The Knowledge Jockey

The Knowledge Jockey Enlightenment through Technology

Colin Brauns DMST 4200 – Critical Approaches to Digital Media Dr. Trace Reddell

“Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve... [T]here are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence. Move the smallest bit upwards [in level of intelligence], and some problems will suddenly move from “impossible” to “obvious.” Move a substantial degree upwards, and all of them will become obvious.” - Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, Staring into the Singularity

Introduction There is a concept of operation I have become quite fond of, originating in the psychedelic mind of one of my favorite writers, Manuel De Landa. Manuel De Landa fuses “non-linear dynamics, the 'nomad thought' of post-structuralists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the psychedelic experience...i” into pieces of writing that push the reader's images of what he knows in unbalancingly generative directions. The operation De Landa describes involves the “double articulation [of] sorting and consolidation” of matter into geological strata, biological species, and social classes. The concept is most easily described from the geological point of view. Sedimentation in rivers sorts rocks of different sizes, buoyancy and so forth. After the rocks are sorted into similar groups, they are then consolidated into geological strata, “each composed of small pebbles which are nearly homogenous with respect to size, shape and chemical composition.ii” Genes are similarly sorted and consolidated in this fashion. They are sorted by evolutionary pressures such as predation, climate and mating. Then, sets of genes are consolidated by reproductive isolation (becoming incapable of mating by separation or death) until a new individual species is formed. Social classes also sort and consolidate. Class roles sediment through ranking on the social pecking order, and are consolidated by legal and theological codification. The double articulation of these operations is a powerful occurrence, one I believe to be active in the process of research. In today's dense media climate, one goes through many pieces of writing, video, conversation, lecture and so forth, sorting out pieces of information that are relevant to certain overarching ideas one has. Then, these pieces of information are consolidated into new research papers. For the last two years, I have been sorting information with several guiding principles. I wanted a realistic viewpoint that would simultaneously be able to reflect upon and influence the world. I wanted to be the ultimate agent of progress, helping people solve their problems, working towards an idyllic world born of science fiction and unwavering optimism. The consolidation of this operation was destined to be an archetype for action. I call this resultant archetype the “Knowledge Jockey.” The ideas in this paper are by no means organized chronologically by date of discovery. Each piece of sorted information has found it's own place in a section, it's own conceptual strata. I roll the Knowledge Jockey archetype through each strata of sorted information until it consolidates into a cohesive, increasingly (yet never entirely) comprehensive archetype for survival in the 21st century, one that uses scientific and spiritual enlightenment and political action as it's two primary modes of operation. The arguments put forth in this paper are fairly straightforward. I argue that we are in the middle of several major paradigm shifts in the way we produce, use, and distribute knowledge that are challenging authoritative structures in academic and other spheres. Secondly, I define some of the material shifts that we will see in the world, resultant of our new knowledge paradigms, and of being in an age of exponentially increasing technological production. Thirdly, I will define the ethics of the knowledge jockey, shaped by influences from Shamanism to the Situationists. Lastly, I will describe how all of these new phenomena will reshape our world, and how we can survive the tumultuous years ahead through creative survival.

