Neo: What truth? Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: What truth? Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
My journey into digital existentialism, in light of my being a Christian, has opened up many new doors and experiences as the technology we have become so dependent on has increased exponentially in both its power to take away as well as its ability to give. Writing “Netizen” has changed not only the way I look at the way we interact with technology but how it has changed us as a society. The more we embrace our digital selves the world becomes both larger and smaller. We see much more of the world we live in, the people who inhabit it and the actions they carry out within it. What we lose in the process may be some of our sensitivity.
Netizen represents this journey in both directions, as people become one with the net and the change experienced when one comes out of it. Our cell phone can bring us the world, but we only live in one small little part of it, often never thinking further than the ten feet around where we stand at any given time. To reach out physically may take more effort mentally than to reach around the world and make a difference in another country, but without seeing the change physically we become disconnected from that which we have accomplished and lose our sense of our own contribution to society.
What does it mean to become a Netizen, to live solely in the net. What would that look like. What would lead mankind there? Read Netizen and see one possible future.
“If you cannot envision a future, you don’t have one.” D.H. Tabor
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D.H. Tabor 12 April – 3 May 2024
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68782177
That brief moment between the release of the seer, before the hammer strikes the firing pin, which plunges into the primer causing a tiny explosion that sets off a larger explosion, causing 8 grams of copper and lead to achieve 1200 feet per second for the six inches of travel to its immediate destination. All this takes place in less than 0.01 seconds. That moment is unrecoverable and cannot be stopped. It is the action of a highly engineered and precise mechanism in a sophisticated machine designed for this one task. Firing bullets. The mechanism does not have any intuitive capacity. It doesn’t matter where the bullet goes. It only executes a series of events it was designed to perform. The only way to stop the inevitable outcome is to interrupt the decision-making process that led someone to pull the trigger.
Why are people killing themselves? Where does that decision process start? People don’t wake up in the morning with the idea of ending their own lives as a plan on the ‘to-do list’ for the day. This process is rarely spontaneous. Killing yourself, for whatever reason, requires a bit of planning. Some people are very good at making sure their suicide attempts result in their being discovered before they die. Sylvia Plath was well known for this. One day her plan failed because someone showed up late. Not all plans are perfect. Some people don’t want to ‘leave a mess,’ or be found by their families.
The plan almost always requires a level of forethought, logistics, and most importantly, good reason. The first two are easier to figure out. How do they want to die? Everyone would rather die in the least pain and discomfort possible. Methodology is determined by cost. Strangulation by hanging was once popular but is often the method of last resort, for it is slow and painful. High places usually signify financial loss resulting in poverty, but its messy unless you are on a high bridge over water. The other issue is the time to impact allows people to think about what they have done, and they can’t change their minds. Time from initiation to termination is a factor. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Warm baths with a knife are slow. Still messy. Drug overdoses are less messy. This is often the choice of women for it is both neat and painless, but still slow, time enough to change your mind. This often leads people to guns.
Why did I explain all of this? Because men are the most likely to kill themselves, and most often with a gun. A vast majority of suicides are committed this way. It’s messy, but it is fast. Very fast. The decision to pull the trigger is deliberate, a statement, which is left for the rest of us. Many suicide notes have been written, but few have been read to the public. Why? Are we afraid to hear that we, and not they, are the problem? Guns end the discussion in a fraction of a second. It can take several lifetimes before people figure out why because the information remains locked away. “It’s personal.” Mental health remains stigmatized out of people’s necessity to not address the issues at hand.
What are those issues?
What defines our basic needs that are not those issues? People need food, shelter, clothing. In our society it requires a job to accomplish those things. Gainful employment, even a job we don’t like, is a steppingstone to a brighter future. Well, it used to be. As our economy slowly crushes people out of a real livable income and into a growing sense of job insecurity as wages do not keep up with inflation year over year, men find themselves in the unenviable position of being irrelevant in the workforce. This leads to decreased earnings potential over time. While having work is important there remains another aspect of earning potential I will discuss later.
Beyond food, shelter, clothing, is the need to be secure in oneself. Whether this is expressed in monetary, spiritual, educational, or leadership terms is up to the individual. How we envision ourselves as individuals often determines our career path, but most are driven by their own internal engine. A man may run a business well, but his passion is teaching basketball to high school kids in the park on Saturdays. Who we believe ourselves to be determines our well-being in relation to who we are and whether we are happy with what we do. Sadly, bad parenting can destroy this in a child, leaving them lost as to their own sense of self. A sense of self helps us to define who we are and what we do with our lives. What happens when this is taken away?
The third item people need is community, more specifically, a partner. While many go through life with only one or two real friends, some go through life with none. A vast majority of men only need one person in their lives. A partner they can trust. Someone for whom they have their back, and that person has theirs. Someone they can be intimate with. Someone willing to carry their end of the log.
In short, people often need only three things in life. A place to live that isn’t threatened, with clothes and food. A reason to go out and do their job every morning, where they can earn their place in society. A partner they can trust.
Take away any one of these things and life gets harder. Take away two of these things and life gets desperate. When you have lost 66% of your reason for living you have lost more than half of who you are as a person unless someone comes in and helps. The burden becomes too much and when they put that burden down, they realize they will never be able to lift it themselves again. Without that burden, which is the essence of our lives, there remains nothing left to live for. They walk away from that burden, let it sink into the mud under its own weight, and look for something lighter, like a handgun. Eight grams of copper and lead are so much easier to carry.
