World 2.0

World 2.0 – Trans-Human Zeitgeist

Part 1 : Birth of the Neosapiens (Fuck yea Exosquad! Wait… NOOOOO LEEEEOOOOONNNNN!!!!!!!! :’0 +100 cool points for anyone who gets that joke about the first cartoon that made me cry.)

The moon looks a lot different now that the settlement is in full swing. The orb hanging in this hazy, polluted-pink sky is much different than the one I remember from 50 years ago. It all started with a movement called The Zeitgeist. Named after the very ephemeral element of mankind they wished to improve. This group of visionaries in social engineering, technology and philosophy hoped to attain a true self-sustaining and open-source society. A society constructed from the ground up with inherent protections against greed, warmongering, power structures and hierarchies. A society of ubiquity and affluence, where the real defining choice the daily grind is simply, “What amenities do I prefer?”

Google’s CEOs Larry page and Eric Schmidt happened to fall into a unique category of the corporate ultra-elite of human history. They had all the money they needed to do whatever they wanted. They could entrench themselves forever in power and money, like so many before them, but instead they wanted change. In their mind, they wanted to use their affluence to give the ultimate gifts back to humanity, instead of hoarding their fortunes away in a mighty palace. It just so happened that never before in human history had people so forward thinking been in such a privileged position. They didn’t postulate about this anomaly though, they acted. They spent multiple years and billions of dollars to get the framework, the laws, the technology and a strategy written out in plain English. Their singular mission was to transcend the shackles of the entrenched technocracy, to free mankind from monies and currencies and to get even the common man to focus not on survival but, finally, on the greater good, on invention and art. They went on to use a big gift from their’s and other’s corporate coffers, and the advent of new technology, to finally achieve true post-human society.

The plan was set out in multiple stages, given in brief here as I remember them happening. Build a space elevator, the oft-thought of brass ring of space expansion. Then, build manufacture facilities on the planet for production of robots. This goal has an inherent fractal expansion element. The first factory builds the robots which build the next factory, and so on. Essentially, perfect binary expansion until saturation. The first factory was the only one they needed to build with robots carted up, fully assembled from earth. The rest would be assembled on-site from much cheaper (to transport and to purchase) raw materials and mass fabricated, modular parts. The dusty surface of the moon was even found to be a great composition for making concrete. With the space elevator and recently mastered ion-thrust drives, the entire process of transportation was fueled by electricity, which rained down free from the sun and rolled in with the tide and swept in with the wind. Google’s clean energy initiatives of the early 21rst century actually paid for a large part of this project, selling cheap efficient energy to the world at large. Lastly the robots would build the starting point of the moon colony and receive their human hosts upon completion.

They figured out through simple arithmetic and best-guess statistics that all of the energy needs of this society could be satisfied by covering roughly one quarter of the moon’s surface with solar panels. These were the first items to be spearheaded by the automated construction robots. Large, hexagonal plates, miles across, were arranged on the surface at neat, regular intervals. They were built on platforms that could be lifted if, in the distant future, the real estate needed to do double duty, other than just for energy production. From earth, the moon kind of looks like a golf ball, but there are more dark spots in the middle where the sunlight is gathered at the highest efficiency. As the solar panel infrastructure neared completion, they had such a surplus of energy (from the lack of the human guests) that they regularly let out a giant spark on a massive Jacobs ladder, just to remind the world that they were still up there busily crafting their little robotic hearts away.

The robots would build continuously and furiously. The factories employed highly efficient fabrication techniques, where tiny machines did tiny work and created very intricate designs in a seeming frenzy of construction. The progress ramped up exponentially. So startlingly quickly was the task completed, a mere 10 years after the elevator, that the pundits were deeming it a dismal financial failure for the companies involved just as they revealed that the colony was up, running and waiting for people to join their cause.

The first city cut its tape and allowed the first envoys two months ago, and last week I got an invitation. The invitations were given out pseudo-randomly, with a good cross section of peoples, cultures and skills. This was all very carefully crafted by the data mining techniques Google was so adept at in their early technological developments. I was just one of the lucky ones, I suppose. I’m standing now in the waiting area of the Virgin Space station in Palo Alto California, which will take me halfway across the world to the Universal Space Elevator, ten miles off the coast of Japan. The space elevator will take me out to the inner edge of the upper atmosphere, a point of such low gravity that the small push of the ion-thrust drives is more than enough to take you all the way to the New World. In the two weeks it takes for the entire trip I’ll be reading and watching movies about what awaits me in my new life in the New World.

