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.





Uncertainty in an Accelerating World (you cannot control)

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

January 4th, 7:04am. O’Hare International Airport

If I were to give you the short-story of what has happened in my life over the last few weeks (Dec 2010-Jan 2011), it would fill a 500-page novel. This is why I don’t write novels.

A great deal has changed — as if things were consistent before. These days I’m headed to New York for an indefinite amount of time, back to San Francisco, LA in February to join a panel at a conference, and onward into the unknown.

There was no way to plan this, there’s no way I could have.

In fact, I think there’s no way to plan anything anymore. The world is moving too fast for plans, agendas, or other set-in-stone type behaviors that we crave for a momentary and completely artificial sense of security.

I keep coming back to the how Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451: on the ten-minute typewriter that cost a dime for his time, fingers blazing, not knowing what comes next in the story.

When I watch the endless line of people swirling by me at the airport terminal, I see destinations, I see plans, and I see people who are frustrated and confused as to why they aren’t at the end already. “When do we get there for frak’s sake?”

We don’t get there. There is no end. We just keeping pushing this techno-cultural-evolutionary wave, and ride it at it’s height.

When I look back at my life, I see a series of well-placed accidents in between moments of stillness. I see that every time I tried to hold onto something that I either had or wanted, I ended up with a fist-full of frustration. Maybe you do too.

Instead, let’s choose a different approach.

Let’s say yes, yes to everything.

Let’s say yes to the impossible.

As all of this, the change, the shift takes place, we’re going (and we have) to see the people we know clinging to the lives they once knew – their jobs, their homes, their stories, their pasts, their supposed futures. We’re seeing these people filling themselves up with surface information in the hopes that it will guide them. It won’t.

It worked a certain way for them before, and they want it to stay that way. It worked a certain way for us five minutes ago, but it didn’t stay that way.

What we forget is that twenty years ago we were still sending letters in the mail. I had a pen-pal in Sydney when I was a kid back then, and it took a month for the letters to get here from Australia (when they got here at all.) Now I have a crew of remarkable people in Melbourne living in my head all day via Twitter — directing my thoughts towards the emerging nature of technology.

(Sometimes I even wonder if Ross Hill and his band of Melbourne-based psychic technoninjas are training me to become an cyber-consciousness super-weapon. They might not even know what they’re doing consciously.)

We forget that most of us just got on Facebook. We only started being plugged into our Twitter feeds all day a few blinks ago in space-time. This reality is new, and it’s getting newer.

This is a fundamental change in human nature and reality that never happened before. We are unprepared for the consequences, but we’ll have to deal with them anyway.

We cannot anticipate how reality will change.

We have no idea where we will be even a day from now. A week? Ha, good luck.

…and 95% of people are terrified of the fact that they won’t know where they’ll be standing.

We’re going to have to get used to the idea that our closest allies might be the person who reached out five minutes ago, or five minutes from now. We have to get used to the idea that our next idea is far more powerful than the idea we had last. We have to learn to destroy our pasts in order to avoid being ripped through the space-time continuum as windshield bug splatter on the change of the universe.

We have to get used to the feeling that we’re all swiftly going insane as technology spirals out of our control into the future of our creation’s evolution.

So here’s the plan: there is none. In a few hours I’ll have two feet on the ground in New York again, and then I’ll take one step and then another until I find myself on the yoga mat.

The rest happens from there, moment by moment, breath by breath. Throughout, we’ll seek a deeper truth.

As I look uncertainty in the eye, and smile. I know that there’s only one way to approach the now: accept everything, stay grounded, and bend with the will of reality.

If you’re in New York, and this message computes, hit me on Twitter and we’ll grab a drink.