Third Culture and the Third Knowledge Revolution

Every so often, a group of thinkers comes together and declares their difference from their intellectual predecessors through a change of name, and a distinction of a few principles that have changed with the times. Old notions, widely held to be true, sometimes for centuries, are overturned, but not overnight. Small groups of very smart people initiate these revolutions by discovering something, but the real revolution does not come until other people in the world start noticing and changing how they act, a la Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point phenomenon could be well deconstructed from a neo-materialist point of view. The Third Culture is a self-declared paradigm shift, bellowed forth from John Brockman and a team of some of the most distinguished scientists in the world. Their claims that a juncture of several theories and disciplines have allowed the scientific intellectual community to directly engage the culture of the world, an area historically reserved by the literary intellectual elite, are quite strong and have garnered much attention in recent years. Brockman argues that “the division of intellectual disciplines into the literary and the scientific… is obsolete.iii” While this is true, it is not thanks to a few scientists that are part of Brockman’s intellectual stable (a small group of extremely smart people.) Brockman wants to be interdisciplinary, yet by establishing an intellectual pedagogy he is disintegrating the ability to actually push intellectualism forward, because he is simply creating new masters for everyone to be disciples to. Essentially, he is thus creating new “disciplines” out of old ones, while the ongoing technological knowledge revolution is dissolving the need for “disciplines” at all. Michael R. Allen is hip to this fact, and carefully deconstructs it in an article entitled The “Third Culture” and Disciplinary Science, specifically using a book by Joe Moran entitled Interdisciplinarity, which humbly deconstructs the same shifts in disciplinarity. He beautifully highlights a different vision for interdisciplinarity as offering “something akin to a conversation in which knowledge is shared.iv” This view of interdisciplinarity is vastly enabled and reinforced by a technological knowledge revolution as altering to the fabric of the planet as the developments of speech and writing – and perhaps more so. Throughout our history as a species, we have undergone several revolutions in our ability to produce and exchange knowledge. The first of these was speech. This enabled an era of oral legacy, propagated via story-tellers and shamans. The second knowledge revolution stemmed from writing, which allowed “for the aggregation of tribes and villages into urban complexes through the apparatus of royal administration.v” The digital age represents the Third Knowledge Revolution, where “strict disciplinarity is impossible,vi” and society is increasingly networked to a vast global, streaming database of knowledge, seething with uploads, downloads and transfers. In the world of the third knowledge revolution, the noosphere is thicker than the atmosphere, and all frequencies are literally vibrating with knowledge. Once the third knowledge revolution touches the entire world (as it has almost nearly done), a re-localization of all systems becomes possible. It is not surprising then, that community-based, independent media and systems of education have been arising all over the world. This de-authorization of knowledge will allow people to design the worlds they want to see. The advent of Third Culture and the Third Knowledge Revolution, both occurring in major ways in the mid 1990’s, is indicative of an even larger change that we are undergoing. These paradigm shifts have occurred all over the place in the last twenty years, in light of several revelations in everything from information technology to

physics. One paradigm shift results from computer models of artificial life. The previous paradigm was that of the hylomorphic model. In the abstract sense, think of the hylomorphic model as arboreal, essentially as having the structure of a tree. On top of the tree sits God, below him sit popes, presidents and so forth. On higher branches sit professors, below them are their disciples. This model has persisted in human thought for its entire history. People think that this is the natural way of things, as increasingly live in ecosystems that are self-contained, only coming in contact with other machines. Many new technologies seem to emerge as horses once did, from evolutionary processes. So when we encounter new technologies, how do we deal with them? We certainly don't try to approach them as we would a wild horse. We let them into our houses, and allow them to continue their lives. But somehow, we are blind to the fact that technology, left untrained and unbridled, is just as dangerous as a wild horse. All across the world (especially developed countries,) wild, electronic horses are roaming through our homes, breaking up our conversations and relationships, kicking dust into our eyes, stealing idle moments and putting sheets of metal and glass between us. The wild horses that roam through our streets and homes are also like the wild horses of days past. They enable both war and progress. Once we tame them, they can enable a different level of civilization, nearly unimaginable now. The same physical laws that enabled evolution have enabled technological growth. Technology, it seems, “wants” the same things as life does. Kevin Kelly informs us that “the major trends in technology evolution, actually, are the same as in biological evolution... towards ubiquity, towards diversity, towards socialization, towards complexity,vii” and towards specialization. The implication that technological innovation share many of the same traits as biological evolution makes a lot of sense. What other process could technological growth really occur by, that we have observed? Ray Kurzweil explains how technology and life have the same evolutionary properties: Evolution applies positive feedback: the more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the next stage... each epoch of evolution has progressed more rapidly by building on the products of the previous stage. Evolution works through indirection: evolution created humans, humans created technology, humans are now working with increasingly advanced technology to create new generations of technologyviii.