I can’t help but get a little choked up as the polite flight attendants tell us to bid our last farewells to earth and all things terrestrial and begin boarding the craft. I have only one item in my possession, having rescinded all my worldly goods to the post-humanist society to be reallocated. All that belongs to me now has been digitized and placed on a personal tablet computer, which will be central to my life in World 2.0. Anything else I need will be provided as necessary. It’s essentially cheaper to build it there than to carry it with me. And knowing this, I feel so utterly liberated.

Part 2 : Life

Depending on which colony you are in, you could be looking directly at earth through your windows at all times. Some people like looking back at the old world to remember or reminisce. Others like to look forward, towards empty space and the blinding sun, which necessitates shading the glass during the full spectrum hours. A quick glance at our personal (the tablet computer terminal that essential to our way of life) would show us statistics and demographics of who likes to live where and look at what, but that’s a moot point.

From where we are right now we can see the space elevator stabbing up out of the sky, a tower of Babel, an epic, shiny, threadlike obelisk. On top of the elevator is a large flat wing. This wing surfs on the upper crust of the outer atmosphere 150 miles up, which creates enough lift to make up for the lack of support from below. It essentially holds up the entire structure. Deploying this wing was also a critical part of building the elevator, as it was built more from the top down than from the bottom up. This wing is constantly guided over the surface of the atmosphere, so as not to torsion or tear, the strong but flexible material that makes up the shaft of the elevator. Just as we’re looking out we can see another ship departing, new lives welcomed into the New World just in pace with it expanding to accommodate them. The construction workers, the robots, are just finishing the last aesthetic touches to the new colony.

Above the headboard, just as you enter this new colony from the landing site is a little known quote from Nelson Mandela from 2008 : “The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid but he who conquers fear. Where people of goodwill get together and transcend their differences for the common good, peaceful and just solutions can be found, even for those problems that seem most intractable.” The people have lived up to this ideal quite remarkably in the past 50 years. We can recall the stories from our grandparents and even our parents, about the state of transition in attitude. We feel so far removed from war and suffering that now they play no role in our day to day lives, and so much for the better.

A new vote is ready and waiting to be weighed upon on our personals. Today it is whether or not we should share, at no cost, our newest discovery in femptotechnology, which allows matter to be slowly transmuted from one element to another. This technology has allowed for the very useless dust of the lunar surface to be slowly (though at great energy costs) into something very useful. The plants which used to recycle the waste of the population are also slowly being re-tasked to transmute instead of reuse. Though this weighs heavy on our electrical systems, they don’t come close to sapping them entirely, and its expected the process will become much more efficient over time. By the end of the day, on average, 98% of the people in the New World will have said their piece on the subject. We fill in multiple choice questions and provide a brief essay of their personal feelings on the matter, if any. All of this data will be coagulated, analyzed and used directly on the policy decision. It is wholly expectable that some random citizen will have coined the feelings of the people so completely that her quote will be on the communication presenting our decision to the Old World. This further tightens the feedback loop of our society to our policy, to personalize it, and it has been very rewarding.

On the top of the bridge is a large surfboard. This surfboard provides all the lift necessary to make up for the lack of support from the ground. Essentially the elevator is hanging on this wing, skimming over the surface of the atmosphere as the world turns.

What its like on World 2.0? What people spend their time doing? How they become wildly productive and leap ahead of contemporary society in all tactile measures?

Cohesive transparent democratic governance through combinations of computer decision making, statistical analysis and ubiquitous computing and human input devices.

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This document contains plot outlines, reference material used and text that didn’t make it into the regular document… Spoilers below, this is a work in progress with hopefully three parts… you’ve been warned…

Part 2 : Life

On the top of the bridge is a large surfboard. This surfboard provides all the lift necessary to make up for the lack of support from the ground. Essentially the elevator is hanging on this wing, skimming over the surface of the atmosphere as the world turns.

What its like on World 2.0? What people spend their time doing? How they become wildly productive and leap ahead of contemporary society in all tactile measures?

Cohesive transparent democratic governance through combinations of computer decision making, statistical analysis and ubiquitous computing and human input devices.

Part 3: Death …aka Rebirth... Or The World of Birth Part Two... Or Birth The Reckoning… Or Afterbirth…

The evolution of post-humanist society. Trickle down to the rest of the world. The construction of slave states. The start of the Great War from the Technocracy to regain control. The digitization of the populace to escape from earth along with the great technologies they developed.