Why are people killing themselves? For most people they find themselves alone. They can deal with a crappy job, cheap clothes, an empty church to attend. They can’t deal with loneliness. So why are people so alone? Ask women. From a gender perspective, roughly 80% of suicides are men. Why are they so lonely? The answer is usually obvious. Many women feel they don’t need men. The standard has become untenable. Men are required and expected to be making incredible amounts of money, provide everything possible, and not expect much in return. I mentioned the ability to earn income before. Men need to meet earning potential criteria. Men are required to meet high physical criteria as well as being supportive beyond reason. Not only do they have to carry the log, but their partners baggage too. Since 80% of most men do not even come within striking distance of this criteria they opt out, condemned to be being lonely, as they face constant rejection.
This represents a heavily weighted third of primary things people need as part of their personhood. The side effect from this has been the number of women in their late thirties and early forties who now want children and men refuse to go out with them. These men who were passed over no longer want to be part of someone’s support package. This has resulted in an increase of drug and alcohol use by women in this age bracket. Instead of choosing a partner when they were younger, which would then have reduced the number of lonely and isolated men who later go on to commit suicide, these women face the same dilemma but continue to maintain requirements that men who have aged out of over time find even harder to meet. Thus, the suicide rate among older women is also increasing.
Not having a partner is one leg of this issue. Without a partner their sense of internal self is compromised. While many men base their sense of self on their work it is also based on who they are working for, and this is not referring to their employer. Some have a strong sense of self, and work at what they are intrinsically, but many work to support their partner. People who have a strong sense of self generally don’t kill themselves as their work defines their sense of self even though they are without a partner. There are exceptions to every rule, but the trend remains logical.
This leads to the third aspect, which represents the lower rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Compromise a person’s food, shelter, and clothing and they will fall faster into the well of despair that leads to suicide. Combine either of these and the probability increases. Take away all three and the last restrictor, besides personal religious belief, or an incredible sense of will to survive, will be the only thing that saves them.
What I have described here are events that can span a lifetime of a person’s experience. Each of these events remains a stand-alone entity or can be coupled to other events. What isn’t described here is the environment those events occur in. Each person brings their own unique set of environmental variables to the larger issues. Some come from broken homes, or homes where violence was the norm. Dysfunctional parents or no parents at all. The volume of undiagnosed mental disorders (autism, bipolar, PTSD, BPD, attachment disorder, etc.) which may exist underneath everything they experience could lead to long term chronic depression or a myriad other disorder. And none of this includes members of the military or law enforcement communities for which their role in society isolates them further.
Socioeconomics also plays a role in this. People who have spent their lives fighting their way out of poverty may be less inclined to fall back into that hole where the struggle for every dollar earned can become an existential crisis. On the other end of this are people who have accomplished so much they feel there is nothing left to achieve, though this is by far the lesser sample set. When the money finally runs out some people may be faced with homelessness or turning to criminal activity, each being a dangerous and socially isolated place.
Divorce and rejection, over a long enough timeline can be the final box in a long decision tree that leads to suicide. Generational patterns of divorce and rejection can be enough to cause anyone to question the value of their own self-worth. If they feel valueless to themselves, regardless of gender, the slide through isolation, loneliness, and feelings of being rejected and abandoned, as they slide down the slope of depression and despair, may become an unstoppable avalanche leading to their own destruction. In the end the explanation is simple:
“Suicide becomes probable when the pain of living exceeds the pain of dying.”
The anchors that prevent this slide are:
1. Access to Food, Shelter, Clothing. (Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs)
2. A solid sense of self, based on monetary, spiritual, educational, or leadership terms
3. A Partner / Friend. Someone to help carry the burdens of life.
Lose any two of these anchors and life becomes very difficult indeed. It may also be a result of speed to impact, how fast they are falling, which can trigger the final event. Break too many things at once and the results may be the same.
While the first two are usually things people are capable of building for themselves, it is sometimes difficult to manage the third, simply because it involves depending on other people. People. We never meet their expectations, fall short of what we promise and resent what we may never have. Accumulated over time, our inability to believe in people is undermined and the person who desperately needs someone in their lives may be forever condemned to being alone.
Simply because that person could never meet the standards and had been rejected.
What is to be done about this? How do we fix it?
You can’t. The problem is societal. People must accept other people as they are. They must be open to examining their motivations in relation to their goals. A woman wants a husband who wants to support them. Men want a wife who will be a partner. A balance must be struck. The idea that any relationship can be built on a one-sided model is ridiculous, yet this is what plays out every day, resulting in exceptionally high divorce rates, broken homes where children grow up depressed and later in life are found dead from suicide. It isn’t something that can be fixed in a generation. All you can do is attempt to reverse the trend. This is started with identification, prevention, and treatment.
Identification can be profiled. Single people, people going through divorce or other extensive life changing events, people who identify as being helpless, hopeless, or depressed. People who live in poverty with any or all these situations. People who cannot find or identify a part of themselves that provides them with purpose. Almost all these people will come from backgrounds where the same situations and behaviors exist.
Prevention happens when someone chooses to step in and help. That help can be in any form, from a referral to a mental health clinician to taking the gun from someone’s hand. Whether it is the right thing to do or not, the important thing is to do something. Inaction is a declaration to the person teetering on the edge of oblivion. It tells a man with a gun to his head they do not matter to anyone. The one thing they crave the most is to matter to someone, anyone. Our society is often shameful in the level of superficial caring we offer people. Getting people to professionals is ideal, but caring in the moment is more valuable.