The most capable methods from one stage of technological growth go on to build the next stage. We can see this in the evolution of computer chips – the best processors are used to design the next processor. There is an exponential increase in intelligence, led by the human mind. In an increasingly tangible sense, writing about the evolution of technology is also inherently writing about the evolution of the spirit, as our search for meaning and our ability to solve problems is exponentially increasing with our intelligence (and our technological frameworks.) Human mobility and capability will increase as our bodies become more technologically enabled, thanks to what Ray Kurzweil calls the G.N.R. revolution, with each initial standing for one of the three overlapping technological revolutions on the brink of occurring in the fields of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. Genetics has allowed us to map the ways in which life has evolved, and gives us insight into how to defeat age-old diseases, allowing us radical life extension, and replace any organs or skin tissue. Nanotechnology “will enable us to redesign and rebuild – molecule by

molecule – our bodies and brains and the world with which we interact, going far beyond the limitations of biology.” Robotics is the most powerful of these revolutions, Kurzweil argues. It will see the evolution of super intelligent robots and intelligence enhancing appendages developed for humans. As Kurzweil points out, “intelligence is the most powerful [force] in the universe. Intelligence, if sufficiently advanced, is, well, smart enough to anticipate and overcome any obstacles that stand in it's path.ix” We will surely use these revolutions to improve our bodies in unprecedented fashions. Future humans will be capable of superhuman feats by todays measure. We might even consider them gods, as the ancients would consider those of us who can talk to one another from the other side of the world. One thing that we would consider godlike is the ability of future beings to develop our muscle with relatively little work. This trend already exists today, with people taking nutritional supplements to enhance their builds, with the main difference being that they have to work at it. This excerpt, from Neal Stephenson's book, The Diamond Age, illustrates how one might achieve humongous muscle mass with an investment in one's own biological systems: On a previous visit to the mod parlor, two years ago, he had paid to have a bunch of 'sites implanted in his muscles – little critters, too small to see or feel, that twitched Bud's muscle fibers electrically according to a program that was supposed to maximize bulk. Combined with the testosterone pump embedded in his forearm, it was like working out in a gym night and day, except you didn't have to actually do anything and you never got sweatyx.

Having nanobots enhance your muscles would reduce the amount of time one would need to spend working in the gym, and increase the amount of leisure time one was afforded. One could also install nanobots to increase flexibility, or have your nanobots connected in such a way that the programs could change depending on what activity you were doing. For example, it doesn't make sense to be hugely muscled to run a marathon or sail a boat. The stimulation of biological muscles is one way of enhancing your muscular system. Another way would be to replace your muscles with extremely strong nanocarbon fibers, and one's skeletal structure with nanocarbon tubes. If one were to do so, one could punch through just about any material known to man, given your skin was resilient enough. One could jump hundreds of feet, and land without a problem. People could have the strength of superman, and perhaps his senses too. In The Diamond Age, our pseudo hero, Bud, has a musical system comprised of a “phased acoustical array splayed across both eardrums like the seeds on a strawberry.xi” He also has “sights - not very tasteful sunglasses with cross hairs HUD-ed into the lens on your dominant eye.xii” These are meant to supplement a “skull gun,” a nanoprojectile launcher installed in his forehead. They augment his vision to help him aim, while additionally providing an increasing intimidation factor for anyone that wanted to mess with him. It is not too far to imagine eye augmentations that allow one to see like the Predator (the decentralization of the panspectron,) switching from infrared to ultraviolet to sonic or microwave. One might imagine telescoping or microscoping eyeballs that allow scientists to hurdle through their environments, dissecting biology for any sign of useful atomic arrangement to sell. These systems would inhabit our bodies like billions of bacteria, bringing us back to the neo-materialist view of technology has simply part of a larger machinic phylum, an evolved form of life. Kevin Kelly also refers to machine as the “Seventh Kingdom of Life,” allowing images of a symbiosis similar to that of bacteria in the human body with technology. The symbiosis that we have with

technology is part of a greater trend of symbiosis that we have with the other forms of life on earth: the bacteria and other organisms that thrive within our bodies, the mammals that we have domesticated, the life that balances our ecosystems. In that sense, we have always been cyborgs. Still, technology is not necessarily always on our side. The Diamond Age also illustrates what the drawbacks of such bodily modifications might be: dangers in installation, constant jumpiness or twitching, an increased need for nutrients and food intake. For some people, however, the risk would be well worth the investment. We must seek to change the mass model from that of fearing technology and fearing change, to that of embracing technology for creative survival. Arthur C. Clark's popular third law rings particularly true: “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