Sources, further reading :

http://thezeitgeistmovement.com/

Zeitgeist - A German term meaning "spirit of the time." It refers to the moral and intellectual trends of a given era.

Nelson Mandela Quote :

http://www.rd.com/your-america-inspiring-people-and-stories/eight-celebrities-share-what-theyve-learned/article98952-1.html

The Edge

The Edge

A gentle hum of static and clicks can be heard in the vacant room like soft rain on a distant tin roof. A colored and shifting light projects from a single powered up cathode ray tube onto the back wall. It’s 4:32 am in a dark, dusty arcade, after hours in the suburban part of Hollywood, Florida. Billy Mitchell is mechanically flicking the joystick of Ms. Pac-Man back and fourth in a seeming trance as the lipsticked avatar plods through the maze of the game world; Gobbling up fruits and dots and keys, going invulnerable and devouring ghosts, shifting in near-zero time to make last minute recalculations of the pathing around enemies.

This seems like the thousandth time he has come this far, since he has replayed it in his head so many times, but really it’s only the twelfth. Being so methodical in his approach to this game, as he had done with the original Pac-Man, he is determined not just to see the end of the game but to truly understand it. He aims to comprehend the logic of achieving the highest scores with the most efficiency and repeatability. This is at least one order of magnitude more difficult from the original Pac-Man. Not because of the female version’s, distracting, lascivious curve, but because of a simple 8-bit random factor that compounds some decisions from being purely deterministic to partially based on luck. This maddens him to no end.

The last real levels of the game are quickly approaching, the 133rd level and beyond. He has been waiting hours, making multiple attempts today, to get back to this point and make another foray into the unknown. After level 133 the game starts to break down, the walls break down, the dots disappear, the ghosts move freely, the world spins, a new frontier is born there on the bright, flickering screen. He quickly dispatches the last level and bravely fords onward. Level 134 shows a new twist from last time, in this iteration it is inverted, the maze is upside down. Where he was playing mechanically and listlessly, Billy’s style changes instantly into “explore mode”. He fiddles around the fringes of the level and can tell the map may be inverted on the screen, but the characters are still moving the same way as before. By memory, he navigates the maze, closing his eyes when he is safely away from the ghosts to use his internal mind-maze instead of the inverted trick being displayed to him. He bests this level without a bit of trouble and moves another step closer to the edge.

This really is the Edge, he knows. Inside this massive cabinet is a set of small computer boards populated with TTL chips. The mind of the machine is a single Zilog Z80, 3.6Mhz processor and the code for the game is stored on an array of ROM chips totaling up to 4kb. At the bottom of the games code is 89 bytes of unused space. The company never intended, nor even conceived that anyone could make it this far. The game simply runs off the end of the written memory and resets, sometimes. And the sometimes is the key. Billy is sure of it. Sometimes you get to the Edge instead.

And here it comes. Level 135 spins up and there is no game world at all. The ghosts meander aimlessly, their simple rule set makes no sense when the walls don’t exist and the game cannot judge the relative position of the pieces. A banana flies diagonally across the screen, wrapping around the edge and fantastic speed. Eventually it collides with Ms. Pac-man by accident and pops off an even 5000 points. Billy takes note that he is still interacting with some of the game pieces, though the game world seems to be slowly disintegrating.

He sees points popping up, ten at a time. He must be eating more dots, and there a key, a bigger jump in his score. A key after level 133? That makes no sense to him, but he continues to explore, undeterred. He goes across the map several times, looping straight through the middle, then down a row, then down another row. There certainly are no invisible walls this time, and he is having trouble locating all the dots. Finally with much fiddling he finds the last few in the blankness, avoiding ghosts that are making completely arbitrary navigations. And this is where things start to get weird.

Level 136 is not supposed to be another repetition of the same palette. Under normal circumstances the game would go and retrieve another page from the ROM, neatly encoded in a very efficient, binary manner, but it simply doesn’t exist. The character engine takes over and random sprites now come shooting out. An ampersand is a ghost, or is it a fruit? Random characters, lines, fuzz, all spewing out onto the screen. And that’s when he notices there are two Ms. Pac-Mans. Another avatar has wandered into the world and its moving about as well.

