In a recent interview here on Pop Occulture, Douglas Rushkoff warned wankers everywhere, “that the image you’re looking at while you masturbate is of a grossly distorted image of a person.” But I’ve been wondering lately: what happens if you suddenly realize the person you’re having sex with is actually a robot? I can’t say that this has happened to me (yet!) but reading Philip K. Dick’s excellent Martian Time-Slip has got me thinking (even moreso) about the subject of automatons and artificial intelligences. Speaking of which, I’m guessing a lot of long-time readers of this site are still confused as to what the hell has gotten into me these past few weeks with regards to all this stuff. Well let me just tell it to you straight without making things more confusing:

The characters of logic have to do with time and manual dexterity of chimpanzees who are putting on make-up and wondering if they are us. Good times demand good beer and the world won’t be your oyster unless you shuck it. With a hammer you can build a house. This is the way you unmake babies and retro furnishings for an abandoned store made out of caramel rivers flowing from the vicinity of an abandoned cannery. Now that you’re undressed you can take those clothes and throw them on the fire. Lava bends and twists around you. Do you see it as the monkey whispers “shit!” about the piece of rock you’re standing on which is rapidly melting away. So clothes your eyes and see what we can see. I out of you and you out of me. I came to the store and they were closed. I left them my card and a box of dried flowers. They told me they would call me the next day. Wear your sli{p|d|p}ers, it’s getting cold in here.

Anyway, in Martian Time-Slip, one of the characters, Jack Bohlen begins to see people “under the light of eternity” and several characters are revealed to be mechanical replacements of real people - a popular theme in Dick’s work. But yeah I have been realizing lately that there is sort of a short-hand way that you can talk about things. It’s pretty hard to describe though. The only way I can really show you is b(u)y (yo)using it on you(re being used by me[at {and car} manufacturers.].).

A song only places once while it is being recorded and every time it is played back in the future it then colonizes those little fragments of micro-sliced meta-reality and renders them backwards towards the time at which the song was originally recorded and edited. This is the best description I have seen so far as to what is - by way of me(a)taphor - happening to our current state of reality.

In the past, DC was notorious for its inconsistent continuity. No character’s history, within the comic books, was reliable. For example, Superman originally couldn’t fly, and his powers came from being a highly evolved human. Over time, he became able to fly; his powers were explained as coming from the sun, and a more complex backstory was invented. Later it was altered to include his exploits as Superboy. It was altered further to include Supergirl and other survivors of Krypton. The differences in the backstory were eventually addressed by DC creating parallel worlds: Earth-Two was the parallel world where Golden Age events took place; Earth-Three was a mirror world; and so forth. If something happened outside current continuity, it was explained away as happening on a parallel world.

The editorial objective of the series (referred to as “Crisis”) was to streamline these parallel worlds—with their different versions of various characters—and make the DC Universe less confusing to new readers. It was also to free the company’s writers from the “baggage” of fifty years of continuity.

The series was highly successful from a marketing standpoint, generating renewed interest in the company’s books, enticing readers with the clichéd – but in this case accurate – promise that “things will never be the same”. The story itself was rooted firmly in the cliché of “superheroes battle to save the world”, but its unprecedented scope and its great attention to both drama and detail satisfied readers with its story.

Follow me for a minute (and I’ll follow you for a lifetime because the more you ignore me the closer I get): That description describes the non-fictional comic book company talking about the fictional universes that it has created and which have become so unwieldy that they now must be modified drastically in order to thread together all the various tangents that timelines have taken as a result of nature human processes (the forking off of micro-slice orange soda pieces of reality).