The Ethics of Liquidity Poised on the edge of such an intense exponential technological revolution, we seek to find paths through the coming (and present) days. Going the corporate route seems so detrimental to the world (and thus to oneself), yet going the Buddhist route of renunciation has its pitfalls too. The corporate route is too structured for individuals to be themselves. The Buddhist route is too loose, too spaced out. There needs to be an ethics created for the 21st century that allows conscious members of society to be critically engaged with their environments. We want to be able to group together enough to stay cohesive, but mobile enough to change with the times. Scientists creating artificial life simulations in computers are coming to believe “that the liquid state in nature – not just actual liquids, but liquidity in the abstract sense of being not too rigid or too loose – these liquid systems “poised on the edge of chaos” are natural computers.xiii” If we start looking for this ethics of liquidity in culture, we find it at all the coolest conjunctions. Bruce Lee, who denounced traditional, rigid martial arts schools, famously said “be like water.” Similarly, the Gracie family, founders of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, embraced live training early on, and encouraged open conversation in their academy. Now, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is considered the best grappling art in the world. Hip Hop “flows,” and DJ’s “eddie” their records. Hacker culture does it too: minds flow around a problem until one “hacks” into any cracks. The etymology of the word hack is “a quick and simple fix,” following the philosophy of liquid: the easiest possible route. Evolution, according to Kevin Kelly, is just a “series of hacks.” It is present in travel culture too, where the experience of travel allows one to enter into a liquid state. Manuel De Landa suggests that “there might be an ethics here: how to live your life poised at the edge of chaos, how to allow self-organizing processes to take place in all the strata that bind you.xiv” The lesson here seems to be to never let your life become too rigid, too boring. This section of the paper is designed to give a brief sketch on how to live a liquid life. Pre-historic shamans were oftentimes the corner stone of ancient communities, deferred to even above the chieftan of the tribes. They were responsible for communing with the Gods, to make the rain come and the crops grow, to prevent floods, to relate with animals, and to preserve the oral traditions that were the wealth of the knowledge of the tribe. His relationships with the various spirits that he detected in the world were mediated through a variety of objects. Rocks were carved into Venus statues and other portable art. Cave walls, sometimes 1-2 km beneath the earth, were painted with a variety of mixtures and substances; as if on the other side of the wall lay

the world of gods, demons and spirits. Skins from dead animals covered these shamans, allowing them to speak to the spirits of the species (today, “film is an immeasurable expansion of the realms of the dead, during and even before bullets hit their targetsxv.”) Anthropologists believe that the earliest productions of art were enabled by shaman entering into altered states of consciousnessxvi. There were several routes into these altered states of consciousness: hyperventilating, sensory deprivation, ingestion of psychedelic drugs, sleep deprivation, meditation, or fever. Paleolithic shaman would enter into caves, where sensory deprivation would allow them to enter into these altered states of consciousness. Once in these altered states, shaman would often produce cave paintings of people killing animals. Some anthropologists believe that these paintings were “sympathetic hunting magic,” performed to enhance the ability of the tribes hunters while on the hunt. He would project a desired solution for his social group, much as artists do today, and divine possibilties for the future. Yet, “everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation.xvii” And so everything that the shaman once worked with has now become a representation or a symbol, “fused in a common streamxviii” from which the modern Shaman draws. The shaman serves as a primal model for the art movement that would emerge through Hip Hop. A great DJ not only has a great collection of albums, but can read the crowd and spin music with the right tempo, the right feel. Showing certain knowledge and reference allows the DJ success in “an abstract proving machine that governs the right to speak.xix” The break dancer gets funky, entering into an intense altered state of consciousness through vigorous exercise. The VJ takes striking images and mixes them together to create links between the “spirits” - different ideas. The MC appeals to the spirits through prayer (his projected flow.) It is from this Hip Hop mentality that we get Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid's “Rhythm Science.” He talks about rhythm science as “a forensic investigation of sound as a vector of coded language that goes from the physical to the informational and back again.xx” This investigation is the most primal of the modern human era – taking the physical sound, turning it into information, projecting it, receiving the bounce back and adjusting, recording, and projecting again. Rhythm Science is like the technological sonar of the present-day shaman with "strange, inferential portraits of a seamlessly complex system for routing people and products, a system as intricate as a global nervous system without all the baggage" mixed on live screens, with live audio, with data pulled from across the global database of knowledge. Also, like the Shaman, Paul Miller assumes different spirits through his alternate personal, DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, who he calls a living engagement with an “ultra media-saturated youth culture.xxi” The Rhythm Scientist is a spiritual being, digging not just for new sound bites, but for news pulsing up from different corners of the globe, new innovations, new technologies emerging and enabling new kinds of thought. He listens to citizen journalists, war photographers, and the life rhythms of different cultures, “transforming subconscious thoughts into formalized artistic acts.xxii” He documents and catalogs them, archives them into digital formats, uploads them, begins weaving them together into bass beats, drums, melodies, with political sound bites in the background, pictures pulsed across his spoken word poetry and dance. He is swept along as the browser drifts in front of him, yet, he is aware of the pulse undulating in the surrounding social scene. He merges the two – the flow from the ether (gods word) and the present circumstance with microphones