They move towards each other, make a last second dodge when they get too close, as if probing for danger. They both pirouette and then stop… Inch forward, inch backward, stop… They both make these simple maneuvers in turn with each other, but it shows they are both probing each other. Communicating in a language that consists purely of up, down, left, right. Just as the dialogue is about to progress a number sign comes swooping in diagonally and collides with him, it must have been a ghost gone AWOL, spinning out of control, no longer bounded by the rules of the normal world. The kill screen splashes by and the game resets and Billy feels even more confused about the Edge than he did before. He stares at the machine for a long time pondering the encounter he just had, mystified.

A thousand miles away in Queens NY, a Jamaican immigrant named Abner Bancroft Ashman is playing Ms. Pac-Man in a local pizza shop. Abner is convinced he’s paid for the machine himself, despite his marathon, multi-hour runs, such as the one he is in right now. Abner has a weird religious philosophy about Ms. Pac-Man. Not any scientific or critical viewpoint, he merely takes the lessons it preaches and moves on to the next level. Tonight he is farther than he has ever been. The owner left him the key and told him to lock up on his way out. They had closed at least 6 hours ago. Abner deftly collects a final set of invisible dots as a banana suddenly turns into a slash and then a percent sign and flies off the screen in dramatic elliptical arc.

On the next level the game has gone completely sideways, a chaotic underworld in contrast to the terrestrial banality of the previous levels. As he crept around wildly dodging random characters he noticed something he truly had never seen before. Another Ms. Pac-Man was wandering around, also visibly freaked by the chaos of the game world. He pushed towards it, and it towards he, then they both stopped and pulled away. Again they danced, towards and away, but asynchronously. They spun around in a tight circle, one clockwise, the other counter clockwise. Was it intelligent? How could it be moving? Why was there a single point of non-randomness in a sea of mish-mashed characters and computer code? Before he could do anymore probing, a rogue symbol smashed into him from nowhere and the kill screen splashed out resetting the game. Abner did not have any knowledge of the inner workings of computers, ROM, memory and game engines. His brain heated up and his heart leapt into his chest in a fashion he had felt very few times before. He felt so utterly close to God.

========== Spoiler ===========

They are both going off the edge of the game’s machine code, to the kill screen, at exactly the same time, meet each other ingame, have a seeming conversation with just the confused gyrations of hteir ms. Pacmans. The lakc of instructions and the seeming random, seeming inconceivable luck of the moment has connected two worlds in a totally unexpected way. This reveals the Deus-ex-machina of it. The fringe world on the edge of valid memory. The innate beauty and complexity of the universe and nature displayed in 8 bit characters on the game screen to two of the first ambassadors to true virtual reality.

Use wikipedia on billy Mitchell for home town etc, where he would be in 1984, Hollywood Florida… born july 16, 1965.. in 1984 he was.. 19 after july say its august but still stupid hot cause its florida..

http://laweekly.blogs.com/joshuah_bearman/files/harpers_billy_mitchell.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms_pacman

4kb ram, Z80, 3.6 Mhz, wikipedia Z80, Ms Pac man is the game.

Like Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man has a bug in the fruit-drawing routine, which renders the 256th board unplayable. While it may be possible to reach the 256th board using the "rack test" cheat available as a DIP switch (usable through MAME or other arcade emulator), the actual arcade hardware will crash at or around the 134th board. At this point in the game, a bug in the code causes invalid data tables to be used for a subroutine which is supposed to draw invisible characters which slow down the ghosts in the tunnels^[1]. On level 142, a similar bug causes a corrupt value to be loaded into the pointer to the maze data, causing the screen to turn black. Although the ghosts and Ms. Pac-Man are still visible, the game becomes unplayable.

The end of Ms. Pac Man

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk1EA8LslW8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAv_jhnXuO8&feature=related

Abner Bancroft Ashman = savant

Jamaican immigrant from queens

• First person to achieve a perfect Pac-Man score of 3,333,360, achieved July 4, 1999 at Funspot Family Fun Center in New Hampshire. ^[3]
• Achieved a score on Donkey Kong Jr. of 957,300 in 2004.^[1]
• Achieved a score on Donkey Kong of 1,050,200 in 2007.^[7]
• Achieved a score on Burgertime of 7,881,050 in 1984. The score was beaten in 2006 by Bryan L Wagner.^[1]

Comments :

Jared :

Hmmm, do they converse knowing they are talking to each other? Or do they each think that they are talking to the CPU or some type of God manifestation in the computer when really they are conversing with another player? Will be interesting to see where you go with that part.