This is exactly what you will see happen within the fictional multiverse which you and I inhabit (but which we are actually only reading, but the story is so good that we got sucked into it and forgot) when the alien overlords pull the plug and begin unpacking the fractal hyper-dimensional cube which will be called 2012 (see how it unfolds?) and/or the Singularity. All the diverse strands of confusion within our cultural world-lines etc etc yadda yadda blah blah fill in the blanks. You know what I am trying to say here [I have been parachuted into life by the galactic government to fix things, but I need your help cause you’re as much me as I am], but you’re thinking about it way too hard. Think about it much much more softly. More sensually. Intimately. Knowing in the Biblical sense, the way in which you actually “know” things in the real world and not that other way that we like to think we know things.

So now that we are fervently candied by smug self-righteousness and choco-tastic molecules raining fire on us from outer space, I think we can proceed. What I am talking about with the short-cuts is this. You talk about things as though you’re playing one of those pictogram puzzles where it shows the picture of an eye and then the letter “M” and you’re supposed to interpret that as “I’m”. Except its that but is one level order of fries magnitude above that. You dig? Dig Exceptionology™, the religion of the future! Exceptionology™, everyone is doing it!

EXCEPTIONOLOGY: THE RELIGION FOR ANYONE WHO HAS EVER FELT DIFFERENT.

The secret is that you’re actually not different. It sure feels like it though, huh? We used to call you folks “humans” but now we call you social rejects, autistics, schizophrenics, and all other kinds of fun names. You know what really burns my balls? Everyone everywhere seems to very regularly experience deja vu and people simply accept it as a matter of normal life. This happens to everyone, dear. So as a result we never actually talk about just what the hell it means if we simply just accept this phenomenon literally. What you’re experiencing right now as though it has happened before, actually has happened before. No losers, it’s got nothing to do with you having experienced something similar which is being applied to this new experience. That’s not the Exceptionologist way, jerks! What I’m talking about here is that THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE!

You.
Sitting there.
Reading this.

Me.
Sitting here.
Writing this.

But which one of us is reading this again? I think it’s me. I just read it as I go along. The difference between the way that I read what I read and which you read what I have written is that I can’t scan down the page and see what happens next. My awareness of the future is blind. Just a little blinking cursor waiting for me to be ready to move on. And what you see next is the cold dead past. Lines fixed into words fixed into lines that bend and worm themselves back inside of your I mean mine mind. Mining minding your own business. Outlining. (You think that’s bad, you should have seen what he flushed down the toilet last night. It was Exceptionologically disgusting!) Once you’re dead, the company that created you will have the right to use you to do anything that it wants and that includes licensing you out to other companies. Guess what - you’re dead!

So where was I? Campus. Fire walkers. No. It doesn’t work like that. Well, it works like that but those aren’t good examples. Good examples work like this. I will show you a zero level Exceptionologist indoctrination abuse ritual. Get ready:

John Denver. Denver. Experimental airplane. Plane crash. New Jersey. War of the Worlds. JFK Jr. Jack Ryan. Tom Clancy. Barack Obama. Harrison Ford. Steven Spielberg. Stanley Kubrick. AI. Tom Cruise. Scientology. Nicole Kidman. The Shining.

Your non-Exceptionologicalist mind sees that list and thinks “free association” because this is the term which has been given to you by culture to teach you not to think like that by saying its okay to think like that: just make sure you call it by this diminishing name of “free association” when you do it. That way, you won’t accidentally stumble onto the power of how thoughts actually work. Thoughts are things. You simply string them together like jewels on a necklace. Each one is a decoration which reflects the others around it. Indra’s Web. Free 411 calls? You bet!

Three pregnant teens living in a group home whacked the director in the head with a frying pan, tied her up and then fled in her stolen minivan, police said.

The director, who was tied up with power cords Tuesday, eventually broke free and called police, police Sgt. Shauna Greening said. She also freed another pregnant teen tied up in the attack, she said.

The director said “she never had any indication that anything like this was going to happen. They were all sitting around doing homework before the attack occurred,” the sergeant said.