Treatment helps bring someone back from the edge. Treatment is often referred to as a climb out of a hole. Like rock climbing, it is hard work moving upward to a place where new anchors can be safely installed, new ropes (methods) of dealing with life can be implemented along with different techniques climb out and build the necessary resilience for surviving in this society, especially when one of the primary parts of anyone’s mental psyche is missing or destroyed.
I state again… people need only three things in life. A place to live that isn’t threatened, with clothes and food. A reason to go out and do their job every morning, where they can earn their place in society. A partner they can trust. Find which of these is broken, support the broken places, even if you can only support one of these, and point them to better resources.
It isn’t your job to save people. It’s our responsibility, when opportunity presents itself, to help people save themselves. That is how you reduce the rate of suicide in this country.
Why doesn’t this happen when it seems like an obvious solution to a problem? This is the part often written in suicide notes but is often never read. At least not to the public, for fear it might encourage someone to not only identify with someone but to act on it. Similarly, the answer here is also obvious. They reached out for help, and no one came. Sometimes people are looking for unrealistic answers, but I suspect often they are looking for someone to simply provide a solution. Our society of instant gratification does not allow for the long-term solution, along winding muddy paths, that lead us back to the light. We want the answer, and we want it now! People are also very resistant to change, even to saving themselves. It always seems easier to quit.
What reaching out accomplishes is the simple act of giving. The person in desperate need of help is giving people a chance to make a difference, though the answer they get may not be the one they wanted. They are giving someone a chance to show them there is another way.
People who are depressed and suicidal often have trouble finding new or different options to the path they have set themselves on. A nurse who loses her job and career, having never known any other one, may find themselves unable to see how they can change. Moreover, that change will take time. Restarting in a different career can be painful, financially difficult, and lower your own sense of self-worth. Not everyone has the will to do this, let alone do this on their own. Running their path until they are trapped, the compulsion to just pull the dirt down over themselves is enticing. They reach out because they cannot or refuse to see another option.
Giving them another option means they haven’t exhausted all their options. Pointing this out to someone comes with a caveat. People don’t want to grow when they have worked so hard to get themselves mentally ready to be planted in the ground. Accepting there might be another path, that more energy must be expended before they can convince anyone they should just go away and let them die can be a real struggle. When you have reached what you believe is rock bottom, however illogical it may seem at the time, people would rather lay down and die than face a new challenge.
This new challenge is an opportunity to help save their lives by giving them a new path. This gift can take many shapes and forms. Counseling should be the first, but this isn’t always what happens. It may be necessary to explain there are other options to be explored and they would be remiss if they didn’t. There will be cases made as to how such plans will invariably fail and serve no purpose. By arguing them out, each plan gets forged into a possible plan of action. It becomes a process of discovery and may take days or weeks to work out completely.
That means the person helping must be consistent. This is where everything usually fails. People are difficult at best, horrible at worst. Signing on to help someone through what will be the most difficult time of their lives, with the very real possibility of it ending badly, requires a certain level of commitment that isn’t always so easily found. This is why professional mental health services are so important. Individuals can help but the amount of empathy and caring involved is sometimes quite beyond the average person’s resources, without the proper training in the tools and techniques of the role. Mental health counselors are trained in these things and know how to use them to their best effect, though sometimes it may take several tries to find a counselor that can reach into a torn psyche and help repair it. That’s why they are the professionals they are.
If you were at the bottom of a hole and the walls were smooth as glass, how would you get out? You should ask for help, but most people do not. They exhaust themselves trying to do it on their own and end up even worse with the falls they have taken. Sometimes they ask for help, but no one hears them or wants to get involved, being too wrapped up in their own problems. Some may even drop some tools down and hope you figure it out on your own. A bad counselor may come down with a rescue rope and hook you up and lift you out. Having learned nothing about self-rescue it is just a matter of time before you fall back down the same hole. It may be even longer before someone comes by the next time. If you have lived so far out on the fringe of society there may simply be no one there to help at all.
Then there are the people who take advantage of the situation and leave you with even less. Some come by to fill the hole in. Their callousness hurts and there seems to be nothing you can do about it. You’re trapped and no one is coming to help you and some who are only hurt you more. This is exemplified when it is family who come by to fill in the hole, pushing you further into your belief that all is lost. The last iteration of this analogy is when you scrape the walls trying to bring the world down on yourself. Self-destructive behaviors, such as drugs, alcohol, self-harm, or suicide attempts, where every day a little more of you dies. But then a mental health counselor works differently.
A mental health counselor lowers themselves calmly and slowly into your world, this world you have created for yourself, and stops just out of reach of you. They do this for two reasons. One, so they don’t get pulled into your world and can’t get out, and second, so they can hand you tools and then be close enough to explain them so you can use them effectively. Once at a point that you can start climbing out of the hole the counselor winches themselves up, always staying just a little ahead of you but never so far out of reach you cannot access them for instructions. They won’t pull you out of the hole but teach you how to get out of the hole on your own. You may fall back at times, everyone does, but they remain there with the advice and encouragement you need to reach the surface.
The journey doesn’t end at the surface, the flat plain you find yourself on. The world may have changed in the time you have been in the hole. Discovering that world is up to you, but they can show you how to deal with all the other holes you may find around you. As well as some of the newly created obstacles society likes to build. Like a guide who helps you climb a mountain because they know the paths, see how the lay of the land is, the tools to navigate it and rescue yourself from it. But the first step is yours. You have to ask for help, reach out that hand and say, “I don’t want to die.”
And that may be the hardest thing you face in the whole trip.
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By D.H. Tabor 11 July 2004
The nature of good and evil in relation to truth.
