Looking within and pulling something out. Much harder than it sounds. 

Staring at a blank page is a bit intimidating sometimes. What am I going to write? Does anyone even care what I have to say? Go off on these tangents because I am so passionate.

Been struggling on focus and I know it’s because of social media. But it’s hard when that is what you do, is create content for yourself and others. Hard to not want to check all apps all of the time. How is this post doing, maybe I should have posted it differently. Not all posts, especially for myself are well-thought out or anything, but some, especially on YouTube and TikTok are ones that I hope I am applying what I am learning to these posts and trying to make them get more outreach.

Then I watch videos or livestreams like the guys from VidIQ. Great channel with a lot of YouTube insight, just want to give them a shout out as they put out a lot of helpful content.

And that’s what I want to separate out here, is that there is valuable content being put out there and then there is bullshit garbage posted and it’s deciphering that for yourself to make for a better timeline. Yet, some don’t know how to do that. As the valuable and helpful content and the bullshit gets mixed in together, then a person starts engaging in the bullshit which tells the computerized algorithm that you want to see more of that so it gives more and more to you, then before you know it all of the valuable meaningful content is gone from your timeline. Then after years and years of seeing this bullshit garbage content, it starts to really have an effect on your thinking.

 

If you’re on social media, we all have our own struggles with it in one way or another. And if you’re an artist it can be really frustrating if you care and are trying to get your name out there. Then there are the ones who it just favors, they get lucky, some think they know why, but ultimately they don’t as the algorithm is highly complex and forever updating and changing. They can say what works for them, but that doesn’t work for you, why? Why did I do this thing they told me to do and I don’t have 100,000 followers in three months like they did? Oh I didn’t throw $10,000 in marketing, they left that part out, fuck.

I have had several moments as an artist where I have gotten extremely frustrated with social media. I was a late adapter to most of it and barely used it – to my own detriment- at the beginning and when I did use it at the time it was for stupid reasons, I didn’t take it seriously or see how it would help me in what I was doing. I was still learning who I was as a person. Figuring out what I wanted to do in life. Who I was going to be, who I wanted to be, what my intentions on this planet were going to be. And in that time, I was looking within, trying to pull something out. I was discovering my soul and was reading into my character. A very self-conscious time, as you don’t feel like you know who you are. I didn’t want to expose that to social media, and this was during the time of writing my first book, which was a lot of self-reflection. Situations that happened when I was a kid, how I chose to react to that, and how I choose to see it going forward. 

Obstacles, life lessons all become part of the story. Scars on the skin. Scars under the skin. Heart was a gaping whole I tried to fill, went to Florida and continued drinking like I did in high school, till I blacked out. It was a way of escaping reality, and I did this in other ways too, experimenting with different drugs, if it came from this earth in one form or another, it’s here for a reason. I think America’s perspective on drugs is completely skewed. Think we need to be more accepting of people and less demonizing and attacking. Lend a listening ear, not regurgitated advice you don’t even understand yourself. regurgitated advice you don’t even adhere to yourself.

We all have something we are dealing with. Choose to be kind, realize that the person you are talking to on any level is probably not telling you everything they are dealing with. Again, be more accepting and understanding, not demanding that others live the way you perceive as normal. What the fuck is normal? Define it for me please. Let’s dissect the meaning together, go deeper, go further, think broader, why are you so focused on that when it doesn’t even matter? People are actually upset over a show? They actually hate someone they have never met?

In thinking of AI, which side is going to be easier to deceive?

I can most definitely see a scenario where the same people upset over the Bud Light Dylan Mulvaney situation, could be upset over something similar except that it’s not even a real person they are mad at, it’s an AI video. And again, it starts with writing. Imagine a lot of the text being written on places like 4Chan or Redditt, Twitter etc. and it was being said and repeated by artificially intelligent bots. Imagine the twitter bots of today, the ones spamming the same written tweet over and over again in the replies, able to get different topics trending, able to dupe hundreds of thousands of people into following them and thinking that is a real person tweeting, yet it’s a computer and it’s all text and memes. With AI video, they will be able to have video and what looks like an actual person reading that script they are given. 

What’s the difference between that and what we see now with the Sinclair local news? They are all given the same script to read and they read it, as it carefully implants little words and phrases in there to script a certain narrative about a topic. It’s highly effective, and AI videos will be just as effective. 

