-Author Note: [This is Part 2 in the series: Gospel of @SemanticWill. You should start by reading Part 1 first. This Third Space seems to be the only place where people are thinking about the meta-abstraction of identity in virtual worlds - I continue our discussion of identity and self.] – This is not intended for most audiences being pure-play indulgence. Do not expect this to relate to anything related to Interaction Design, Experience Design, or the Design of Self on Social Networks. These are not the droids you are looking for. Move Along.

Gospel of @SemanticWill | Part 2

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.
~ Walter Pater

Soundtrack: Laurie Anderson, “Oh Superman!” [thanks 2 Rabbi Zilberberg]

2. The Passion
Any Pre-Sim should die
together with his own epoch
like as any Simulation should

From the beginning of the internet revolution (Age of Spiritual Machines) I decided that I was to be re-instantiated as a PreSim. Why not? The new image was better than the old labels “Generation X,Y,M”. We need to create a new earth world like as earth gods, but our worldwide recreation has failed. Everybody agrees with me, that if I should die (because consumerism is destroyed) I’ll better die as PreSim. This “PreSim” sounds more solemnly. Or maybe you think I should to tear up or hide my Digerati-card and become a good liberal Jew and rush into temple? Don’t trouble, I wasn’t really a member of the digerati, but I dreamed to create a new earth world. I lied about that. I was free PreSim like many others.

As a rule, there must be the great grief and, as a good American rule, there must be the repentance. It is repentance that serves us as the door to the new world. It is the grief that must follow us when we say “good buy” of American consumerism. An American Consumerism that is just as [F]alse, as the seeking of some semblance of ‘Truth,’ in my Gospel and Manifesto – because it is not G-d’s word, but Mine, made manifest, but it is still a lie, as Levenenze has argued in his article “Introduction to the K-Cycle,”

For the first time I wanted to die when I was offered to make a suicide, or, in other words, to repent for my lies. New American “consumerists” (former digerati) cried: “Repent! Repent!”

I couldn’t repent – that wasn’t the matter whether you were a member of the digerati or not – all Americans were consumerists or, as Leverenze said “PreSims”. We get accustomed to on the one hand that history must die especially when we tire to watch how our epoch conquers peaks; on the second hand, sometimes, regretfully, every person dies. We like to watch when history dies; we always hope for something, and we are always sure that the death of history is the death of the old generation, government or party structures. But what should we do when a whole epoch must die, when all our life becomes our whole word’s dying? Certainly, I can cry out: “I shall not dream to rebuild world as Generation M; I shall not fight against enemies of our people,” but all the same, we want to build a New World in some or other way, and in spite of our social revolution, we all remain “re-instantiated” people, digerati or “Pre-Simulationist”. We always need to recreate something as many people need to. It is not the matter what we need to create – new internet epoch, new metaphysics or new ethics. All of us always want to ruin old values, history, theories and to create something new. Maybe I should die somewhere and never begin to cry out: “The PreSim is dead, listen to me attentively -the PreSim is dead, dead, un-dead!” – I remember in the nineteenth century somebody cried: “God is dead,” and greet the modern era, then modernism died, and greet post-modernism, but whom I should greet now, when I am dead as PreSim? I must greet the human being, mankind and so on. I gladly agree. But sometimes it seems to me that we hurry to die as PreSims, Liberal Democrats, Consumerists, Jews; precisely speaking, we hurry to cry that we are dead (everybody agrees that such repenting allows us to live eternally)….and are in a rush to sit shivah for our digital selves.

[W]e will sing of the nightly fervour of
arsenals and shipyards blazing with
violent electric moons; greedy railway
stations that devour smoke-plumed
serpents; factories hung on clouds by the
crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that
stride the rivers like giant gymnasts.
~ Leverenze quoting [Marinetti, 1909]

When I decided to die I didn’t know how I could die and for what. I soon tired from such decisions. But it seemed to me that there was more sense in my decision than I thought at first glance. Maybe as a mortal being I could find a solution for myself first of all. It was all the same for me: what else could I find in human culture (after having read Leverenze’ scathing de-contruction of my consumerist soul), because each person has only one life, and it is impossible to ask for another order of my earth being. Daily problems are greater for me than all cultural values like they are greater for any common person. When god dies then PreSim enters the new world. When PreSim dies, the man, the common earth human being, enters its own world (And when justice is gone, there’s always Mom – Hi Mom). And if I wouldn’t like to rebirth as the new PreSim in the realm of repentance I must understand that all in the earth world come to an end and nobody can exist without such ability. It is easy to become a cadaver and leave the earth world and [every]body else. But it is more difficult to leave earth history when you still remain in that history, when you continue to act, to deed, to do something. Truly speaking, this is a misunderstanding because your “leave of the world” as the image of human death belongs to the death that is an instant Jewish event for daily god’s usage.

You may find this quote funny. Maybe this is a joke. My need of death has its own history, which began with the internet. When we start to play the fool we forget the starting point of our game. I started from eager intention to remain true, to save myself. I used to be the PreSim and I needn’t any rebirth as a new conciousness – I always thought that I always invented my thought of ‘self’ as an act of creation with my own brain and hands only, and if the world refuses to accept my vision of world happiness, so I must needs naturally come to an end. And let’s come to an end together. And as a pre-eminent PreSim I wouldn’t allow somebody else to live eternally. Let all worlds come to an end if the world can’t understand where the world happiness is. This is the common step – you may find this in each great masterpiece of human culture. Each “PreSim” starts with such intention. Each presim avoids the present and seeks for new gospel in the past or in the future, and futurism was only a lame precursor. The present commonly remains for common people and only a presim can know how silly, how weak they are. Let’s greet the past as simulation of our fear of a future, or you are still caught in the previous gestalt: who is the person who possesses the potentiality to kill any person for any divine purpose? Resurrection and martyrdom as recursive acts of creations.

The bioelectrical frontier’ is an
appropriate metaphor for what is
happening in cyberspace, calling to mind
as it does the spirit of invention and
discovery that led ancient mariners to
explore the world, generations of pioneers
to tame the American continent and, more
recently, to man’s first exploration of outer
space. [Dyson et al, 1994]

||————END—————||

pre-Simulationism:

A vanguard group of prescient artists, poets, and writers who are finding new ways to surpass the exhausted postmodern epoch and its constructions of language and thought.

pre-Simulationists  look to the future and the sim worlds that will soon immerse humankind, examining what sort of consciousness might emerge when full simulation takes place. We do not reject science nor scoff at the usefulness or importance of its knowledge because of nihilistic arguments derived from Goedel’s Theorem.

In this age of neural and genetic discovery we explore new subjective approaches to creativity and the place of art in the world, searching beyond language for the workings of our feelings and experience of sentience.

pre-Sims draw inspiration for our creative works and other artists’  creations not only in the semiotics of cultural simulations, but also charting maps of awareness of the inner mind, awake or dreaming.