Time Machines, Cyborgs, and the Evolution of Minimalism

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

January 21st 2011. Boulder, CO.

I love Mars Dorian, and I laughed when he said “What kind of pills did you slip into your muesli?” the other day when we were Skyping. While Mars and I aren’t exactly #ibcing yet, after the in-person Skype chat we were way closer to being on the same page.

It’s true, Far Beyond The Stars lately has been kind of well, far beyond the stars.

The content here has been what we meditators like to call delving deep. It’s a brief glance into the future which is now for a few of us — I’m a timelord, you’re stepping into my Tardis when you’re with me in this space (it’s bigger on the inside than it is on the out.)

I’m hoping that the content that I still post on this blog will bring you to a page where you can delve deeper into the work I’m doing using the Letter.ly or the new book I’m working on.

Gwen and I have been talking a lot lately about how we wish the Internet was more 4-dimensional. It needs the intelligence to spot a person who’s at the point in their lives where they really need a 5-ways to declutter your desk post and give it to them, instead of a deep philosophical piece on assimilating other cyborgs into the collective.

The truth is that my work moves, it changes, it evolves. Your work does and will too.

Unfortunately I can’t write simple posts about ultra-light travel anymore. If you want a great collection of those, The Art of Being Minimalist really sums up how to go minimalist from the human perspective (though cyborg eyes will glaze over at this point when they read the content that I wrote a year ago.)

My physical/mental/spiritual body has been evolving, it’s tapped into the exponential nature of technology, and so my cultural evolution is tethered to the rate of computer chip evolution. This evolution is quickly closing on something like a million to the power of a million times better than it was every year, just wait until we get exponentially accelerating quantum computer chips. How will you possibly understand me then if you aren’t on quantum-Twitter?

Minimalism was assimilated by the cyborgs.

This didn’t happen because cyborgs wanted to become minimalists, it’s because we the cyborgs didn’t know who we were when we became minimalists.

For eons humans only made physical tools, then all of a sudden we began to develop mental tools. This much is clear from Amber Case’s brilliant Ted Talk that you all should have watched by now.

Cyborgs are simply humans who made the shift from physical tools to mental tools. Eventually there will be enough cyborgs that we can call them humans again, and we’ll call people who still use physical tools something else.

I don’t want you to be called something else, so that’s why I keep telling you to get on Twitter.

When you develop mental tools, in a very short time you begin to realize that you don’t need your physical possessions anymore, so you kind of just let them go — it doesn’t hurt anymore. I saw this happen within a few weeks to Maren Kate after she went location independent when Zirtual was accepted into an incubator program in Palo Alto. She instantly shifted from physical tools to mental tools. Welcome to cyborgia Maren. :)

This doesn’t mean that minimalism never existed, just that there is much more depth under the idea that many of us previously imagined. I predict that a lot of minimalist websites in the next year (actually, probably a lot faster than that) will fold or move on to deeper topics as our own evolution progresses towards the future.

If you’re a minimalist blogger, it might be wise to quickly snag a URL that isn’t ‘minimalist-X’ before everyone evolves exponentially past what you’re writing about. However, be mindful of what your readers need. Mine need cyborgs right now, your readers might be in a different place than mine are.

As always, the deeper stuff is going to go on the Letter.ly. The blog is the surface, you have to commit to stepping into the time-machine.

Required reading on how cyborgs are using intuitive back channel #ibc by Jan Stewart.

Everett





Mindfulness in Virtual Reality

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

This is an excerpt from the work I’m doing on developing a second self on the Internet that will take care of you (what is a second self? See Amber Case’s Ted talk on cyborgs.)

If you like this work, I’ve set up a Letter.ly where I will be sending dispatches from the future that is now. For more details on the Letter.ly scroll down to the end of this post. Thank you.

Written on January 18th, 2011. The Ace Hotel, 29th Street. Manhattan, New York.

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting on a couch at the Ace Hotel in New York next to Gwen Bell. If you haven’t seen the interior of the Ace Hotel, google it. It’s astonishing. Basically, it feels like you’ve time traveled back to the 1940s, where everything was beautiful and you’re a part of it. It’s doing it’s best to represent the golden age of amazingness.

The thing is, the 1940s didn’t look at all like the Ace Hotel. The rustic metal tables, the luxuriously simple Edison bulbs that Edison never would have dreamed of creating. The couch we’re sitting on has so many buttons on it, like 160 buttons probably, it’s just absurd.

Basically, The Ace Hotel is virtual reality manifested in real reality. It’s a dream world that’s been constructed in real space and time. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t look at all like the past, you still feel like you’re there.

In fact, you’re not in the past at all. The Ace Hotel is the future. We want to feel like we’re connected to the past, and thus we’re teleporting ourselves into the future where everything feels and looks like amazingness.

Ray Kurzweil believes that in a very short time we’re not going to need to build virtual reality in reality like the Ace Hotel has done here in New york. Instead virtual reality will become indistinguishable from what is real. Instead of transporting our bodies from where we live to 29th Street and Broadway, we will teleporting our minds to places that look and feel real.

