The Outside of the Internet

Let’s be social without deception.

Let’s be social without dishonesty.

Let’s tell stories to one another, not lies.

Let’s be brave and trusting with one another.

What is It?

It’s what the internet and social media should be. It’s the fix to a seriously fucked up system. Let us conclude the experiment that is Facebook and all it’s ilk has resulted in a clear unambiguous result - that allowing others to control everything we see and say for their benefit is just a fundamentally bad idea that could only be thought up by an emotionally disconnected and stunted teenage boy. It should have been obvious to begin with, but that’s water under the bridge. We know now. We do. Let’s do something about it.

We don’t have to give up any of the good parts, the connections with friends, the effortless communication with loved ones, all the great stuff that we’ve grown to love. We get to keep taking selfies. We just need to put it all out of reach from the greedy mean people who don’t care about others. As a recovered programmer on the path to redemption, I can assure you that if you don’t trust a person to watch your kids, you shouldn’t trust the code they’ve written. You also shouldn’t trust any corporation that has profit as it’s principle goal, let alone one driven by a corporate business culture that has made shareholder value their highest virtue. Seriously, they write editorials and give speeches about this principle of institutionalized, industrial grade, greed. The strongest indictment I can offer is just the observation that they’re not even embarrassed by it.

Through My Mind

My first promise to you is that I will always be brave so I can be totally open and honest about myself and my intentions. Complete honesty is a powerful force that leads to trust. A trust that is first achieved with great effort and then maintained with a lifetime of effort. But trust is the cornerstone of community and a trusting community is an even greater force. I am going to build that community.

I am going to start the process by donating my mind, my imagination, my history and my just don’t give a fuck boldness to create a place where we can all be as open as artist and as loving as we were meant to be. I’ve always been on the outside, not really looking inwards though - I don’t fit on the inside. But I am lonely so I’ve decided to actively recruit friends to join me on the outside.

Where is It?

It is an amusement park in my mind that I have built to entertain my friends. I have decided to tap deep into my excessive imagination, which was otherwise going to waste on anxiety, and get busy building a world of puzzles and oddities and quests and games for others to explore and extend. Because it is built in and on my mind, it is constructed of my dream logic, a framework that provides the rules. Rules that are meant to bent and circumvented with wit and courage and magic.

But mostly it is a place for artists and creators to art and create. It is a community. There are no trolls there. Any half decent society throughout history as gone out of their way to kill all the trolls. It was the first thing I did. Well, some of them were tamed kinda, and now earn their keep performing, but strictly ironically in traveling freak shows.

Is the Magic Real?

Yes the magic is real. It is built on ancient principles that I have unearthed. Builds on the ancients work (to drop a name, Aristotle, for one) to make it more accessible. And more immediately powerful. Unless you’re an artist, you probably don’t give nearly enough attention to or appreciation of the basic cognitive capabilities that are our species birthright.

The girl’s silhouette was visible for only a moment before she turned the corner and disappeared from sight, but that moment was enough. It was her. It was always her. I ran but I tripped. My hands were stung by the wet pavement of the alley. I gasped for breath, but each breath contained just the slightest trace of perfume, her scent, leaving me gasping for more in hunger. I was drowning. That’s when the tears came.

In a just a few sentences (assuming I have any future as a writer), I have hijacked your nervous system, taken over your higher brain functions and literally put words in your head and perhaps touched your heart. With just my words. That is magical.

Is software magic?

That’s just the thing. It could be magic, but generally no, and even when it is it is often dark magic. The Algorithm is real. It is also a dark magic.

But magic resides not in the binary, but in the abstractions that the binary can potentially encode. The binary can encode powerful, life changing, power but only if the author has the abstractions within themselves. Sadly the same qualities that allow programmers their profession, cannot see the more human abstractions, and this fact goes a long way towards pointing out the solution. I say this with the confidence of someone who has been in the profession for 30 years. The wrong people are coding. I’m going to change that, but that’s a theme to be introduced later.

How do I get to it?

That’s where the magic comes in. It doesn’t exist in the internet like other websites. It can’t, not if it’s going to be outside the internet. It needs to be hidden. So it doesn’t have a domain. You get to it through hidden paths. You get to it through your friends. You get to it by solving puzzles, in other words, you get to it through your mind.

Here is an example. A friend tells you about it. This friend is already a Guild Member. On your behalf they go a Guild Elder and they agree to assign you a task. They give you a phrase to search for on the internet, something like, “Akkundra Somucha”. This takes you to a strange little page on Facebook. There there is a crude map and a set of clues that leads you to a local mall where near a back entrance your friend chalked a glyph, a symbol, which is translates to a word that you then enter on the webpage. Now you’ve reached the Outside of the Internet. The possibilities become countless at that point.

Why is it so secret?

Because it has to be secret in order to be at all. Things are so screwed up right now, social media wise, which has then fucked up the real world, that it’s only possible to exist as full happy person at a slight remove. This is a carefully maintained boundary to protect a place we don’t live in, but as a community we can take refuge in from time to time, in order to recharge and return to the fight in the real. As a community.

Spiritual Atheist – Awe and Respect

One dimension of my spirituality is an appreciation of the universe revealed to man by science. A world in which a modicum of curiosity is rewarded by an awe inspiring message. Respect and awe are two values that I make a conscious effort to embrace.

Evolutionary theory states that life took a billion years to evolve. The thing about a billion years is that it is not just difficult to comprehend, but impossible. If you lived to be a hundred years old, then a billion years is ten million life times – or 10,000,000. Or fifty million generations.  Compared to the 4000 years that have transpired since the building of the pyramids in Egypt that’s 250,000 times as long. Or as a fraction, .000004.

It’s just awesome amount of time. It deserves our respect and awe.

Astronomy presents us with equally mind boggling distances and quantities that defy understanding.  In our galaxy, a midsize galaxy by universal standards, there are 100 billions stars (100,000,000,000). And there are maybe 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe. I won’t try multiplying the two together because the result would be as meaningless as either number alone. But just look some night and try to imagine. It’s an awesome thought.

Or zoom in from the very large to the very small. A conservative estimate puts the number of cells in the human body at ten trillion (10,000,000,000,000). In dollars you could just about pay for the recent government bailout. And once you zoom into the inside of a single cell you will find a place of miraculous complexity. It is an intricate dance of molecules, the full beauty of is only barely understood.

As I step down from my soap box, it occurs to me that the awe and respect I feel is similar to the awe and respect embraced by many of the religious (you say God I say universe). Maybe there is common ground to be had (I am just not into sin and people getting nailed to anything).