Everything is intrinsically neutral. Rocks, weapons, bibles, candles; all are neutral in that they are neither good nor evil. We call the bible the ‘good book,’ but it remains paper, glue, and ink. We consider nuclear and chemical weapons evil, but a vast majority of them simply sit idle. It is not the nature of these objects but how they are used, their application, which makes them good or evil. Animals don’t have applications, their ability to reason being limited and confined to the hunter/derek-tabor-4614088bgatherer role in the food chain, so they are not part of the good or evil debate. Animals work as designed, no matter how fierce or dangerous they are. Only humans have applications for the materials around them, creating things out of other things for mankind’s benefit or destruction.
In this light we look at the truth of good and evil. The bible may help keep someone whole, spiritually, giving them guidance on leading a better life that gives more than it returns, or it could be used as a tool to lead others to kill people in the name of God by killing themselves. Inversely, nuclear weapons with their destructive power stopped a world war and for several decades prevented future wars by simply sitting and collecting dust. It is the mind that determines the outcome. Each outcome has elements of both good and evil. For one person to win the lottery many thousands of people lost money. This alone is neither good nor evil. The person who bet his families wages and lost them playing the lottery has done evil at some level. The winner who has spent the money on drugs and self-indulgence has committed evil at some level. The person who bought a lottery ticket to prove to his son the extremely low probability of winning the lottery has done some good. It is our action, or inaction, which defines whether something is good or evil.
All of this is determined by the standard of truth we hold ourselves to. Truth is most often based on religious standards, be it Christianity, Judaism, Islam or pagan. Each of these standards has its own set of rules and values. To bridge the gap of varying religious values a legal standard was put in place, and the laws we are governed by define much of who we are. The law is not necessarily the ‘truth’ and although the law seeks the truth in the pursuit of justice it often fails to be a unifying standard. It is the standard by which each of us lives, rather than one universal standard, determining whether something is good or evil. This same process applies to all fields of human endeavor. More than ethics, a standard of truth is what everything else in any system is built on. In the building trades this is called a “plumbline.”
A plumbline is the first line set as part of the foundation for any building, and determines the vertical standing of the first wall, positioning the absolute starting point for each corner of a structure. Hung from a temporary frame by a string, and using the force of gravity, its pointed weight is set just above the spot where the first corner is to be put. Concrete forms are put around this point and made to parallel the plumbline. These forms must be perfect for once concrete is poured it is far too expensive to fix once it hardens. When all is ready the plumbline is pulled up and the concrete is poured. Everything else built on this foundation will be constructed based on the original plumbline.
A ‘plumbline’ helps us determine whether actions are good or bad, helpful, or hurtful, since truth is intrinsically neutral. Truth is neither bad nor good for it has no action within itself, but merely facts to be discovered. Good and evil are based on our actions, what we do. The inherent knowledge of good and evil is frequently black and white. Killing people is bad, saving people is good. Between these two poles is grey. A plumbline defines the truth by which we govern our lives.
Each of us has a plumbline that defines our foundation. In modern American society the construction process for a person can be as long as thirty years but is usually eighteen. The foundations are set by our parents, for better or worse, with the best skill they can muster. This might be considered the ‘temporary frame’ spoken of above, for most parents usually lose control over their children’s thoughts by the time they are teenagers, about the time the forms for the walls are put in. Other influences, TV, music, and school, make up the bulk of the form structure. Each panel of the form represents a different influence, but the way each of the panels set against each other is the work of the constructor, the parents. Though the shape of the panel cannot be altered, its placement can be adjusted to maximize or minimize its effect on the structure. If the parents do not adhere to their own plumbline, then the structure will forever be inherently unstable, requiring much more repair and reinforcement over time.
Our lives are built on this foundation. The more stable the foundation is the easier it is to turn inward and find the truth in our lives. Conversely, the less stable the foundation the more the need to find truth in other places, since our own plumbline appears wrong, based on the quality of the construction. What is important to note is the nature of the original plumbline. Whether the temporary frame it was hung on was unstable and inadequate or solid as steel, the plumbline remains straight. Truth does not change. What we hang that truth on, and what we hang it over, is another part of the human construct we as children have no control over. Once we become our own person, developing our own sense of the truth which resides within us, we begin to understand that ‘truth’ can be very subjective. To find ‘truth’ requires the perseverance to keep digging.
Truth is like a diamond.
Truth is like a diamond, at its core lies the truth and we each perceive this truth / through the facets surrounding it. Although the truth never changes our perception of it changes as we look through each facet, thus our view is colored by how we choose to look at truth. Diamonds, like truths,’ are the hardest of materials and can withstand the hottest fires and be only blackened.com/2016 Clean the soot off and the diamond remains. Covered in the mud and muck of the world does not diminish a diamonds shine. Truth is the same way. It isn’t the truth that shines but the light that shines through it. Thus, truth is transparent, we need only uncover it.
- Derek Tabor, April 1994
Each of us sees what we believe is the truth, but it is our perception of the truth, and our own perspective is unique. Once we understand our perspective, we can then begin to understand another perspective. Through greater understanding of any truth the more it provides stability in our own lives. Once the ‘truth’ is known, the lies and falsehoods become obvious and necessary repairs can be made, bad assumptions corrected, and the stability of the construct improved. Our lives are often built on lies we have been told that have no basis in fact but have been carried through generations and have since become “gospel.” For decades people believed General Custer died on Little Big Horn by an ambush. Forensic science has revealed that faulty intelligence, a lack of communication with subordinates and his own arrogance in attacking a superior force led to his defeat. Greater understanding is not always popular as many historian writers are now facing the harsh truth of forensic science.