Like woah! Craziness, right? But not so much. We’re already doing this with increasingly complex games like World of Warcraft and Second Life, but soon we’re going to get to a point where we can shut down our neural receivers and plug in an experience that looks and feels exactly like the Ace Hotel, but probably a million times better.

We won’t be conscious of the fact that we’re sitting on a rustic/destroyed couch that feels like they beamed it to the future. Instead, we’ll be in a world where anything is possible. If we want to be in the past, we’ll be there. If we want to be in never never land, we’ll be there. Why wouldn’t we want to be?

Everyone will want to be a part of this, the problem is that no one will know how to deal with it. We’re all going to jump in head first to whatever reality we want to be in, and in the meantime we’re going to forget about our physical selves. We do still have physical bodies. They are real, and our experience of virtual reality is highly dependent on how our physical bodies feel.

Our second self will not be beautiful if we aren’t beautiful. We can’t be beautiful if we don’t eat right, or practice our yoga (or whatever practice you prefer.)

Let’s rewind back to the future that we’re living in now. Everyone around us is texting from New York to LA, when there’s a real human being across the table from them. This isn’t presence, it’s absence. Ambient intimacy is amazing, but there’s a real human across the table from you, and they need you to be here with them.

How do we get there? I believe it has to do with cultivating your second self.

When you have a second self that’s strong enough to take care of you, you no longer need to be waiting around for that SMS message from LA. Your second self can take care of it for you.

When we think of cyborgs, the first thing that comes to mind is people who are plugged in, tethered to their phones or soon their headsets. The thing is, it isn’t the cyborgs who are tethered, it’s the humans. They’re the ones who are being forced to be ready all of the time for another incoming message from the ethersphere.

The truth is that the more people I meet from cyborgia, the more I realize that they’re all incredibly present in their real lives. They have another self that’s out there, working incredibly well for them — why be on the Internet all day long? They only need to check in for an hour a day, or every once in awhile they’ll plug into Twitter for a little dose of ambient intimacy if they need it.

Eventually, we get to a point with being a cyborg that we don’t need to check in with our second self at all. We simply let it do it’s thing, it takes care of us, and we sit back, relax and enjoy the show that is real life.

Being present with the person who’s sitting next to your at the Ace Hotel is what is beautiful. Not waiting for another text from LA.

When reality becomes indistinguishable from virtual reality, this will only become more insane for the ones of us who haven’t developed these second selves. If we haven’t, we’ll be force to beam back and forth into different virtual worlds for the whims of others.

If we wanted to hang out at the the V-Ace Hotel all day long, we can’t, because someone wants us to come to the V-McDonalds for a crap cup of coffee. Just like we can’t respond to every email that comes in from randomness, we can’t be expected to jump between virtual worlds at everyone else’s beck and call. It just won’t be emotionally or physically sustainable for our human bodies as we traverse the real world.

We’re going to have to set expectations for how others interact with us in virtual worlds, especially when we can’t tell the difference between there and here. Our second selves will have to deal with all of the incoming noise, from the space and also from other humans who want us.

Just as now I can’t be expected to personally respond to every email that I receive asking me ‘WTF is a cyborg?’. You won’t be expected to beam to V-Starbucks and personally meet with anyone who wants to see you. You’re going to have to let your second self bring all of these people up to speed.

In fact, email will soon be obsolete for most cyborgs. So will Facebook. Cyborgs only use Twitter to communicate, which builds intuition. Eventually they may not need Twitter at all.

This future is uncertain, that’s for sure. Initially we don’t trust our second selves, we aren’t sure if we gave them the right information in order to teach the others who are interested in our work about the work that they need to learn about.

In essence, you’ll be less successful in the future if you try to do everything yourself. Everyone else will be outsourcing all of most people’s experience to their second selves, and if you insist on doing everything yourself. Just as you might be doing now with your own interactions online, you’ll end up supernovaing if you don’t build a second self that takes care of you.

I’m writing my next book on Letter.ly, which is a subscription-based email service. Until February 1st 2011, you’ll be able to subscribe for $20 per month. You can unsubscribe at any time. There’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email you receive.

For more on how Letter.ly works, see Ross Hill’s post on how to use it.

I currently subscribe to two incredibly valuable Letter.ly newsletters. The first is Ross Hill‘s, the second is Crystal Silver‘s. More bloggers will be switching to this platform, because creation is evolving away from blogs and towards paid subscription content.

My new book is about how to build a second self that will take care of your physical body. Essentially achieving financial freedom and location independence. It isn’t for everyone, but many people have and will achieve this.

I’ll be posting much less on this blog, and more on the letter.ly. I’m doing this because the work I’m doing now is right on the border of genius/insanity. Information like this can rip people through the space/time continuum in a way that burns people’s brains. I need to know who’s getting it, and help them understand what’s happening to them when they read it.