Who is harder to deceive, an 11 year old 6^th grader or a 35 year old lawyer?

Again, which side of the political spectrum is going to be more gullible of false narratives? What have we already seen, what evidence do we already have to say, this group of people are going to believe false narratives? The ones who will not be able to tell the difference between a fantasy and reality?

We are seeing this blurring of the lines time and time again. So many are not even conscious of it, it truly blows my mind still to see this in 2023, after I have tried to warn so many friends and family around me. Seeing them still share pages that are not even real, the memes they are making are continuing a narrative that is separating from reality in a way that has caused harm.

As an artist, I am all about separating from reality as long as the person knows they are consciously doing so. You know that you are entering a movie theater to watch Barbie, you know this is fiction. The problem we face, is that people don’t know they are actually living in a fantasy. They have gone down the rabbit hole, so far from an objective truth, with such a fixed mindset, they are hunkered down in the shelter and refuse to come out.

They have a fixed mindset and refuse to change given new information. Imagine if our DNA did that over the course of human evolution. Imagine if we didn’t evolve our thumbs? Where would we be without our thumbs, certainly not at the top of the food chain as we are know. Where would we be without the ability to see various colors of visible light? Countless other changes, that our code of information, our DNA, is what it is today, because it has adapted and changed to the environment in a way that will ensure it’s survival.

What we have seen in recent geopolitical events and how they have been narrated by different countries is a perfect example of what is at stake. How will humanity choose to perceive the world? That is a serious question we have to ask. How will we choose to perceive the world? Because how we choose to perceive the world will be how the next evolutionary step of human beings will see it. And that next evolutionary step will be what we see as Artificial Intelligence, but really it will be a combining of humans with this technology, allowing people to live longer as it already has been doing for centuries. 

Humans and technology are already synonymous with each other. Wherever you find humans, you find technology. Traces of ancient civilizations are found in the technology they left behind. 

It’s technology that has allowed humans to expand the average life expectancy so rapidly in the past 100 years and will continue to do so in the next hundred years. Ray Kurzweil says in his books that humans will be able to live as long as they want to live. He sees there being a point at which they may choose to end their consciousness.

Imagine living centuries in a matter of a second here on Earth. Time is perception as well. Does time seem faster at the north pole than it does at the equator? Not enough to really notice but it is slightly as gravity is ever so slightly different, spin of the Earth is just slightly tilted. Aren’t we all just a little tilted?

Ah, you’re an artist, just shut the fuck up! 

And I say, it’s artists that drive change. It’s artists that can creatively speak truth to power, which is what I aimed to do with Bleace. To talk about all of our situations allegorically.

There is a lot happening right now. Sometimes decades go on and nothing happens, then there are times where decades happen in a matter of minutes.

How many drastic changes we have had in the past five years a lone! Feels like it’s going to take decades just to process it. But it’s incessant, it’s every single day. We can’t let up, we can’t just ignore it, think it’s not cool to talk about, think there is nothing you can do about it, or think that these problems are just too far away from you to be concerned with. That’s bull shit. That’s disrespecting yourself as an individual. That is belittling yourself as a human being on this planet. Do you know how astronomically rare that is for you to be living right here in this moment? Take a second to think on that. Momento Mori. Remember that you have to die, that this has to end. Nothing lasts forever. Change is incessant, the only constant in this universe is change.

Just feels like we are falling and falling down a hill getting battered with one unprecedented thing after another.

Yet, there is only going to be more change and it’s going to happen at a faster pace and if we don’t talk about hard truths now, and we continue to put it off, put it off, hope for Superman to come save us, it’s not going to happen. 

There are some really heavy fights happening right now, for artists and really workers across the country. how will this strike end? Should end with the workers winning, but will it? Remains to be seen, I support them in their fight.

Then we have what is happening with the former president of the united states, who was just arraigned for the third time in four months.

This case is significant for a lot of reasons. If you have read my thesis paper, Users with Dissociative Identity disorder, you will know why this latest case in particular is of significant relevance. Returning now to the point about which side of the political spectrum is going to be more gullible of false narratives? What have we already seen, what evidence do we already have to say, this group of people are going to believe false narratives? The ones who will not be able to tell the difference between a fantasy and reality?

