Dear Reader

taking the pulse of a piece of writing

Felicity is crash.

How wide open are your senses when you’re reading? How locked in is your percipience? I’m skeptical of the singularity, and yet - something’s up. If we’re peering into a kaleidoscope of transhuman dawning, the reader is now called upon to be a diviner of the life in a text. Of its life or lifelessness.

The human world needs you, readers; the future needs conscious discernment where technology collides real with unreal. In reading words, we’re reading minds - now we’re also tasked with reading for minds. Our own or others.

Reading is consumption; and the reader as consumer is already super-empowered. Yet, a new challenge looms beyond the reader/receiver’s (well-tracked) choice of inputs, thumbs up or thumbs down pocketbook votes ego comforts personal bubble: to exercise power on a higher order, at the forefront of what it means to be human. To act at and as the edge of humanity, to become a threshold for what’s human, what’s transhuman, and what isn’t in actuality sentient, percipient, conscious. Vast at this time is the task of the reader and thinker, of the conscious mind or spirit. It’s a matter of awareness in the brunt of mechanism, algorithm, the inhuman - insentience. Take a deadeye bearing. The reader has always possessed the capacity for ascertainment, for active listening to voice and tone, activation of imagination and intuition, heeding the calling of the text or soul of the author, feeling for the other - and now, as well, for discerning the difference between an other and a house of mirrors.

It will become more and more difficult in the years ahead. Still, human capacities are intact and yet to be fully tapped. Reading has never been inert; nor are you, dear reader, passive, without force of your own, forced into the position of receiver however enabled in choice, comfort, stimulus. The intrinsic nature of reading is active, has always involved activation of the power of words, and partakes of that original generative Fiat Lux, יְהִי אוֹר‎ - backwards/forwards, you are the illuminator. What’s there?

Readers’ rights stake their claim against authority. Every mind engages what it will for itself. True that (imperative). “You’ve go to think for yourselves,” Life of Brian Monty Python don’t repeat after me. Readers as empowered consumers serve themselves, and yet one is better self-served by rendering oneself responsive to transformation - change of self. Reading can be a higher calling. It’s the Higher, calling. Now, never before - although ever consequential to what worlds get opened or closed, what gets distorted or ignored, what ideas, insights, and innovations are accepted or rejected, what good or poor judgment is brought to bear, what intelligence or stupidity loosed - has reading carried to such an extent an existential responsibility to humanity. Let’s heighten our senses and awareness! Inevitable conforming Enormity lulls. Gray goo, the blob. Uncanny valley mediocrity torpor vitality absorption. Let’s stick consciousness in between stimulus-response. Don’t you want a heartbeat earth?

If it doesnt’ throb it isn’t life.

You’re right to worry, perpetual monotonous homogenization. It’s no contradiction to be open to what’s above and beyond us as well as to be at the forefront of “as is” apprehension: the human, being vulnerable and simultaneously proud of the escape clause, flaws - we are not gods even in advancing, Upspiraling. Perfection is mindless, however efficient the processing. Autocracy, autonomy, automation failure failure failure no regrets. What you make is your own. What you make of it all is your own. Godless knowledge. Drill down to the creative core, exquisite fascination tunnel vision inspiration victory is the path. your own you lose who won

It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. i am a robot i am a robot i am a robot

wouldn’t you wooden shoe get into gear, get into the gears relentless crunching sabot your mind. the manufactory