Speed of Thought, Looking for Fulfillment

Sometimes I wonder why I am so busy.
Every morning, before my alarm goes off, my phone makes plenty of noises and chirps and squeaks to let me know that robots are sending me email. In a half-dreamy state of grog, I pick up my phone and look. Sales on car parts. Free movie rental when you buy a soda. Write to your senator to encoura..... zzzzzzz.
Twenty minutes later it's the same thing. Half an hour after that, my alarm actually goes off and I sit up.
And check my email.
Why? Who am I waiting to hear from, God? A supermodel? Someone offering me a job? What makes my brain make my body think that they might be emailing me at such ungodly hours when even most birds are upset that there are birds already chirping. All I know is, when I do get a relevant tidbit - not necessarily e-mail, or a phone call, or a face to face conversation - it excites my brain and makes me feel alive. Dopamine, rushing in because what I've been looking for is finally there. It's like love. You don't know what you're looking for until you find it.
But it is a smaller event than that, something much more immediate and visceral, but fleeting. It is falling in love with a moment, an object, an email, someone's smile, for just a minute. It excites our brains and makes us feel alive, fulfilled. The view from the top of a mountain can do that, so can walking through a park with your headphones on at just the right moment.

So what does this have to do with technology? Recently I watched an ABC special called Science and Spirituality where they were creating "religious experiences" in the brain. Well, if that's true, couldn't we shoot lasers into our brain to trigger dumps of dopamine and endorphins? I do not mean the uncontrolled rush that comes from certain illicit drugs, as the nature of their illegality makes finding the right "amount" something best left to Timothy Leary. But what if we could zap ourselves - and make ourselves smile, fulfilled, happy, for just a moment out of the day? Not to say we are all depressed - and neither is the author - but sometimes a moment of pure joy is a blissful spark to a dull day.

Now, while there are drugs that do this, as have been mentioned, some of them apparently do it well. A major bit in the written news lately (as I do not consider much TV News worth watching) mentioned that Johns Hopkins University had found the "sweet spot" for doses of psychoactive mushrooms, stating that small but effective doses over long periods of time are amazing for the human brain and mood. Sounds like a natural Paxil - and some part of me wonders why we don't take nature more seriously more often, but medicine is just a part of the technological machine as anything else.

Sexuality and Singularity

As part of the Art & Tech class, I've read Slavoj Zizek's No Sex, Please, We're Post-Human! which touches on a wide variety of topics from the Turing test in relation to male/female conversations, Kurzweil'd theories of a biotech singularity, and the sexuality of the internet as a facet of perversion in our lives.
The full essay is available at http://www.lacan.com/nosex.htm, but to continue on a point I must quote most of a paragraph from the writing

...Even advocates of cyberspace warn us that we should not totally forget our body, that we should maintain our anchoring in the "real life" by returning, regularly, from our immersion in cyberspace to the intense experience of our body, from sex to jogging. We will never turn ourselves into virtual entities freely floating from one to another virtual universe: our "real life" body and its mortality is the ultimate horizon of our existence, the ultimate, innermost impossibility that underpins the immersion in all possible multiple virtual universes. Yet, at the same time, in cyberspace the body returns with a vengeance: in popular perception, "cyberspace IS hardcore pornography," i.e. hardcore pornography is perceived as the predominant use of cyberspace. The literal "enlightenment," the "lightness of being," the relief/alleviation we feel when we freely float in cyberspace (or, even more, in Virtual Reality), is not the experience of being bodyless, but the experience of possessing another - aetheric, virtual, weightless - body, a body which does not confine us to the inert materiality and finitude, an angelic spectral body, a body which can be artificially recreated and manipulated. Cyberspace thus designates a turn, a kind of "negation of negation," in the gradual progress towards the disembodying of our experience (first writing instead of the "living" speech, then press, then the mass media, then radio, then TV): in cyberspace, we return to the bodily immediacy, but to an uncanny, virtual immediacy...

What comes to mind about this thought of "internet sex" is something that has been brought up recently in recent news but something I don't want to delve into beyond what I need to. For those who don't know, someone (important) tweeted something (inappropriate) on the internet in the form of a picture. He got in trouble for it, sort-of admitted to it, then admitted to it when he couldn't deny it much more. Well, this guy is now seeking "rehabilitation" and counseling for his inappropriate use of the internet. He fell into the hole of hardcore internet "pornography" (where everything is pornographic and lewd; aside from being a place filled with actual pornographic images) and came to a point where the appropriateness of real life was removed from his being. He forgot that he lived in the real world, and made a decision on the internet that impacted everything about his real life.

(Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

 This brings up an interesting point. When an addiction to the internet warrant rehabilitation? I understand that this man's case is at one end of the scale - as he basically published lewd photos while in office - but people have been sent away for this because of playing too much WoW. If we're all moving towards a singularity where our bodies are combined with computers and we're all connected to a global/international/interplanetary network, who is going to go to rehab for an addiction to being on the internet? Is my addiction to car parts going to translate over to the bionet and get me in trouble there? Hell, are we even going to have cars? Maybe some of us can be built into cars. I don't know if I'd like that as a permanent thing, but I'm sure it's better than being shamed for putting my "manly silhouette" on the internet.
So as part of the singularity, who are you going to be? We're no longer going to be able to chose what we put on the neural network as we will all be thinking together. Where your head is and where you want your head to be is not only a major part of what you'll be when the singularity comes, but what you'll be in real life. Fill your head with thoughts of girls across the country and your life in "tweets"?
Well, that's what you'll get known for, Weiner.

Intellectual Property and Skating... LOCALS ONLY!

When skateboarding started en masse (in different pockets across the US in the mid 70's) as more than just a novelty item, and people began to skate manmade items and find the joy in gleaming, people began to treat some of this property as "theirs." This created problems with skaters - groups of skaters and other groups of skaters would come to fight with each other as if they were gangs (Thrashin' is mandatory viewing, Romeo and Juliet set with skateboards).
Today, this still happens. People argue with each other about what "spot" belongs to who. I'll agree - sometimes there are secret plots you want to keep to yourself. But in a world of millions of people, and more importantly, living in a country like the US, people are going to come, and find what you have found. Sometimes they'll find the same place or start developing the same style as you, right around the same time, devoid of contact with you. But some people will take it personally, even though it has nothing to do with them.
How does play into technology? Technology is much like style (an idea visualized) or spots (the idea of property). Sometimes, technologies are developed simultaneously. Sometimes not. Ideas can be built upon - if we didn't have the black and white tube TV, we'd never have our flatscreen plasmas. If a skater takes your trick, gets used to it, and then builds upon it, that's progress.
What's my point? Let's all relax a little bit about ideas - they should be shared, and built upon, instead of hoarded. Because when people take things too seriously, ideas - like spots, styles, or entire sports - can be stifled.