implanted in his external minds eye. “The hieroglyphic language of the cinema is capable of expressing any concept, any idea of class, any political or tactical sloganxxiii” and the rhythm scientist explores them all. The derivé is like an ancient migration, with the Shaman leading the pack, looking for signs of green pastures and wild fauna. They take note of the symbols and indications around them, the hieroglyphics are pasted into Google Maps to form a psychotopography. We put our houses on the hills of this psychotopography (the cultural hotspots) where the oceans of mass media can't swamp us. But being swamped is just one habitat in the various media ecologies of different societies and cultures. The airy mountains of Tibet still have scarce vegetation, even though they are struggling with a variety of invasive species. The southwest of the United States has a rampant viral epidemic. Major metropolises could be considered rain forests, with calls of a wide variety of species and a constant influx of energy; liquid biological strata surrounding solid structures. Memetics becomes quite real in the world of the KJ, and he has to be mindful not to get infected via his technological devices. The “technology is a bearer of forces and drives,xxiv” and the KJ dips in and out of them, pulling back direction for the group. But the KJ doesn't just listen to technological trends: he also listens to those rhythms that the ancient shaman listened to, allowing him to divine a true economics. He uses the technology to alter the world. He participates in the creation of a global network that keeps track of the commons: how much can we extract today? All of these questions revolve around a truer sense of economics. We must incorporate the economic into our ethics as well. Just after World War II, Vannevar Bush noted that inventions “extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind.xxv” In the 21st century, inventions are focused on extending man's mental powers via digital technology, cell phones laptops, and all of the informational assemblages around our learning (video games, etc..) Writing at about the same time as Bush was a man who would earn a Nobel prize in literature for his accomplishments, Herman Hesse. While Bush was constructing man’s physical powers and just beginning to consider the expansion of his mind power, Hesse was deep into the derivation of a method and ethics of achieving an expansion of man’s mental powers. His final novel (even though he lived 11 years past it’s publication,) and the work that won him the Nobel, is where one might find his conclusions. The Glass Bead Game is a novel set in the future – suggested by Hesse in later writing to be in the 25th Century – that tells the story of Joseph Knecht. Knecht is an orphan who enters into the elite academic province of central Europe, Castalia. In the nearly monastic Castalia, much of technology and world influences are prohibited for the sake of spiritual and academic. The spiritual development, alongside his academic development, of the Castalian scholar is begun with meditation exercises. He then begins to learn music. Finally, he may enter into the Castalian Order, of which the players of the Glass Bead Game are the most elite. During Knecht's years at Waldzell, a “high school” that produces the Bead Game Players, he meets another youth, Plinio Designori, who becomes his philosophical antithesis. Plinio is not part of the Castalian world – rather, he is an emissary of the outside world whose presence in Castalia is enabled by his family's wealth. Plinio argues for the merits of the material world while Knecht argues for the merits of a Castalian lifestyle. At Waldzell, “the two worlds and the two principles had become embodied in Joseph and Designori respectively.xxvi” The two