Objective Truth has to matter. There has to be evidence-based facts that everyone can recognize whether they want to or not. Reminds me of a baby wanting to drink gasoline. They believe it’s mountain dew, but you as the adult know that it’s gasoline and will kill the baby, but the baby screams, begging to drink the gasoline, you tell it no over and over again, but the baby insists on drinking it as it thinks you are lying to it and it believes that it’s Mountain dew. 

Will the next Dylan Mulvaney be an AI Video? A Person that doesn’t actually exist, but they have Instagram, they have tik tok – yes and it’s all an Artificial image. Captions generated by AI. 

Who will be easier to dupe with these deep fakes? Who is going to fall for them? We have seen hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people fall for fake accounts on Twitter and Facebook as they share their memes and posts which ever so slightly help tell the narrative, help continue to the fantasy, interact with the fantasy, and be apart of the fantasy, it’s very intoxicating, you don’t have to just sit on the sidelines and watch your TV, you get grab your phone and with your highly evolved thumb write a reply to a post written by an artificially intelligent computer and you’ll get a lot of likes, meet others who think the same way you do, will share in the same fantasy, and guess what? You can meet them at the rally, because your favorite rock star is touring the country nonstop! Who is going to be there other than the grifters, it’s the idiots who still believe in Santa Claus.

Idiot. Noun, a person of low intelligence.

Who is harder to deceive, an 11-year-old 6^th grader or a 35-year-old lawyer?

Look at the average reading level of voters. It’s shocking how low the average reading level is and uneducated they really are, by design. This is not to blame the person in any sense. This is just pointing to the environment in which they are raised. I have compassion for their situation. This is a matter of getting them to see it. To see that the same ones they keep voting for are keeping them in this position.

How many countries have they visited verse the number of countries the politicians they vote for? 

How much travel does the average voter do verse the average politician?

How many countries does the average politician visit verse the average voter? 

How many Michelin star restaurants has the average voter eaten at verse the average politician?

We all have to face hard truths about ourselves. It’s very hard for the ego to do, to admit a wrong, to admit a mistake.

I have had to undergo this in my life as well, it’s not easy, what got me through it was art. It was creating, it was writing, it was designing, it was animating, painting, all of it. Self expression. Let it out, it’s ok to express yourself. write it out, say it out loud just to see how it feels.

We have to be accepting of others. Many who continue to support the previous president, are hurting, they are hurting and they don’t know who to turn to for help. Their government, by design and by sheer greed, has deserted them, corporation have deserted them. They have torn out the unions and pitted everyone against each other.

To evolve require cooperation.

We have to cooperate with one another in order to progress. That requires everyone to face hard truths, to say that everyone as a collective has added to this storm we see brewing before us, screaming at each other on the timeline. Not even willing to have a discourse.

We have to be able to communicate with one another. If we stop communicating, then we will stop progressing in the same manner, which will matter as we take these next evolutionary steps that we are on the brink of. Technology that is going to continue to rapidly change our environment, and technology that will have the power to magnify the problems we currently face, so if we think they are hard truths to face now, truths that are too much to face now, will be even harder to face in the near future.

What are we going to do about that? Sit back, because I am just an artist? It won’t matter if we don’t have a sustainable environment, that won’t matter if we go through a nuclear war based on lies and deceit. Who will be there to read then? What will matter then?

I have hope for humanity and no, I am not a doomsdayer or think we are always on the brink. But like the people who update the time on the Doomsday clock, I keep an eye on it, and with the recent war in Ukraine, it feels like World War 3 has already begun. I think most world leaders see that but don’t want to raise the alarm as they all have financial interests and don’t want to cause a panic in the markets before they actually have to. Remember how the messaging was early on, because they didn’t want people panic buying certain items, feels like the same going on here. I know the Military Industrial complex has to keep going and the war ending in the middle east meant those government contracts had to continue to exist and find another deal somewhere else, most definitely another factor for spending billions, but I do think to a certain extent they know the seriousness of this move and the implications it has, and look at NATO in how quickly they are now adding countries. 

Politics doesn’t have to be like this. It doesn’t have to be hostile.

Fragile time we are in right now.

The journey isn’t long, it’s right now and it’s infinite. Go Further. Further into the future that lays itself out before you. Growing pains, one step at a time.

And if this my last episode ever, and one of these times that will be true, so I want to say it now, because if not now, when? But I just want to say before I go, one last thing and if it’s the last thing I ever say I want it to be this -