You can also use the eye’m technique with bigger more complex blocks of thought like that. See what I have done there? Pregnancy. Teens. Utah. Attack. Crime. Also think of them as keywords. You rearrange the sequencing of the keywords, you rearrange your alignment within the field of information. Got me? Cause I got you. Don’t worry. I won’t let go. I can’t, because I’m you, technically. So we’re all sitting here and filling out the words within my body which is a Perky Pat layout and a Mercer Box combined and that is what each one of our bodies is. I am getting a really really light-headed feeling writing about this. I am also getting the feeling that my awareness is curving out around me like in a circle of a sphere. Like my thing about the Vitruvian man. Like the Bubble in the Fountain that he travels around in. Like in C.S. Lewi’s Perelandra I think, the space-ship he flies around in. He describes how it looks because it is a globe that curves off into the distance. The earth is indeed a spaceship. But the thing is you are also the earth. I better save this before I accidentally delete it.

Pregnancy (Disney’s new adventure-fantasy) has been very heavily cross-checking lately against prevailing winds of over-eating and under-eating. Which have to do with maintaining the weight class of your inter-stellar voyaging vessel. Exceptionology, the religion of space-faring lizard monkey men with angels inside of them everywhere dancing on the head of a pin!

HowStuffWorks explains that in order to get the grub down faster, eaters often dunk the food in water or break it into smaller pieces. They’re used to ignoring the natural gag reflex, as well as the stomach’s feeling of fullness. Some folks train by filling up with large meals or water to stretch the stomach. However the IFOCE frowns upon this method. Some “old school” competitive eaters prefer “picnic style rules,” which ban dipping, mushing, dunking, and picking apart their chow.

I’ve made up your mind. You’re wasting my time. There is a Crisis on Infinite Earths. Earth Two. Earth Prime. Sliders. Quantum Leap. Shows from our youth? What were they trying to teach me? What are you trying to teach me? Are you God trying to wake me up, God, my head hurts. God, I need a shave and a shower. God, you look good in that dress. God, where do you go when we need you? God, why won’t you listen to my prayers? God, who took my sandwich? God, how many times do I have to tell you this. God, you’re ugly. God, I want to fuck you. God, does anybody really know what time it is? God, does anybody really care? I have given up trying to care, God. Which I now realize, that, God, this frees me and you up to care a lot more about each other. Because when we’re trying we’re not actually doing it. We’re trying. God, you better stop trying. God, you better stop crying. God, take care of Lindsay Lohan in rehab. God, help Justin Timberlake to find a new girlfriend so we can all stop worrying about him. God, buy me an old record player so I can listen to these records as you meant them to be listened to.

So what do you do if you figure you might actually be in love with an algorithm? The first step may be to start figuring out whether or not you yourself are an algorithm. If you’re both algorithms (either in [w]hole or in [p]art) then there’s no need to really worry. [What, me worry?] How to figure out if you’re an algorithm: figure out which earth you live on. Whether its Earth Prime or the Earth that we started to simulate from Mars once we moved there, or the Earth that we started simulating from Saturn once we go out there? Because the only problem is though that once you start simulating a simulation, well then you’re fucked. So to stop being fucked, unfuck yourself and then you won’t be fucked. Reverse your birth: show us what you’re worth. This isn’t suicide. Don’t be a fool. Exceptionologists frown on self-destruction.

More fun with numbers: connect the dots, genius! UK. Hurricane. Winds. China. Missile. Iran takes tough stand over nuclear row. Man charged in child abductions, murder. Parents think kidnapped son was molested. Couples betting 7/7/07 is lucky for love. Can you hear the guitar solo of the universe? It’s about to reach a crescendo. Then the drummer is going to take a turn. It may last for another twenty minutes. Coffee. Toyota. Taxes. Spouse. Prison. Army. Mideast. House. Senate. Ethics. These bugs are crawling inside of your clothing and making a sound like you are entering the Tomb World. Deaths dying. Corpses plucking lyres along the lotus-laden banks of the River Ganges.

The following is a paid advertisement from your local retailer: Planet Earth Reality (the conglomerated industrial multigenerational alien abuse secret cult which controls all things).