ideals, the consciously solid structure of the Castalian province (and the fluidity of the Glass Bead Game) While at Waldzell, Plinio often argues that “the world” and the “normal life” were superior to the “arrogant scholastic intellectualism” of Castalia. Using stinging rhetoric that attacks the base of the Castalian culture, his main problem with Castalia seems to do with the “resigned sterility” of the whole spiritual culture and behavior that takes place in Castalia. Hidden amongst these attacks on the Castalian culture is betrayed a fondness to the world of politics, wars, business and relationships. In Castalia, no such materiality is allowed, with students hardly owning their own possessions. They don't get married, but often go down to a nearby town to interact with the girls, who have no predilections about marrying these untouchable scholars. They part ways after graduating Waldzell, with Joseph entering into the Castalian Order, and Plinio returning to the outside world. In the outside world, Plinio takes his place amongst his wealthy family of landowners, and becomes a terrific politician and businessman. Eventually, he works his way onto a major committee that decides the funding for Castalia, working as an advocate for his childhood home. He then returns to Castalia to find his old companion, Knecht, has become the Magister Ludi. The Magister Ludi is the ultimate administrator of the Glass Bead Game, the highest honor in the Castalian world. They have a conversation that leads Knecht to offer his resignation and move into the outside world in an attempt to save the Castalian order from what he believesis an imminent collapse. He moves in with Plinio as a tutor to his son, Tito. While tutoring Tito, Joseph Knecht goes for a swim with him in a glacial mountain lake, where he succumbs to the cold and drowns. When Tito realized that he had led the old Magister Ludi into the lake “...a feeling of sacred awe took hold of him which foretold that this guilt would change him completely and would make more demands upon him than he had hitherto ever demanded of himself.xxvii” This guilt is something that environmentalists feel when they toss a plastic bottle into the trash can, or when a socially conscious Anglo-American sits in an American History lecture on the genocide of Native Americans with his friend from a Native American tribe. Tito is driven, from a young age, to be simultaneously Castalian and worldly, spiritual and practical. Castalia is best understood by its ritual game, The Glass Bead Game. The Glass Bead Game is a mode for the scholar to interact with “all the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and concerted into intellectual property.xxviii” Here, we can see reflections of the battles we undergo today over intellectual property. Hesse describes a system where free and unrestricted access to information is the precursor to the production of the game. The scholar's resources are not restricted, but freely available (although Castalia does have government sponsorship, and is considered a luxury of the civilization.) The unrestricted mixture of media and meme becomes clear in one of Hesse's only technical descriptions of the Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel) : ... on this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; it's manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capabale of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.xxix

Hesse describes the game as “a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture...xxx” Much as Vannevar Bush imagined himself in his laboratory, snapping photos with a camera attached to his head, while “the cord which trips its shutter may reach down a man's sleeve within easy reach of his fingers,xxxi” people who play Hesse's Glass Bead Game use an organ whose “ manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos.xxxii” Both of these forms of media creation, published within two years of one another (1943 for Hesse, 1945 for Bush), imagine new forms of invocational media, where the powers of man's mind are amplified through technology. He uses “the machine to add new layers of meaning and functionality to the daily world itself.xxxiii” This kind of person could be called a “Knowledge Jockey,” the archetype illustrated by Tito Designori. It is Tito who interests me more than even Joseph Knecht. He is a hybrid, a fusion of the material world and the spiritual world. He could even be considered to have the characteristics of the first Knowledge Jockey, a new kind of persona, who has his finger on the pulse and spins together the various strings of his observations into real world manifestations, dymaxion artifactsxxxiv. This fusion of analysis and of production is representative of a real emergent “third culture,” where makers and hackers all over the web are producing new objects, and composing stories about hem, directly aimed at their own cultures. It’s not all dependent on future technologies. It is happening now. An early prototype of the Knowledge Jockey is imaginable with today’s technology. Imagine: high resolution images are projected in all directions from a central console. Speakers line the walls. There are no keyboards, mice, or screens. Everything is multi-touch interaction screens. All of the machinery is nearly silent as it hums away at the building of this ultimate external framework. The KJ stands in the center. His whole body stands as one invocational medium, poised to explore concepts far and wide. He has access to all of humanity's knowledge, with constant and accelerating updates. This is a personal exploration with the world around him: the spiritual, the ephemeral, the invisible, the universal, the material, the ecological, the economical, and the social. Wireless sensors are connected to the KJ's body, detecting all of his vital signs. They are part of his performance. At first, he meditates on himself. He can switch frequencies, noting his x ray, heat signatures, and so forth, indexical like the Hip Hop voicexxxv. He runs through a few exercises to get himself warmed up: his favorite memories, his goals and wishes, his most intimate connections, the assemblages, machinations, flows, and structures of his environment are cycled through his minds eye. One screen pulls up the three dimensional image of a mosquito, the second is filled with machinery, and the third is filled with an antidote to an epidemic. His quick flitting fingers form gesture after gesture as he invokes a new type of life into existence. He begins to design a mosquito who delivers antidote rather than extracting blood. In the next room lay a workshop. A rapid prototyping machine and all variety of tools lay there. Here, his technology hums with nearly a life of its own, as interns and padwans scurry about the room. From his journeys, just next door, he sends down models and plans, concepts of (dymaxion?) artifacts and accompanying comprehensive strategies for their integration of the assemblages through which he has just passed. This is the KJ at work, deconstructing the hylomorphic model through his understanding of “the nets and bets, modes and flowsxxxvi” of the machinic phylum, pollinating the metal consciousnessxxxvii. Seated for the first time at the helm of machines which enable