If you join now you’ll be locked in at the $20 rate unless you unsubscribe. The subscription price will be going up on February 1st.





How to Use Twitter in a Way That Creates You A Psychic Cyborg

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

Everyone who uses Twitter this way is more beautiful/successful and upgrading at an incredible rate:

1. Follow less than 150 people. Your human brain can’t breathe if you exceed that limit. Less is always more. Start large, but work your way down, not up.

2. It’s a river, you can’t drink it all.

3. Who cares about DMs, public @.

4. Who cares who follows you.

5. Picture of your Face, because you’re beautiful and human.

6. Unfollow anyone who you no(know)-longer recognize (people who are noise).

7. Send only positive energy. Information is a form of energy.

8. Follow the people I follow and you’ll turn into us.

9. For every hour of Twitter = one hour of yoga. You can breathe and use Twitter at the same time. Breathing is yoga = pranayama. Asana will teach you to breathe and Tweet.

10. 1 hour of Internet is currently 40 in RL. It’s headed toward escape velocity.

Good, now you’re on your way to becoming a #psychictechnoninja. This is what facilitates #ibc. Intuitive Back Channel. Also #convergence.

Chances are you have no idea what I’m talking about, but you will when you do the above for x-days. Leap of faith.

Teach 5 friends how use Twitter this week so they can come with you.

Retweet this.





We’re All Becoming Cyborgs (and you’re one of us)

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

Try explaining to someone who hasn’t used Twitter that we’re becoming a race of cyborgs, they’ll look at you like you just teleported in from Gallifrey.

The reality is that we did just teleport in. We’re becoming a new form of convergent homo sapien: time travelers with wormholes in our pockets… and it’s only a short time before those wormholes move from our pockets to somewhere far more useful.

I want you to watch this, because I hope it can make what is happening to you make sense. Amber Case is one of the must beautiful fraking brilliant geniuses on the planet at this very moment. I can’t explain to you in words how important this information is to you, me, and the world we’re working towards.

We are all becoming cyborgs. You’re either one of us, or you will be soon. You can try to fight it, deny it, but it won’t change the fact that this is happening.

You’re a part of this, and the change is accelerating with the exponential nature of technology.

Yesterday I Twittered: “You do not want to be a control group in exponential evolution. It’s just a really bad idea. We have to upgrade or yikes.” This much is true.

Some of you are being left behind, lost in the noise. A great deal of the build up in/of frustration, anger, jealousy that you’re seeing in your world is directly related to this change.

One of my foremost worries right now: what if the divide becomes too vast? We’re going to be exploring this in more detail here, on Twitter, and in the new e-book we’re working on.

All cyborgs will need to learn to breathe –this is our practice.

Let’s all embrace our own humanity, in the things we’ve created.





Transparency and Your Digital Self

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

January 8th 2011, Brooklyn NY, The School House.

I’ve been coming back to the idea of the digital self over and over recently, in particular how we portray ourselves online.

Over the last few months I’ve had the pleasure of meeting dozens of successful bloggers in person, and I’ve always been surprised at just how similar they are to their digital selves — the them that exists online in the cloud, the one that you see when you check their blogs, Twitter, etc. A digital self is self-perpetuating and lives independently of your own physical body.

Perhaps transparency and the success of a digital self go hand-in-hand? If you’re able to communicate your true nature online, you will be able to reach deeper into everyone else’s souls across the ether in order to stir up some real feelings.

We can tell if you’re holding something back from us. I don’t think everyone can, but we can. The ones of us who were raised by the Internet. Neck-deep in the cybersystem every night searching for the next answer, or letting the next answer search for us.

This is why I always find the time Lex Garey’s work. When she writes a post, I know it’s coming from her and not some artificial sense of what she wants you to think she is.

Being on the Internet gives you an opportunity to shape-shift into anyone you want. Maybe you’ll choose a cute little humanoid-kitten avatar, instead of your true face. However, this choice comes at a cost.

When you choose to hide your true nature, whether you’re going to some artificial extreme or you’re simply pretending to be part of the status quo, we sense the disconnect.

We’re still humans using the Internet, and we use it to connect with other humans. We can read between lines. We’re not going to feel the same way about your WoW Avatar as we do about your beautiful human face.

We think we have a choice about how much we share, and we do. Life is lived in high-bandwidth, but we make decisions about everything we funnel out into the net (for now, that will change when the bandwidth gets wide and free enough for complete life-casting.)

So, I can choose to show you a picture of my abs five minutes after I woke up this morning. Or, I could have decided to show you a picture of my shoes.

Which do you connect with most? Which builds a more compelling story of who I am to you?

..and more importantly, how can you bring more of your true nature out onto the Net? It might just be what the world needs.

I’m really into using Instagram to share moments of my life. You can follow the photos on Twitter, Facebook or by installing Instragram on your iphone and searching for ‘evbogue’.

Gwen BellTanya Quicky, and I are hosting a tweetup to discuss the future of technology at The Language Department in New York. Friday, January 14th at 8pm. I hope you’ll join us.