Thus, the temporary frame by which young adults measure truth seems to keep shifting as their understanding, or lack thereof, becomes more apparent. The weight at the end of the plumbline, the overall knowledge of the individual, grows over time and becomes more stable, but it is only held by a string. Without a great deal of knowledge, the plumbline can be carried by the breezes of fashion and craze. With too much knowledge the weight could bend the temporary frame, grounding the plumbline, or break the string. If the weight at the end of the plumbline is knowledge, the string is the connection of that knowledge to the family who built the temporary frame to which it is attached. If the weight of knowledge breaks the connection with the family the knowledge stagnates where it fell, for knowledge has no will of its own. Great knowledge has often bent the temporary framework of families. Child prodigies have caused families to construct ever more permanent frames, often at great expense and even greater pain to dismantle later. Frames insufficient to the weight of knowledge will bend, skewing the truth and causing doubt. This is likened to mental instability. A balance needs to be achieved.
People cannot know all the “truth” and it would be quite impossible to do so, therefore we live by a system of beliefs. This might be construed as ‘faith’ but not a religious one. We live our lives believing many things without knowing the truth.com Wall sockets provide electricity, the corner grocery store will have milk, the car will start when we turn the key. So long as these actions continue our belief remains firm. Undermining this belief and our perception of truth changes. California experienced brown outs for several months and the electric wall socket became less certain. A truck overturns on a highway and a corner store doesn’t get its milk delivery for the week. The car develops one of a hundred potential problems that causes it not to start and our trust in it becomes weaker. Our belief in the systems and structures we have built into our society, to operate as designed, borders on the religious, since faith demands sacrifice. The sacrifice of society today is often monetary. But money is not truth. Money pays for the car repair, the milk, the electricity. The sacrifice we really make is understanding.
By not understanding how things really work we become dependent on others to explain things for us. We trust people to give us accurate, albeit boiled down, information upon which we make decisions. This is trust. Like faith is part of a belief system of things that cannot be measured, trust implies if something does break our trust we can go back and check the records to find out what happened. As trust was broken by energy giant Enron, records checked and guilt assigned, so our trust in what we perceive as truth was compromised. Our trust in truth was compromised by a lack of understanding and willful deception. People didn’t look hard enough for the truth. Those whose job it was to understand what was happening failed to find the truth. Some were motivated by other factors.
Once the search for truth in any subject is compromised it becomes a liability. It could become a lie. Knowledge, or ‘data,’ is the fact portion of understanding. Comprehension is the mental portion of understanding. Seeing where and how these two different forms of intelligence intersect is called wisdom. Only through careful understanding can real wisdom be achieved.
Of all the anime coming from Japan, and despite the recent re-introduction of Ghost In The Shell, very few have gone so far as to show the origins and future of mankinds interaction with the internet. Serial Experiments Lain is above all the most fundamentally remembered and revered work within this genre. While Ghost In The SHell shows us how we would use it Lain shows us how we got there and why. But others who have gone before me have written far more eloquently than I.
Below is an article which appeared on Anime Review and republished here with the permission of the author. (Thank you, Nadav.)
Published June 3, 2012 | By Nadav
For the last post in the Remembering Love series we go back to the 90s to look at Serial Experiments Lain – a series that raised the intellectual bar to standards no other series quite ever managed to match. It made bold statements about religion, the way people interact with each other in postmodern society and the internet-based future we were headed to. In a way Serial Experiments Lain predicted the future with a frightening degree of accuracy. But before I delve into the series itself let’s put things in historical perspective. The year is 1995. A strange show called Neon Genesis Evangelion airs on TV and attracts casual viewers to watch anime for the first time. It looked and felt new, not because of the mundane robot battles (which you could find in other series) but because it had some intellectual depth in it. When Serial Experiments Lain came out in 1998 people were already eagerly waiting for a new intellectually-inspiring anime. But Lain wasn’t your typical “defend the earth and defeat the evil overlord” anime. It was weird, it was surreal; and it started by showing a young girl committing suicide by jumping off a building.
I was attracted to Serial Experiments Lain because the series arouses deep thought and encourages you to think outside the box. Or perhaps it would be better to say that in this particular series there exists no box. There was something scary about the way in which Serial Experiments Lain portrayed normality, because nothing was absolute in the “normality” it showed. While the series focused on a middle school girl called Iwakura Lain it soon transpired that the world surrounding Lain – her friends, her family and even her city – might all be lies. At some point Lain even discovers that she is not the only Lain – even she might be a lie or have a different identity than what she believes. René Descartes once declared “I think, therefore I am” and Serial Experiments Lain clings to this belief for dear life. As Lain discovers that there are some who know more about her than she does the only thing she understands for certain is that because she can think and believe in her own existence she must exist somehow. This desperate assertion of reality might seem convoluted at first, but one might say it is the basis for modern atheist belief: since atheists do not believe in god they must, at the very least, believe in their own existence. As Serial Experiments Lain progresses things that should be stable, that are taken for granted, change. For example, the city in which Lain lives in changes its appearance. At times Lain’s house is tidied up in a way that makes you doubt if people are actually living in it. Shadows seem to have physical substance in Lain’s world while some humans are almost reduced to the level of mere shadows.
Shadows (or perhaps bits of information from The Wired) creeping into the physical world.
