Friday, August 27, 2010

Secrecy Is The Original Sin

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Secrecy is the Original Sin. The fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The basic crime against love. The purpose of life is to receive, synthesize and transmit energy. Communication fusion is the goal of life. Any star can tell you that. Communication is love. Secrecy, withholding the signal, hoarding, covering up the light is motivated by shame and fear.”

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I encountered the above quote from Timothy Leary through an article in Reality Sandwich entitled A Supraterranean ManifestoSupraterranean is an on-line magazine where people can freely publish any type of creative work without having to go through the usual editorial process.  In the manifesto the magazine's creator, Nick Meador, chronicles his own amazing journey. 
Perhaps it hit me when Time Magazine named their 2006 Person of the Year - YOU. It was so simple, so obvious. The decision must have been based largely on the runaway success of YouTube. By that time, many considered a night of watching "viral videos" and bootleg concert footage to be more rewarding than flipping channels on TV. Much else was changing about the ways we communicate and spend our free time and energy. But even that simple switch from passive to active media consumption was one that, I felt sure, would forever transform our society.
Through this manifesto Meador addresses much of the current cynicism about the influence of the World Wide Web on our personal, cultural and global evolution and allows the possibility of a radical new order emerging through that portal.  He talks about how his generation, disillusioned by the "reality" that was being presented to them through mainstream media - institutions, marketers, advertisers and editors - found the communication and connection they were craving on the Web.  Moved by this personal revelation, he began looking more deeply into traditional journalism and publishing practices and did not like what he found.
For too long the creative instinct has been bottled up to make human beings into consumer robots. I see now that I wanted to break the mold, while helping existing robots (myself included) regain the optimal path.
This guy has certainly done his homework.  Drawing from such visionary minds as Freud, Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Henry Miller, Neitzsche, Robert Anton Wilson, Carl Jung and others, he developed a personal and professional philosophy which eventually found expression through Supraterranean.  It's a fascinating and compelling story and I cannot possibly do it justice by summarizing - you can read the full manifesto HERE.
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The Web allows people to project their mind in endless directions, at an unprecedented speed and distance. It’s a collective out-of-body experience that lets us share in each other’s daydreams – a new map of time-space to help to navigate the inner and outer cosmos.  On Supraterranean, we are all connected by the creations that people share with the community.

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“Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.”
– Doc Brown, Back to the Future

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