founded ran out of money which dictated that I lay off the entire staff en masse on July 5^th. Our departure was scheduled for just ten days from that bleak day. Canceling with less than 90 days’ notice would have meant a forfeiture of the entire cost of the journey, a substantial amount of money that trip insurance would not have covered, seeing that my personal mental trauma did not constitute a physical emergency or death of myself or close family member.

Finally, with mere moments to go, our payroll situation was resolved, and our staff was paid what was owed to them. With the assurance from my business partner that we were on the path of repairing things and that we’d be able to hold on to a skeleton crew to maintain minimal operations, Caroline and I, after weeks of discussing our options to the point of ad nauseam it was decided that the cost of not going would be too great. Not the cost of the money lost, but the impact on our happiness due to the burden of crushing weight watching a 27-year dream that had accrued over three years of work and constant toil approaching the juncture of failure.

A glimmer on the horizon for me was that the nature of our vacation meant we would be fully off-grid, dampening my ability to dwell on or respond to the myriad issues that occur due to the messy nature of layoffs, bruised egos, pissed investors, and creditors who want to know your next step. For that respite from the fury that was upon us, I am forever indebted to my business partner for shouldering that burden.

The forensic examination of what went “wrong” is not ready for a telling, especially in light of the fact that the tombstone for our company has not yet been erected. Sadly, we lost some very talented staff who rightfully were hurt by the perceived sudden situation that apparently caught them off-guard though the rumor mill was rife with back-chatter from those who’d read our public financial filings half a year prior.

With all of this in mind and my confidence approaching an all-time low, creeping depression, and near overwhelming anxiety, I am trying my best to put a stoic face forward and take the next step needed to begin the process of allowing vacation to do the work it can be so effective at; healing.

Dr. Aslinger emailed yesterday, telling me of a grad student he is mentoring he would like me to meet. I suggested the same Starbucks as a suitable location, and with a brief description of the woman, I sat down to await her arrival. While she is willing to share the nature of her studies and what avenues of interest she is exploring, she was apprehensive of having her name shared on my website so as to maintain her privacy and not divulge to the world at large just who it is raising some of the questions she is exploring I will simply refer to her as RTR for the rest of my blog posting.

RTR set the stage by first telling me about her studies in order to establish a background for how she plans to attack her theories. Now nearing thirty years old, RTR received her Bachelor’s in Filmmaking from USC, then worked for a short time in Germany in the advertising industry. It was during this time that she became aware of the Max Planck Institute. Through conversations with students from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, she started exploring how the brain processes language and affects cognitive behavior in regards to how this could be incorporated into her filmmaking. Back in Germany, talking with yet another student, RTR learned of an undergrad project at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden where students looking at how cells form tissues were contemplating if pigments could be programmed with genetic information in order to have them self-assemble art.

RTR’s original interest in film began with the observation that there were a handful of movies being made that contained a kind of psychedelic spirituality, such as Dune, Contact, AI, Altered States, and 2001 – A Space Odyssey. While Dune, with its reference to spice, piqued her interest, it was the time dilation scene with Jodie Foster in Contact that struck a chord. RTR felt that this particular scene exemplified a move from suggestive psychedelic spiritual hints to overt references to a particular entheogen. This interest was to lie dormant during the intervening years of working to make a living, but that was about to change.

Germany was leaving its mark and effecting great change in RTR’s life and outlook upon the arts and reality, but it was time to return to America. Trading the camera for a new bookbag, RTR returned to her studies and finished her Masters in Computer Sciences for Biomedical Informatics to lay a foundation for a better understanding of genomics and computational biology. As a grad student still unsatisfied with the limits of her knowledge, she has since embarked on a lengthy education process, currently working for a Professional Science Master in Nanoscience and her Ph.D. in Molecular / Cellular Biology.

The aim of this multidisciplinary trajectory is to find answers or, at a minimum, to create a better allusion to an artistic model for film or video, allowing us a glimpse into her view of the human relationship to the universe. The crux of her quest is to gain an understanding of the complexity of the mind and its capacity to be fed by an enormity of information and influences contrasting with our place in a slow-moving world where mountains don’t move; forests stand witness for decades if not centuries and clouds drift by – why should your minds have such innate ability for an environment that seems to plod along? RTR believes there is more to things than what meets the eye, ear, nose, sense of touch, and thoughts we appear to crawl through. She would like to find the key to the existence of a more primitive or intuitive language she suspects we may yet carry embedded in our instinctual knowledge, a language that exceeds the limits of our current understanding and lays bare the maze of survival information and ability to dream to our conscious mind.