There is one important rule that guides the world of Serial Experiments Lain: if people didn’t see something it may not have happened. For example, if someone stole something but nobody saw him do it or noticed the absence of the thing which he stole than it’s as if he never stole it in the first place. This means that by deleting information (on the internet) or making people forget something they saw you can effectively alter reality. Serial Experiments Lain had a very atheist view on life and extended the rule above to encompass the existence of god as well. Basically, as plain as it may sound, god only exists if people believe he/she/it does. If everyone decides to forget about their current god and adopt a new one then the old god would disappear in favor of the new one. It’s as simple as that. I’m sure religious people will have a problem relating to such an idea, but by the logic of the series this meant that the existence of an omnipotent god is questionable. Furthermore it hinted that a human can become god if enough people believe he/she is one. I remember myself being utterly fascinated by these notion. Here I am, watching an animated series that offers more food for thought than any other article or book I have ever read (at that point in my life) about god.
Lain becomes more and more concerned with The Wired.
The only absolute thing in Lain’s world was the existence of The Wired – an advanced (yet in some forms archaic) type of internet. Everyone uses The Wired to communicate, exchange information and build their alter-ego persona. When Serial Experiments Lain debuted in 1998 the (real) internet was still partly in the realm of science fiction. It was new, undeveloped and cumbersome. As a result When Nakamura Ryuutarou, Yoshitoshi ABe and Kishida Takahiro set out to create The Wired they tried to predict, according to their world views, how the internet will turn out to be in the near future. Some of these predictions came true in the most eerie of ways. For instance, in one of the episodes Lain’s father is seen participating in a conversation via an online chat room. To do so he had to line up several computer monitors before him. I’m sure this depiction of “human interaction” via chat rooms made people laugh in the 90s. But while most of us are still not using more than one or two monitors at a time we have pretty much enslaved ourselves to chat and community websites in much the same way as Lain’s father uses them. In Serial Experiments Lain The Wired plays a bigger role than just being the internet. It is suggested that The Wired, which offers a non-physical form for people to exist in, is where our souls actually reside. Think of the movie The Matrix, in which people were unaware that they are in fact connected to an interface in the real world and live a fake life in the computerized matrix world. Now flip it over: our souls live in the computerized world that is The Wired (the internet) while we are mistakenly assuming that we have physical bodies and that those physical bodies reside in the real world. In this respect Serial Experiments Lain was similar to movies like Ghost in The Shell that suggested the human soul can be freed of the body and maintained inside the internet. The big difference is that, as Serial Experiments Lain would have it, our souls existed in The Wired even before we knew The Wired existed. Living in the internet is in fact the highest level of awareness we can achieve and using our alter-ego online is no less than a spiritual activity. Lain came to understand this and felt her internet self is more real and more empowered than her physical self. When you think about it we do tend to spend an ever increasing amount of time on the internet. Our lives are becoming more and more entangled with it. The day in which we will be forced to always stay connected to the internet might not be so far away as we think.
By D.H. Tabor
3 January 2017
> CTRL-ALT-DEL
> Reboot
> [TINBox@new-host-1 ~] $ initialize persmatrix ‘TINBox’
Would you wake up to this? Could you? Start each day with a fresh reboot of your personality matrix, load a digital coffee to support your dependency app you downloaded and head off to work down a digital highway, through routers, network wires, switches, servers and finally get dumped at your workstation inside a secure server room, cut off from the outside world until break.
As a species we are not there yet. Not even close. The current state of technology is limited by power requirements, equipment size, processing power and memory space. It would take the power of the Pleiades Supercomputer at NASA to actually store a human being and process ‘digital life’ at speeds necessary to not only look but be human, that is to store your soul.
Pleiades Super Computer:
| Architecture | 163 SGI Altix ICE 8400/X racks (11,312 nodes), 211,872 Intel Xeon processors, InfiniBand QDR/FDR interconnect |
|---|---|
| Operating system | Linux[1] |
| Memory (RAM) | 724 terabytes |
| Storage | 27 petabytes (RAID) |
| Speed | 4.09 petaflops (sustained), 5.34 petaflops (peak) |
Courtesy of Wiki. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades_(supercomputer)
It takes about 4500 Kw to keep this running. Needless to say, this isn’t even remotely portable and requires a fiber-optic cable to interface between stations. Even by Moore’s Law it will take several decades for this to be reduced to the size of a backpack. Of course twenty years ago the idea of filling a 1 gigabyte hard drive seemed almost ridiculous. Today that represents the smallest RAM chip necessary for running Windows, and you need four of them to keep it from crashing.
But someday…
While this is all nice in theory there are much more practical applications of Digital Existentialism as a way of perceiving mankind’s interface with its digital self, since no one is uploading themselves to the net anytime soon. But a little history first: A man named Vannevar Bush once dreamed up the idea of the Memex, a memory indexing system that would be searchable. This led to hypertext protocol, http, and ultimately “Google”. Children no longer use books in school to find information, digest it, think about it, mainly because there is too much information to absorb. They use Google to get predigested information, sifted and sorted, ready for use. While such technology has proven a valuable tool for many, it remains underutilized and squandered as more useless information is dumped on the net.
In weeding out the garbage to get the right data it becomes clear the importance of analytics in the application of data acquisition. Thus the factor that drives all of our endeavors in ‘Digital Life’ is not having more data, but in more efficiently using our time. While much of the work on Man-Machine interface is directly involving helping people to overcome disabilities there is a much greater effort to help people to communicate better in real-time with both other humans and machines. The science of this is called a neural interface.
