By summary of way, this article intends to reframe your understanding of literacy before condensing the bulk of the content presented across the body of the document down to four simple steps for deeper exploration. First off, you'll note the pretentious title. Before we get started, let me ask you to click this link. Don't worry, it'll open in an entirely new window, and you won't lose your place here. I asked you to click the link to distract you from the pretentious title, but that title is likely what lead you to read at least the first three sentences in this paragraph. What does this mean?
It means that you have made an assumption that these words are leading somewhere, that they are not simply words spat out of a keyword generator. You are assuming that there is some intention behind these words guiding them toward a revelation, a meaning to be imparted, a technique described, or recipe presented. That's taking a lot on faith, that's making the assumption that I am both sober and sane enough to present a viable and actionable set of perspectives, beliefs, and anecdotes that can deepen your perception profitably with a scant few electrons and a few moments of your time.
Slapping a website together and getting people to it, let alone convincing them to read it, or engage with it, is a massive investment of time, energy, and emotional baggage. A few hours perusing most personal web pages, blogs, journals, profiles, and videos reveal a maddening white-noise of self-indulgence, in many ways a vampiric or parasitic manifestation of data fungus, in the terminology of Steven Johnson. Creating change, real vibrant spectral change on many layers of reality simultaneously, requires one hell of a set-up. Sculpting existing data fungus while simultaneously initiating noise and vibrations around the semantic web that fungus has accreted around, now that's fucking magic.
See, I've already lost 80% of you who were drawn in by the title that were unable to click the more link and make it to this page... likely the few who made the jump did so in part because you are thinking, at least preconsciously, WTF is this Zen Werewolf character rattling around in your head doing like that that he has acquired layers of voice through words on a screen... and perhaps ever more gently the whispered question follows like a thread: what about the QR Code square that started this blog post?
To begin then, I ask You: What is a Word?
While you are thinking about that question, planning to state your opinion in the comment box below, let me hit you with a few unrelated thoughts. First off, you are not an individual. You are a component in a metabiological organism which seeks only to grow outward from its edges, at least up until the point where you begin identifying the contact points between you and the hive mind outside of physical constraints which is guiding every aspect of your development.
And it all began with the cruel mind-trap of literacy forced upon you by other sufferers early in your development. The very fact that you are revivifying the internal dynamic I as writer experience in laying down these tarnished imperfections of constraint before you, that the entities firmly enshrined at the white-hot crux of thought and meaning can maintain their stranglehold on culture by having evolved alongside our species in the spaces in between flesh, indicates how diabolically enslaved we are to these watchers, these forces embedded at right angles to malkuthian space.
In sigilization, and in bind runes, in veves, in iconographic declarations of purpose outside of language and with passionate focus, entire semantic signifiers can be built which impart knowledge alongside the violent, literary dominion of thought. Perhaps the unmooring of literacy evangelization protocols from the new mechanisms of history will follow, but for now we can come together in the shadow of the classifiers, the spime wranglers, the watchers, and use the very systems of technological control to communicate in other ways, to assign meaning and memory to icons that deepen the textual aspects of those icons, and in so doing to reroute thought, bypassing the suspect and controlling nature of dominator language structures and rely on the adaptive and intuitive nature of private symbolism and technologically generated machine code.
If you did not get that, then read very closely - WORDS are EATING your THOUGHTS. Words are that which devour the pure thought and the letters on a page, the text, is the shit words streak out behind in their passage. Words are no more thought than nails, hair, skin, and teeth are you. These shapes that can carry content across gaps through optic radiation, these letters and statements and paragraphs, they're an action that need only be observed to be complete, and by littering an area with this potential act of meaning, and then filling that same area with observers equipped to complete that meaningful act, observers who then become the space acted upon, you have created a microcosmic psychodrama beyond the grammar of the mundane, and in so doing to touch and manifest the pure thoughts unclothed by words.
QR Code initially made me very excited, but the barriers to immediate interaction left me frustrated. It is easy enough to generate QR Code for a URL or other bit of meaning, statement of intent, declaration, etc. with Kaywa but they do not provide support for my blackberry or my friends iPhones, which makes me wonder if they're even bothering to keep up.
Instead, I've found a lesser, yet accessible, barcode generator reader at ScanLife that uses what they call EZ Codes - however these codes do not retain information in themselves, they instead rely a mobile device to a url via a database ScanLife maintains. Point your mobile phone at GetScanLife.com and you can photo a scanlife glyph and your phone immediately pulls up a url. Applying a little ingenuity to this and a steady supply of stickers and you begin layering a space with anchors out into the virtual.
While there are problems with both QR Code and EZ Code, both of these represent technology developed primarily to catalog and observe, to regulate and restrict, and ultimately to replace human cognition with machine precision. Faced with the tools and the implications, we must adapt for you and I, as mad as we all may be, are still here - and if we aren't using what comes to us through serendipity, through the contacts and networks we are emerging from, then we are little more than data fungus waiting to happen, a data footprint we manifest yet to which we remain oblivious.
I prefer ScanLife's EZ Code, even though it does not retain the core message, because it is easier to memorize the shapes - memory is not moored in grammar and word, it is instead tied to patterns, and the patterning of EZ Code is more visually apparent. That said, these codes have a long way to go to be as accessible to the creative side of the brain in the same way a properly constructed sigil or sigilic web can convey data. Currently I am incorporating both into a space designed specifically to open new doors into favorable places.
I invite all of you who have made it through this entire mind-trap riddled article to do the same, find inventive new ways to combine scanning technology, web-based content, and sigilic art to overlay a private or public space. Monitor the interactions that take place in that new space over time, and watch for seepage of thought, the vibration of intention, to manifest. Remember above, when I asked you what a word was?
I'd love to hear your answers. Me, I think a word is a parasite. Comment now, and tell me what you think, and come back after you've done some work related to the above proposal/incoherent rant as well -- let me know your results. This is experimental - I'm still finding out what happens. Comparing notes speeds up growth!
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