human minds the long dreamt of abilities of time control (capture, rewind, fast forward), astral projection (video conferencing, creation of characters in MMO games and communities), communal with the full pantheon of gods (google, wikipedia), the Knowledge Jockey can begin to design a better society, exponentially.

Conclusion The Knowledge Jockey uses an ethics of liquidity and a neo-materialist viewpoint to navigate the third knowledge revolution produced by exponential technological growth. By doing so, he creates something beyond civilization, which was/is a series of forms enabled by the second knowledge revolution, writing. Just as civilizations were only far-fetched dreams of the first knowledge revolution’s political group, tribes, the next level of societal growth is hard to imagine for us. It may not even be possible, considering the dramatically changing environmental situation on the planet. There are, however, several interesting tools for an imaginative thinker, things like an expanded ecological economics, the Design Science process of Buckminster Fuller, the future engineers of yesterday: science fiction writers. The Design Science Decade was a concept put forth by Bucky Fuller to encourage a decade of design that would eliminate all poverty, all need in the world, through the use of the Design Science Processxxxviii. The first step of the Design Science Process involves choosing a problem situation, describing the problems in that state, and defining a preferred state. An easy analogy is an ecological one. Say a knowledge jockey chooses to address the destruction that cities wreak on the environment. He would describe the state, using the full gamut of tools described above. He could use the emerging fields of ecological economics and Manuel DeLanda’s neo-materialist viewpoint of economics to define a true economics that encompass far more than today’s monetary economics. Then he would define an ideal state, and begin to design a solution. A solution a Knowledge Jockey might come up with is something that could already have been thought of by a visionary designer. R. Buckminster Fuller once wrote that “a designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.” One might use those words to describe Neal Stephenson, who describes a city that intakes its water and air through distributed, rhizomatic structures, splayed out into the environment: “Source Victoria's air intakes erupted from the summit of the Royal Ecological Conservatory like a spray of hundred-meter-long calla lilies. Below, the analogy was perfected by an inverted tree of rootlike plumbing that spread fractally through the diamondoid bedrock of New Chusan, terminating in the warm water of the South China Sea as numberless capillaries... One big huge pipe gulping up seawater would have done roughly the same thing... but it wouldn't have been ecological.”

Stephenson's future engineers have constructed an elaborate method for microextraction of atomic material from the environment, for later shaping by any numbers of device/people. While this is a far-fetched scenario for today (who knows if/when this will really happen?), it is a good example of how Knowledge Jockeys, given their neomaterialist perspective and measurement of true economics, would approach and solve a problem: with a distributed, sustainable method. The Gaia Hypothesis, introduced by James Lovelock, asserts that the planet is essentially one super organism in which there is a global, ecosystemic balance (homeostasis.) He proposed this theory in the late 1970's, to much opposition in the

scientific community. An overwhelming global consensus has recently established that human activities are causing unusual global warming. Is this evidence that the Gaia hypothesis is valid: there is one global ecosystem that is in balance, and throwing it out of balance has been seen to result in ice ages and extinction? What the planet really needs is an intelligent global monitoring system, a nervous system, that will keep the many distant parts of the planet in homeostasis. The analogous bone and blood already exist in road/mountain and pipe/river systems. Imagine millions of KJ's at work in concert and competition, in the field sending live data in for use and archive, designing artifacts at home (while their artifacts design their homes), constantly plugged into a global network where all flows pulse, training natural and technological machinery to work in concert for the benefit of the whole ecology. As our understanding of the machinations and true economics of our various ecologies increase, so will our abilities to manipulate the flows of matter within them. We are seeing the growth of the nerve lines via the growth of our broadband networks. Let's just hope that the growth of these nerve networks allow us to react in time, before our species forces a global environmental collapse, and we lose this opportunity.