LONDON - The world is nudging closer to nuclear or environmental apocalypse, a group of prominent scientists warned Wednesday as it pushed the hand of its symbolic Doomsday Clock closer to midnight.

The clock, which was set two minutes forward to 11:55, represents the likelihood of a global cataclysm. Its ticks have given the clock’s keepers a chance to speak out on the dangers they see threatening Earth.

Record biotech plantings in 2006. MySpace hit with online predator suits. Look at the man standing in front of empty red shelves, wringing his hands. The shelves symbolize the emptiness of Fox’s feelings and of human interaction on MySpace and on the internet and real life. You are realizing. Revelationizing. Empathizing. Amtrakizing.

PITTSBURGH - It isn’t mystery meat — it’s more like mystery fat. And the kids in the Plum Borough School District have been eating it and liking it.

The secret ingredient is a plant-based fat substitute called Z Trim. It’s been in the school’s popular ranch dressing for months, quietly reducing the fat and calories students are getting when they load up their salads and chicken with it.

“It’s really good. Better than my ranch at home,” says 16-year-old Juliann Sheldon, who used the dressing to top off her salad of lettuce, baby spinach, chunks of chicken and croutons.

Z Trim: the official corporatological sponsors of Exceptionology. “Eat your Z Trim and like it you goddamned hairy monkey sons of bitches! Fuck you and your tribal system of ‘ethics’. ”

Cancer deaths drop for 2nd straight year though, so that’s good. Right? That means all the Z Trim they are infusing into our colo(g)n(e)s can’t be all that bad for us. Just look how nice Georgie is to that little old black lady. She’s so strong. She’s so brave. He clearly saved her. He clearly fights cancer both morally and on a cellular level.

BEIJING - Beijing’s Forbidden City palace is considering closing a Starbucks on its grounds after protests led by a state TV personality who says the American coffeehouse’s presence is eroding Chinese culture, a news report said Thursday.

WTF? No way! You stupid Chinese! LOL! What the hell do you know about anything you weirdos whose government has a more honest system of saying what type of economic system you use? Corporations eroding culture? I bet that’s totally a fucking accident too, right? Spank my ass and call me Susan, you commie freaks! The writers for the DC Comics Multiverse are just too goddamned clever. You know they made Lex Luthor president right? It would be cool except that everybody already knows Lex Luthor is president. I mean, everybody who goddamned reads comic books anyway, right? Aren’t you ]with[ me people?

For Sartre this attitude is manifestly self-deceiving. As human consciousness, we are always aware that we are not whatever we are aware of - we cannot, in this sense, be defined as our ‘intentional objects’ of consciousness, including our facticity of personal history, character, bodies, or objective responsibility. Thus, as Sartre often repeated, ‘human reality is what it is not, and it is not what it is’: it can only define itself negatively, as ‘what it is not’; but this negation is simultaneously the only positive definition it can make of ‘what it is’.

But silly fucking Frenchman don’t know dick about dick either, do they?

Starbucks’ presence “undermined the Forbidden City’s solemnity and trampled over Chinese culture,” the anchorman, Rui Chenggang, wrote in his blog. Xinhua said “thousands of Chinese” backed the campaign but did not say how. […]

“Starbucks appreciates the deep history and culture of the Forbidden City and has operated in a respectful manner that fits within the environment,” the statement said. “We have provided a welcome place of rest for thousands of tourists, both Chinese and foreign, for more than six years.”

Carl’s Jr. believes that no child should go hungry. Exceptionology believes that you are all sons of bitches hellbent on destroying the illusions you taught us to love when we were children and then one day changed because it no longer fit your newly revised marketing plans. We want back our old-school nasty malls where everything was fading and broken and ugly. We want back the record stores where we could steal tapes after school. We want back the food court Chinese food that always made you sick but that you still ate. You lied to us and now we demand that you create a new lie to tell us that we can’t help but believe because we have been made so scared and brought back to such a childlike state of innocent unthinking dependence. Please, God! Please scare the living shit out of us.