Me :

I decided to leave it to the user to interpret. Maybe they have crossed a void in time, maybe their rom code is intricately llinked in a corner case of probability and quantum entanglement, them beign the only two people who have ever explored the space at hte end of the rom code... or perhaps its an "AI" an intelligent side effect of their playing the game, adn it has tampered with the bits at the bottom and created something out of randomness that is greater than the intended software could acheive... maybe it is god mixing it up in the ether... i think it works every which way and i want to write it in such a way that the reader gets to decide what they like best..

they have a "conversation" because they know how to move about the game world. They share a common tongue of "how to dodge a ghost" or "how to track down a bouncing fruit" and that language shows in their motions.. hence why they both get a haunting feeling of the presense of intelligence..

Google Moon

The moon looks a lot different now that the Google settlement is in full swing. The orb hanging in this hazy, polluted-pink sky is much different than the one I remember from 50 years ago. It all started with a movement called The Zeitgeist. Named after the very ephemeral element of mankind they wished to change, these visionaries in social engineering and philosophy hoped to attain a true self-sustaining and open-source society. A society constructed from the ground up with inherent protections against greed, warmongering, power structures and hierarchies. A society of ubiquity and affluence, where the real defining choice the daily grind is simply, “What amenities do I prefer?”

Google’s CEOs Larry page and Eric Schmidt happened to fall into a unique category of the corporate ultra-elite. They had all the money they needed to do whatever they wanted. They could entrench themselves forever in power and money, like so many before them, but instead they wanted change. They wanted to share their gifts instead of hoarding them away in a mighty palace. They spent multiple years and billions of dollars to get the framework, the laws, the technology and a strategy written out in plain English. Their singular mission was to transcend the shackles of the entrenched technocracy, to free mankind from monies and currencies and to get even the common man to focus not on survival but, finally, on the greater good. They went on to use a big gift from their’s and other’s corporate coffers, and the advent of new technology, to finally achieve true post-humanism.

The plan was set out in multiple stages, given in brief here as I remember them happening. Build a space elevator, the oft-thought of brass ring of space expansion. Then, build manufacture facilities on the planet for production of robots. This goal has a fractal expansion element built in. The first factory builds the robots which build the next factory, and so on. The first factory was the only one they needed to build with robots carted up, fully assembled from earth. The rest could be assembled on-site from much cheaper (to transport and to purchase) raw materials and mass fabricated, modular parts. With the space elevator and recently mastered ion-thrust drives, the entire process of transportation was fueled by electricity, which rained down free from the sun and rolled in with the tide and swept in with the wind. Lastly the robots would build the starting point of the moon colony and receive their human hosts upon completion.

They figured out through simple arithmetic and best-guess statistics that all of the energy needs of this society could be satisfied by covering roughly one quarter of the moon’s surface with solar panels. These were the first items to be built by the automated construction robots. Large, hexagonal plates, miles across, were arranged on the surface at neat, regular intervals. They were built on platforms that could be lifted if, in the distant future, the real estate became more valuable than merely just for energy production. From earth, the moon kind of looks like a soccer ball, but there are more dark spots in the middle where the sunlight is gathered at the highest efficiency.

The robots would build continuously and furiously. The factories employed highly efficient nano-fabrication techniques, where tiny machines did tiny work and created very intricate designs in a seeming soup of constructivism. The progress ramped up exponentially. So startlingly quickly was the task completed, a mere 10 years, that the pundits were deeming it a dismal financial failure for the companies involved just as they revealed that the colony was up, running and waiting for people to join their cause.

The first city cut its tape and allowed the first envoys two months ago, and last week I got an invitation. I’m standing now in the waiting area of the Virgin Space station in Palo Alto California, which will take me halfway across the world to the Universal Space Elevator, ten miles off the coast of Japan. The space elevator will take me out to the inner edge of the upper atmosphere, a point of such low gravity that the small push of the ion-thrust drives is more than enough to take you all the way to the New World. In the two weeks it takes for the entire trip I’ll be reading and watching movies about what awaits me in my new life in the New World. I can’t help but get a little choked up as the polite flight attendants tell us to bid our last farewells to earth and all things terrestrial and begin boarding the craft.

Sources, further reading :

http://thezeitgeistmovement.com/

Zeitgeist - A German term meaning "spirit of the time." It refers to the moral and intellectual trends of a given era.