The neural interface is a means of connecting ones body and brain to a machine it can control. Currently there are people who can control robot arms, mouse cursors and other such apparatus. The required machine interfaces are getting better and smaller, but they are extremely limited. There is research in progress about using Artificial Intelligence to aid in this using predictive software to help movement applications to be more effective. Some of the bleeding edge research goes beyond this, but is this what we need to be part of the digital empire?
Mankind may be better served by finding a faster way to use information, thus companies like IBM have been working on redirecting the thinking of people away from AI to IA, Intelligence Augmentation. The logic path is simple. Developing technology that would allow the individual to access and transmit data directly to people’s brains without external appliances would be wonderful. IA is more about better decision making than human cyborgs. This was proven after Gary Kasparov lost to Watson, IBM’s popular gaming computer. Kasparov went on to try and figure out how he lost and how the technology won, which are two separate matters.
“After being defeated by Deep Blue, IBM’s chess playing machine, Gary Kasparov began exploring the interplay between man and computer and how each could affect the outcome of a game. Kasparov designed a tournament to determine which grouping would garner superior results – solely humans, solely computers, or a combination of humans and computers. Hundreds of matches were played.
Teams comprised of humans leveraging computer assistance consistently defeated all challengers including the strongest “computer only” and “human only” teams. A surprising finding, however, unfolded and was reported by Kasparov. “The surprise came at the conclusion of the event,” Kasparov stated. “The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art computer, but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time.”
Derek Wang, http://www.kdnuggets.com/2015/12/tasteanalytics-augmented-intelligence-decision-making.html
IA allows for everyday people to use digital intelligence to make better decisions to improve their lives. What would have happened in Allepo if everyone there had used such technology? They would have fled before they were trapped, I suspect, but people are people and they do cling to the strangest things, like property over life, pride over survival. (Sometimes it may be necessary to die for what you believe in, but to be slaughtered for the sake of politics is useless. There is much more to this line of thinking for another day, another thread.)
From this perspective mankind will not walk forward into the digital existence but one day find he is already there, fully digitized, and wondering how he got there. The more useful question to ask would be ‘Why?’. The answer is simple. Time. All of mankind’s efforts have been directed towards saving time, increasing efficiency and expanding knowledge to make the former two possible. We strive to save time, use machines that are supposed to increase our efficiency using time and get very irritated when we spend more time using these machines, ultimately losing time. Time becomes a commodity and we are often very bipolar in how we dole this commodity out. I have wasted time watching sporting events which contribute nothing of significant value to me than the mild entertainment they provide, yet I still cheer when Chelsea FC win. I have spent long hours hammering on a problem by less efficient means only to find the answer was easily a Google search away, but I learned some things through the experience.
Thus TINBox came into being through hard work and learning.
Inversely, I find writing easy and seek to plumb greater depths of thought in many subjects through asking questions of the reader and encouraging discussion. I do this in this particular media so that it may be preserved for a time so others can study it, see where we were as a species at different levels of society and determine if what has been posted here helped to further mankind. I would consider this a productive use of my time. What do you consider to be productive?
So I live here in this digital medium, typing characters into a computer to question the very box we perceive our digital lives with. The name of this box is Digital Existentialism. We exist. Existence is not in question, though some would argue to the contrary. Thus we are, and in this is common ground. The question here is where does the line between a digital life blur with a real-world one? I will refer to this as IRL (Sorry, Indy Racing League is not the correct answer. In-Real-Life).
Here, typing on this keyboard, I feel more alive than in IRL. I type and people read. I get a chance to put my best ideas on a blackboard and let people hone it down or blow it away, but at the core of what I have written they may have found a truth they didn’t have before. Here I can provide a perspective possibly not previously thought of by someone. I have the chance to change things. Yet I am just words on a page, an idea for which you have little in the way of proving who wrote this and only my writings as an answer to ‘Why’ I wrote them. In my digital life I can be productive and accomplish things I am not capable of IRL. You are here, reading these words, and wondering whether they apply to you or you have moved beyond them to an even greater understanding. You are part of this digital world simply by being here. And this is just the beginning.
If you are here, then who else is here?
Dir? List: Users
Kirito
you
God
There may be many others here who are lurking, meaning they haven’t logged in and are just reading. They prefer to remain anonymous but this also means they cannot post messages and share what has been in their digital life. They don’t have an avatar, a symbol or icon that identifies them to other users. But there are places like Second Life, where they do. Since 2003 Linden Labs has been running Second Life, a 3D Virtual world. Short of actually diving (neurally simulated experience, as in the Japanese Anime Sword Art Online, which I highly recommend) into the world it is everything you could hope to have in a digital life. And that started over a decade ago. And God is there too!
“God is in the wired” – Lain Iwakura ‘Serial Experiments Lain’
There are virtual churches in Second Life, this avatar based virtual world. These are attended by people who bring their IRL selves down the digital path to seek God’s wisdom. If God is here then he is everywhere. This leads me to ask this question…
Can spirituality exist amongst the electrons?
Since existentialism is about ‘existence preceding essence’ it is imperative to understand that it is not whatever label is applied here by whomever, but what truth you yourself have found as to whether “God is in the wired.” Moreover, existence implies action, means more than five minutes thinking about it. Can spirituality exist in the wired? While a church may establish itself in a virtual world it does not necessarily mean God is there. Yet the bible says:
“20 For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” – Matthew 18:20
There are no qualifications with this statement. There is nothing exclusionary. It would seem likely God could enter into anything mankind has made for He created mankind. Regardless of your faith or belief system this statement is intrinsically true for those who do. Without faith there are only electrons, small little negatively charged bundles of energy. Where did they come from? Energy is much more complicated than the atoms changed or destroyed to make it. It would be difficult to believe there isn’t an entity whose hand is involved in its creation and daily operation. Which means spiritual digital existentialism is the actions of living a spiritual life in a digital medium.
