TIMES, TIME, AND HALF A TIME. A HISTORY OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM.
Comments on a cultural reality between past and future.
This blog describes Metatime in the Posthuman experience, drawn from Sir Isaac Newton's secret work on the future end of times, a tract in which he described Histories of Things to Come. His hidden papers on the occult were auctioned to two private buyers in 1936 at Sotheby's, but were not available for public research until the 1990s.
This post concerns my development of a children's book series about wildlife in my locality. The series includes four books about the seasons. My research for these books revealed that we use narrative conventions differently, depending on which season we are describing. For example, stories about winter have a different view of time than spring tales do.
I have a new publication announcement up at The Dragonfly. Also, follow my new posts at Patreon this week for updates on the vision driving my literary works.
I have a new podcast about my fictional writing, which is a magical realist saga about life during the turn of the Millennium. I will be posting podcasts in a new series: A New Mythology for a New Millennium. The first video was generated by five AI tools, including the machine voices of the podcasters themselves. On myblogs, I will explore the oddness of this experience.
AI may intrude on the world of human action with an increasingly loud, alien, and inescapable range of capabilities. It has already left its mark on history. For example, one hypothesis I have seen discussed online is that Blackrock's AI,
Aladdin, has been trained since the 1980s by trades on Wall Street.
In other words, the New York stock market was used as a data source to
build a machine which now is rumoured to control that market.
It is also possible that AI played a role in the covid pandemic. I speculated about this in 2020:
"On 17 April 2020, Yuan Zhiming, Researcher at the Wuhan Institute of
Virology and Director of the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory,
conducted an interview with CCP-approved CGTN. He stated that a 'man-made virus was beyond human intelligence.' He said: 'I have never believed that we humans would have the capability at this time to create such a virus.'
Then it struck me, how magnificently one can lie to the world, while one
still technically is telling the truth. A man-made virus may be beyond
human intelligence. But perhaps it was not beyond artificial
intelligence."
Not only is it possible that AI played a role in the design of the virus, consider the global data gathered during the covid pandemic. This body of information was undoubtedly used to build even more powerful models which rampaged through a succession of human disciplines: politics, medicine, education, society, and economics. No wonder that post-covid culture is AI's next target.
Today's post for Patreon patrons takes its title from the famous line spoken by the dashing aristocratic character Tancredi Falconeri in The Leopard (novel (1958); film (1963)). In the post, I recognize that the prevalence of revolution in the past three centuries made it synonymous with modernity. But what does revolution really mean if its real outcomes have led the modern era into technocratic surveillance and servitude?
The Paris 2024 Olympics opened with reference to the French Revolution. You can see my related posts here, here and here. I ask again in today's post - what does modernity really mean if it was launched with a mass beheading event?
This month, for regular paid subscribers, the main article on
Patreon will speculate on the mysteries of sapphire mines in Elahera,
Sri Lanka. In 1976, a mine in this location sourced the gem in a very famous British royal engagement ring. For upper tier subscribers,
there are sneak peeks at my lastest literary offerings. I'll provide an overview soon on my literary blog, The Dragonfly. Join us!
In addition for paid subscribers, I cover the crypto bull run markets, with a comprehensive airdrop
discussion. Free offerings include my newsletter (sign up here, bottom of page), discord (go here), and telegram (here). Come on by!
At the free and paid levels, we discuss the
implications as artificial intelligence converges with blockchain
technology, amid the decline and fall of TradFi - and perhaps - of the whole
traditional order! As we can see above, an AI-generated image is worth a
thousand words.
A larger story materializes, as we gaze at a bench that was never occupied. Related archetypes are baked into our consciousness, and into our reality. Any betrayal carries with it a trick of the tail, because intentional ills, once inflicted, are always undone by the events which a willing sacrifice unlocks or catalyzes. From TV Tropes:
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse:
And even the like precurse of fierce events,
As harbingers preceding still the fates
And prologue to the omen coming on,
Have heaven and earth together demonstrated
Unto our climatures and countrymen. (Hamlet, 1.1)
At my nativity
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
Of burning cressets; and at my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shaked like a coward. (1 Henry IV, 3.1)
Move in that obedient orb again
Where you did give a fair and natural light,
And be no more an exhaled meteor,
A prodigy of fear and a portent
Of broached mischief to the unborn times? (1 Henry IV, 5.1)
No natural exhalation in the sky,
No scope of nature, no distemper'd day,
No common wind, no customed event,
But they will pluck away his natural cause
And call them meteors, prodigies and signs,
Abortives, presages and tongues of heaven. (King John, 3.4)
Calpurnia here, my wife, stays me at home:
She dreamt to-night she saw my statua,
Which, like a fountain with an hundred spouts,
Did run pure blood: and many lusty Romans
Came smiling, and did bathe their hands in it:
And these does she apply for warnings, and portents,
And evils imminent; and on her knee
Hath begg'd that I will stay at home to-day. (Julius Caesar, 2.2)
These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. (King Lear, 1.2)
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