i ii iii iv v

Davis, Erik. "Delanda Destratified." Techgnosis. . De Landa, Manuel. “Deleuze and the Genesis of Form.” Allen, Michael R. “The 'Third Culture' and Disciplinary Science. ibid., 6 Raschke, Carl. The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University. London and New York: Routlidge, 2003. 13. vi ibid. 17 viiHow Does Technology Evolve? Like We Did. Kevin Kelly. TED Talks. 10:09. viiiKurzweil, Ray. The Singularity is Near. Penguin, 2005. 40. ix x xi xii xiii

ibid. 206. P. 3, The Diamond Age. Neal Stephenson. Bantam Spectra. 1995. ibid. 4. ibid. 6. Davis, Erik. "Delanda Destratified." Techgnosis. 26 Oct. 2007 . “The metaphor they use is solid, liquid, gas. If the system is solid, too crystallized, its dynamics are completely uninteresting. If it’s gaseous, it’s also uninteresting – all you have to do is take the averages of behavior and you know what’s going on. Liquids have a lot more potential, with all kinds of attractors and bifurcations. Now they’re coming to believe that the liquid state in nature – not just actual liquids, but liquidity in the abstract sense of being not too rigid or too loose – these liquid systems 'poised on the edge of chaos' are natural computers.”

xiv http://www.techgnosis.com/delandad.html. Manuel De Landa xv Kittler, Friedrich A., Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford University Press, 1999. 125. xvi A fascinating exploration of the spiritual phenomena of our ancestors is From Black Land to Fifth Sun, by Brian Fagan. xvii The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord. xviii ibid. xix Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies. MIT Press, 2005. 33. xx Miller, Paul D. Rhythm Science, Mediawork, 2005. 4-5 xxi ibid. 12. xxii ibid. 89. xxiii ibid. 88. xxiv Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies. MIT Press, 2005. 56. xxv Bush, Vannevar. "As We May Think." The Atlantic. July 1946. 26 Oct. 2007 . xxvi Hesse, Herman. The Glass Bead Game, Henry Holt and Company, 1949. 96. xxvii Hesse, Herman. The Glass Bead Game, Henry Holt and Company, 1949. 384. xxviii Hesse, Herman. The Glass Bead Game, Henry Holt and Company, 1949. 15. xxix ibid. 15.

xxx ibid. 15. xxxi Bush, Vannevar. "As We May Think." The Atlantic. July 1946. 26 Oct. 2007 . xxxii Hesse, Herman. The Glass Bead Game, Henry Holt and Company, 1949. 15. xxxiii Clark, Andy. Natural Born Cyborgs. Oxford University Press, 2003. 15. xxxiv http://buckminster.info/Index/D/Dymaxion-A-G.htm xxxv Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies. MIT Press, 2005. 28. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, "A Thousand Plateaus," University of Minnesota Press, 1980, p. 409. “We may speak of a machinic phylum, or technological lineage, wherever we find a constellation of singularities, prolongable by certain operations, which converge, and make the operations converge, upon one or several assignable traits of expression. If the singularities or operations diverge, we must distinguish two different phyla: that is precisely the case for the iron sword, descended from the dagger, and the steel saber, descended from the knife ... But it is always possible to situate the analysis on the level of singularities that are prolongable from one phylum to another, and to tie the two phyla together. At the limit, there is a single phylogenetic lineage, a single machinic phylum, ideally continuous: the flow of matter-movement, the flow of matter in continuous variation, conveying singularities and traits of expression.” xxxvi A major theme of Rhythm Science. xxxvii Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press, 1980. 409 "... what metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or covered, rendered unrecognizable, dissociated by the hylomorphic model. Metallurgy is the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow, and metal the correlate of this consciousness. As expressed in panmetallism, metal is coextensive to the whole of matter, and the whole of matter to metallurgy. Even the waters, the grasses and varieties of wood, the animals are populated by salts or mineral elements. Not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere ... The machinic phylum is metallurgical, or at least has a metallic head, as its itinerant probe-head or guidance device." xxxviii