Mankind has often sought to ways to increase the amount of time they have here on earth. Life-span has increased and healthier lifestyles have often been successful, save the occasional car accident, life taking disease or terrorist incident. Part of living is a certain fear of dying. While the human body does have a limited capacity to sustain life, and mentally life can cease to serve a meaningful purpose, we remain unsure of what happens when we die so we avoid it as long as possible. Even spiritual individuals, whose faith would tell them there is nothing to fear, still worry and fret at their passing. “What more could I have done? Why didn’t I do this? Why did I do that? What about those I leave behind?” All very valid questions, though meaningless at the moment of one’s transition.
It is what you do now, this present moment, and what you plan to do with this information you are consuming. It has less to do with thinking than doing. Will you seek God in a digital dimension, trying to contain Him to 1’s and 0’s? Will this spark you into researching something larger than yourself regardless of what it is? Regrets do not exist in a life well lived, there just isn’t room. But what stops you? Why do you not act but continue to read this? What prevents you from seeking out what is in your heart and pursuing it, after all, that is what I am doing here. I am but a mirrored surface on a shiny tin box telling you there is no box, giving you a different perspective on the world around you. But if there is no box…. Then your perceptions are your own regardless of the reflections you see.
Now comes the hard part. If there is no box then why are you sitting inside one? TINBox is a euphemism for anti-paradigm. Paradigm’s are a way of thinking which allows for drawing faster conclusions and thus saving time. Our spiritual experiences are a journey without end. Is fast better? Being fast doesn’t provide any greater perspective than standing still. Fast allow you to see a great deal but briefly and without context. Standing still allows for the greatest absorption but leads to stagnation. People move, almost constantly, taking in new experiences at a phenomenal rate, mostly shot at us by media outlets vying for the three to six seconds of attention they can garner. We hide in our tin boxes because its easier, safer, than venturing out into the noise, an ocean in zero gravity threatening to drown us regardless of our best efforts to swim to the surface.
But what if you could surf? Moving with the waves of information and experience, being able to choose a path through to keep on surfing. This experience, an existence where we feel we can see the horizon even as it closes in on top of us, being able to stay ahead of it while also being propelled by it, drawing energy from it as we rush forward, working with others on the same wave to create new patterns in the surface. But as quickly as the pattern forms it is lost in the movement and energy of the wave. We go through life, accomplish our little bit of change, pass what we can onto our children and disappear back to dust. In a hundred years no one comes to visit our grave and who we are as an individual is lost in time.
So why try? What difference does our existence make?
If you believe in nothing then it is only as good as what you pass along to those who follow you. How you lived your life will be an example for others, whether you lived good or bad, richly or poorly, and they will draw their own conclusions based on their perceptions. How are you perceived? To know this you need an echo, a sounding board who is honest and caring. Someone you trust. This is where the paradigm of life fails, our interactions with others. Despite our best efforts at risk management there remains the unknown factor of trust, the constantly changing vortex of forces which can help us achieve great heights or crush us mercilessly. Trust requires judgment and it is often our judgment which defeats us.
Ernest Hemingway once said the only way to learn how to trust people is to trust them. There is no box for this. It is existentialism applied, regardless whether in an analog or digital life. All relationships are built on trust, even the trust implied in mistrust. We trust banks with our money. We trust employers with our work. We trust computers to store our data. We don’t trust governments to act always in our interests. (Implied mistrust)
Spiritually we trust God to take care of us. We trust our cars to get us where we need to go. All of this works until it breaks. Trust in the digital world often comes down to certificate keys and server up-time. How much more so when we find ourselves embedded in a digital virtual world? Do you trust your anti-virus protection? What if someone started rewriting your code? You now had three digital arms and two heads. Trust remains a relationship.
But would you go through this digital life alone? Scientifically, people do not fare well being alone. Human interaction helps us to maintain our well being mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally. Whether this interaction is in a coffee shop or an online forum is irrelevant. The Internet is littered with forum’s, chat rooms, lobbies, Google hangouts, IRC channels and countless other social gathering systems. All relationships are initiated on the thinnest threads of connection and are either developed or broken. These connections are built upon a set of mutual needs, or dependencies if you will, retaining all the same social dynamics of an IRL relationship. The profound difference between the two is the digital relationship is based on words and trust. It takes more discipline to maintain such a relationship, for there are fewer tangible bindings to maintain the connection, just the electrons on the screen. How much do you trust someone you haven’t physically seen?
In our post-Snowden world we have seen the trust we have in the digital world erode a bit.
Who really is this person I am chatting with? This is what TINBox calls into question, though it is not meant to be destructive, I merely want people to seek the truth actively. It is this kind of truth seeking which breaks dawn many paradigms, for the ability to box something in means it was cut off from something else, and everything in the digital world is connected. To answer where my earlier question about where does our IRL existence stop and our digital one start… at the interface. How far we take the interface into ourselves determines our connection. If it become possible to store the human soul on the net, would you?
Time to choose: Red pill or the Blue pill?
Blogging. Conveying ideas I have accumulated over time that I have come to believe are true and accurate. No better place to start then. What is ‘truth’? In reality this is the last question. There are three before it. What is knowledge? What is understanding? What is wisdom?
TINBox starts here. To discern the box one finds themselves in it is important to know all the truth of this environment we may have created for ourselves, or wish to escape from.
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