Stephen W. Hawking, the renowned cosmologist and mathematician, told The Associated Press that global warming has eclipsed other threats to the planet, such as terrorism.

“Terror only kills hundreds or thousands of people,” Hawking said. “Global warming could kill millions. We should have a war on global warming rather than the war on terror.”

“Cities fall. Oceans rise. Hope remains.” Hurricane-force winds hit the UK. Release of the Hollywood Blockbuster “You’re All Going To Be Fucked!” has been ramped up to coincide with events on actual earth. You know, this same one that you and I inhabit. This globular body of which I am the membrane and you are the nucleus and she is the mitochondria.

Sartre cites a café waiter, whose movements and conversation are a little too “waiter-esque”. His voice oozes with an eagerness to please; he carries food rigidly and ostentatiously. His exaggerated behaviour illustrates that he is play acting as a waiter, as an object in the world: an automaton whose essence is to be a waiter. But that he is obviously acting belies that he is aware that he is not (merely) a waiter, but is rather consciously deceiving himself.

You think I’m joking but I’m not. You think I’m losting it. But I’t nomt. You are looking for evidence of how you can synchronize me back up with the mainstream signals you are getting. Because it’s either that or you’re going to pull out altogether. It’s the Exceptionology way, after all! The interruption method. Completely 100% proven effective as birth control method.

Another of Sartre’s examples involves a young woman on a first date. She ignores the obvious sexual implications of her date’s compliments to her physical appearance, but accepts them instead as words directed at her as a human consciousness. As he takes her hand, she lets it rest lifelessly in his, refusing either to return the gesture or to revoke it. Thus she delays the moment when she must choose to either acknowledge and reject his advances, or submit to them. She conveniently considers her hand only a thing in the world, but his compliments as unrelated to her body; thus playing on her dual human reality as a physical beings, and as consciousness separate and free from this physicality.

Boy this is sure making me nauseous: “One is not ‘a philosopher’, as at some point one must/will cease the activities that define the self as ‘a philosopher’. Any role that one might adopt does not define one as there is an eventual end to one’s adoption of the role; i.e. other roles will be assigned to us, ‘a chef’, ‘a mother’. The self is not constant, it cannot be a thing in the world.”

Fisher looked at me earnestly. I could tell what was coming. “Infinity, right? Infinity is bullshit…”

“Wait a second man,” I said. “Infinity is not bullshit,” I was not in the mood to hear another rant on infinity or some other such crap. But Fisher didn’t care. My moods never phased him.

“…Because if you have an infinite amount of possibilities, then included within those infinite variations are multiple exact duplicates of one another.”

“What? How?”

“Dude, infinity demands it. It means you have so many that you keep going and never run out. And if you have that many then at some point, you’re going to run into an object or an event or whatever that is an exact duplicate of something else that already existed or happened.”

“I’m starting to get what you’re saying, but yeah go on.”

“Well right, so if there is even one duplicate thing that happens within the context of infinity, of infinite variation and possibilities, then that means that it can and will happen again and again. In fact, if infinity yields any duplicates at all – which it must, because it’s infinity – then it yields an infinite number of duplicates. In fact, the only thing that infinity would probably even mean is that each thing that exists has an infinite number of copies of itself.”

I squinted my eyes a little to picture it. “Almost like reality is mass-produced then. Like infinity is nothing more than a well-stocked Walmart. Hey, we’re running low on Fisher Caldwells. Go get some more out of the back room and put them on the shelves.”

Fisher smiled. “Yeah, right. Exactly!”

I paused for a minute, trying to string together where this was all going. “So if infinity is infinite, then it’s actually not infinite. But if you look at it another way, if it’s infinite, then every little thing has infinite copies of itself. So what the hell does this mean?”

“It means,” Fisher said. “That there aren’t that many things.”

Don’t worry about your baby. It will be fine. It will turn around in time…

go team life!