RiC#Code

1844

Soul and body, mind and matter, intellect and sense, reason and emotion, reality and appearance, unity and plurality, perfection and imperfection, immortal and mortal, permanence and change, eternal and temporal, divine and human, heaven and earth.

As Socrates is sentenced to death, he reassures his followers that his soul will not die and that he will be able to pursue his love for philosophy in the after life.

The soul is life and the body is a corruption of the soul.

Ah but you see, Socrates is very dead in the world of today, to witness his demise, fast forward and rewind, until you get to the industrial revolution J

Today, we all agree:

A person’s main function in life is to work for money, the only quality we have as people is to be working, to be a worker in an occupation that permits us to continue to conserve (sustain) our physical body, and it is only as a physical subject (one who follows orders) that we continue to work.

We live for the paycheck and we are not paid to think.

Workers (you and me buddy) are driven away from their potential and tasks become mindless.

Working class

We don’t know anything anymore. We certainly don’t know how to produce things; we cannot produce most of the things we consume daily.

For most people, that doesn’t matter, since we can’t even afford to cook “real” food, let alone produce any other sort of goods...the only commodity we can understand enough to sell is our time.

(And we sell it cheap)

When it comes to trying to be self sufficient, start a business, sell a product, it has become nearly impossible to compete with corporations, the assembly line made sure of that.

All we can do is try to call some attention and sell our business soonish, we want be assimilated!

An alternative is to invoke a sense of identity, to bring some importance to art, some nostalgia in the idealistic notion that there is value in the time, effort, knowledge and human experience poured into the making of the commodity presented.

A return to the old sense of real individuality is always being invoked as a sales pitch for something like sweet drinks.

Still, the need for artisanship has become void in most western societies as fake individuality is as good as the real deal, the idea is the product; the cool you is actually, someone else.

Alienation

With scarce productivity capabilities, (one man, one tool, one finished product per a certain amount of time) we had to come up with a need before wanting to acquire something, opposed to the current status quo:

Plenty of products, not enough people who can afford them.

The current solution to economic woes which comes from this double whammy of too much produce and dwindling resources in our ever increasingly overpopulated little planet is this:

“We don’t care if you need it or not, if you can afford it or not; just buy stuff to save the economy!”

Enter pop culture, forcing commodity fetishism down our throats, making the copy and the artificial be at the same level as the hand made art, where the item, the product and the money it represents, is definitely more important than the people buying it, blurring the lines, between propaganda, commercial interest, rhetoric and design.

We are accustomed now, to being in that assembly line, to be given tiny repetitive tasks, all we do, is done in ways that alienates us from whatever the complete product may become.

We are taught to want everything and anything that is paraded in front of us, where having some people smiling, holding a can, replaces having the description of the product you’re being pushed to buy.

The future of mankind seemed set on factory work for us all, until the computer came along, and replaced us in the assembly lines, created a new age of even more time to spend, being busy doing nothing.

We don’t even have time to sell these days.

Altair 8800

But that’s not all; computers are bringing back the power to the people, or at the very least, getting people together again.

Twitter, facebook, blogging in general, love it or hate it, the truth is, mankind has never been this close to being one race.

We now have the ability to not only exchange ideas, but to also feel connected enough to relate with people who are physically living in places we will never set foot on.

We can once again, have an understanding of the product we produce and the people we share the world with.

Yes, there are always some abstraction levels to take into consideration when it comes to understanding what we do, but all in all, we have, once again, the ability to sell something we create;

As insignificant as these things seem at first look, almost everyone now can create and distribute: movies, music, computer games, books, news stories or even industry application based software.

It was all kind of ugly, big and difficult to use in the beginning of our new modern age, compared to the current machines we call computers today.

The current age of personal computers started with a simple toolkit you could have ordered by mail and build it yourself.

Assembling personal computers isn’t hard to do, even today, I still assemble my desktops at home; it’s just like playing LEGO.

The people who first consumed this product, (the personal computer), when it first came out as a DIY utility, these people are now the big players in the computer industry related business world of today.

IT geniuses spend their time changing our lives, when they are not getting themselves in trouble with the law.
Self in Exile

Computers are an interesting tool, but a tool none the less.

What makes a computer different from most tools and machines is that it can evaluate the status of a task, it can be told to stop itself when it’s done...

When computers first came out, they were already quite powerful machines; enough to help mankind finally start space exploration.

I like to think of machines as our first non human cognitive partners; they brought us a step forward in human evolution.

So much so, computers are currently helping us with a reversal of our existential dilemmas.

Computers are more than a work tool; they are used to augment our reality.

My point being, they are also a socially evolutionary and revolutionary tool.

Not just being used as a medium for getting things done, getting your point across, or breaking geographical borders, we are now making computers a part of our life.

What is interesting to see, is the human world changing once again towards a practice of skill, of craftsmanship, of easy deliverability of products being introduced by individuals to individuals, of trade, cooperation, of a return to our humanity, no longer just droning in to work for someone else.

No words against the corporations in general, they also have a part to play, most are playing their cards very well and owe their success to the respect they have for and from their workers; from their success, it’s not hard to understand that which is desirable:

Understanding, collaboration, respect and real freedom of choice will bring back the Socrates in all of us.