At the core of her thesis is that our DNA is not as simple as it appears. Not that it is overly simple with what we already know regarding the four building blocks that make up DNA (Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine – ACGT), but she thinks it is far more complex than we have yet considered. Specifically, she believes that encoded in our chromosomes amongst the 3 billion base pairs that define our genome is more information that we are yet to discover. This is where Dr. Aslinger’s work comes into the equation as with his theory of a particle of time tinier than any theorized particles to date and his ideas regarding fractal energy, RTR has begun exploring a hypothesis that our 3 billion base pairs of DNA contain a fractally encoded data state holding the collective survival information that proved efficient to any and all species since life appeared on earth billions of years ago.

She is curious if this embedded information acts as our compass for the evolution of humanity on levels that are subconscious to us but are at work in order to propel our species forward and hopefully not make the mistakes of earlier life forms that weren’t well adapted to survive. Specifically, she has looked at the human mind with its capacity to perform at between 10 trillion and 20 quadrillion calculations per second (this is open to interpretation with no definitive answer to precisely how fast the mind operates) and that we have storage capacity in the neighborhood of 100 terabytes. Consider that 20 million books in the Library of Congress would represent approximately 20 terabytes of data, that 144,000 songs encoded in the mp3 format would require one terabyte of storage, and that 10 million photos would require approximately 20 terabytes of data storage, and you see that considering we may be able to read three to five hundred books over a twenty-year period and that the average person might listen to and remember two to five-thousand songs, there is an incredible amount of storage capacity in our mind that we are not able to withdraw and playback with the precision of a computer but for some reason, we have this capacity and maybe it is being used for something.

Then there is the question of the speed of calculations that the mind is capable of while our senses and thoughts seem to go about at a rather tepid clip. Why have this processing power but not have the ability to render our memories in the waking clarity of our visual perception when a piece of silicon called a graphics chip running at a magnitude slower than our brain has the accuracy to display dynamic data sets of changing imagery combined with sound and action? RTR believes that, in reality, our mind is interpreting a massive data set, filtering life lessons learned over the eons, and that these instincts guide human endeavors to work from past failures to ensure the survival of our species. Somewhere in our evolution, information was being fed piecemeal to our slower senses that are limited by gravity, the need for food, sleep, and a short life span to act in a way that would sustain an ever-expanding population. Earlier species may have destroyed their environment by eating more than the biota could supply, and so the lesson learned and subsequently encoded into our DNA is that for our species to survive while our population is skyrocketing to the tune of billions, we would need to develop systems of food production able to sustain such a mass without requiring each individual to participate in growing their own food. Similarly, a shelter for a fragile species is at a premium when tool-building skills do not exist, so maybe a slow focus was necessary to allow humankind to work out the complexities of how to build ever-expanding demands on a secure shelter to ensure the protection of a species from the natural elements.

RTR went on to explain that over the last thousands of years, our growing knowledge of mastering natural resources and creating new artificial resources has put us on a trajectory to either save this organic creature from destroying its environment and potential or succumb to the apparent destructive forces that at times forces species into extinction. RTR told me how happy she has been to meet Dr. Aslinger because she can see that the approach of 2012 and the possibility of a mass awakening of our awareness to our real potential may be becoming a requirement for our survival as it appears that our conscious mind is overwhelming our subconscious instinctual needs for survival and that we risk failure of yet another life form – ours.

Working within this new framework of hypothesis, RTR would like to share visually through a medium most of us watch, television and film, that we are wasting our potential and risking our survival by not understanding the complexity of what we are trying to accomplish as the breathing, thinking, imaginative creatures we are.

On a final note, RTR is fearful that we may have an inherent propensity towards stupidity and ignorance and that this, too, may be part of the knowledge built into our DNA. Maybe the Egyptians, Mayans, or if they existed, the people of Atlantis, found that their knowledge of the world proved destabilizing to their successful continued existence and that in our current state of awareness, we are but pawns moving sentient life out of the organic form and into an artificial life form not affected by lack of water, food, warmth, and cold. Maybe the highest embodied form of a being with a physical presence will have to be a silicon and electron-based piece of hardware that can be imbued with the qualities of a soul, but that can exist under harsh conditions while still being able to catalog, dream about, and share the immense beauty that can exist on a world that is but a trillionth of the entirety of our universe. Or are we doomed to build the inheritors of our legacy as we extinct ourselves due to our myopic view that centers the individual as a cornerstone in their own mini-universe where we can consume and destroy what suits us? Can we awaken to our shared adventure and work in a coordinated, enlightened, and knowledgeable way that will allow a three billion-year history to succeed in creating a kind of heaven on earth?