version

Well-known member
"The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit."
 

luka

Well-known member
I think a lot of becoming good at something is (1) learning to pay attention to things you're not used to paying attention to—where your body is, perceptual saliencies—and then (2) mapping the territory of these things that you pay attention to, learning to distinguish subtle gradations between states, and understanding the ramifications those gradations have. A difference that makes a difference
but you only really get good when all that stuff becomes unconscious
 

sus

Well-known member
My guess would be that cognition and processing is decentralized, so that to some extent your hands are "thinking on their own," or automatically translating high-level orders from command into e.g. the series of keystrokes you type, so that command doesn't have to specify "now press 's' now press 'p'"

And so you spotlight an area via command and drill down on the local base micromanaging them really looking over their shoulder making sure they're doing exactly precisely what you want, and then eventually your hands learn and it becomes habit
 

sus

Well-known member
So I think many of the things we do aren't some dark lurking part of Command, like a Deep State (altho there is some of that surely) but just that the various localities have minds of their own, quite literally, and need managing, and your spotlight or telescope roves around as needed. You can't multitask on two command-intensive tasks like say having a philosophical conversation and centering your clay. The telescope can only be in one place
 

sus

Well-known member
but you only really get good when all that stuff becomes unconscious
Def... the intentionality from Command becomes very macro-level ("play this song gently in the style of Bach") and everything else flows, the hands know what to do
 

luka

Well-known member
its what i liked about coffee work. you get to a point where you are very in control, you know exactly how milk flows, all the forces of the machine, all the weights and shapes of the utensils and crockery etc, how to move
 

sus

Well-known member
its what i liked about coffee work. you get to a point where you are very in control, you know exactly how milk flows, all the forces of the machine, all the weights and shapes of the utensils and crockery etc, how to move
Conversely, the worst part of coding is when you're tossed into a foreign city of the codebase, or worse, its wilderness. A part of the codebase you don't know. You don't know its customs or history and everything is quite illegible. You don't understand how the functions fit together or the logic behind how people do things. It's a very palpable overwhelmed feeling of high entropy.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
I didn't quite understand the secretary bit to be fair.
you acquire drives and desires and fantasy as and etc. as you go about life and they come together to form a Frankenstein's monster in your head that all your newer experiences revolve around and are audited by before they reach you. instead of having an above/below unconcious/concious deal you've got a cybernetic system where conscious focus is one node on the grid of experience and you need to know whats happened to a phenomenon 'before' it reaches your desk to really understand it
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
why do these files look funny? Oh I know Betty sometimes messes up with the xerox machine. Why does limbo's lighthearted jabs keep me up all night? oh its because of my struggles with male authority figures and etc.
 

sus

Well-known member
So I think many of the things we do aren't some dark lurking part of Command, like a Deep State (altho there is some of that surely) but just that the various localities have minds of their own, quite literally, and need managing, and your spotlight or telescope roves around as needed. You can't multitask on two command-intensive tasks like say having a philosophical conversation and centering your clay. The telescope can only be in one place
 

version

Well-known member
Gibson's cyberspace is a map,

"Put the trodes on and they were out there, all the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn't, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to a particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry called that."
 

luka

Well-known member
it gets conceptually quite difficult when you start talking about personal with regards to this stuff but otherwise i agree with all of that. it matches my experiences.
 

woops

is not like other people
that's too numinous for me. i believe in something outside of time but not my own unconscious.
 
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luka

Well-known member
its possible that theres more than one thing you can interface with. a personal unconscious and a load of other stuff
 
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