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Dictionary Definitions & The Hyperreal, Part 5

In part 3 of this series, I looked at one of the ways the Hyperreal works on a question & answer website like Quora.

If you’ve never used Quora, it’s basically a site where people go to ask other people things they could just as easily look up in a search engine. And then other people take those things, look them up in a search engine, and reply to the original asker with usually the answers they found in a search engine, plus usually some condescending remarks. In other words, it’s a great experience for everybody, clearly.

As I began to see those patterns take shape, I came up with an idea. What if I could just seed the answers I wanted into Google results? This way, I could ask leading questions anonymously (which Quora allows), knowing people would just Google them, and then their answers could help me launder content further along the spectrum of the hyperreal.

Having experimented a lot with Medium, I knew that it would be relatively easy to rank quickly in Google (often occurs within a few hours). So I set up a kind of meta-data thirst trap account, “pretending to be” dictionary definitions. I put “pretending to be” in quotes because, really, I have as much of a right to define words as anyone else. There’s no monopoly on language. It’s a living thing…

The Medium account is:

https://medium.com/@define.words (archived)

I also set up a “publication” on Medium to further strengthen my SEO:

https://medium.com/online-dictionary (archived)

Looks pretty legit (despite dark-mode in screen shot), if I say so myself!

I would definitely believe “Online Dictionary” and so should you! What’s not to believe with all this meta-data!

Then I set up about defining some words & concepts, complete with pronunciation guides, and usage examples, so Google would hoover them up, and it did! Usually within a few hours.

You know, common everyday words most people use like Hieruthian (archived), Crypto-Civilization (archived), and Poesiarchy (archived).

Google will happily purr them back out to you as “correct” answers to definitions of these common Quatrian words & concepts.

And thus as a result, on the marvelous “can you Google this for me” website that is Quora, you will get results like these if you ask the right leading questions to lead people into your meta-data thirst traps:

Example throughput:

What does the word “poesiarchy” mean? (archived)

Quora response:

A highly creative answer, to be sure. And this “reality lurking in the shadowy peripher of our lives just waiting for a chance to manifest” mentioned by the responder sounds, in fact, just like hyperreality — the quarry of our present inquiry. So maybe this person landed on the secret inner meaning, despite the false trappings & trail that had been laid down to entrap them…

Sidenote: I only planted about 5-6 of these definitions. Imagine if someone did hundreds, or thousands, and free dictionary aggregator sites picked them up. If they were good & useful words, how long would it be before they made their way into real people’s everyday vocabularies? Perhaps not long at all.

Tangent:

Speaking of free dictionaries online, this one of “cultural layer” (archived) is pretty interesting.

It begins with a disclaimer: “The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.”

Perhaps all dictionaries should have a disclaimer that they might be outdated and potentially biased?

Further, the OSINT trail for “The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition” is anything but comprehensive – at least in English. There’s a 2016 blogspot source called Russian World Citizens Project (archived) which itself is pretty sketchy looking, and only points back to this same site as a source.

It might be “real” but it might also be hyperreal…

Does the difference even matter?

Quora & The Hyperreal, Part 3

In prior installations of this series on the Weapons of the Hyperreal (Read Parts 0, 1, & 2 for context), I looked at the power of naming & the dissemination of “facts” via press release into the various lower strata of news sites. I am by no means an expert on this, but merely trying to collect & reflect on all the hyperrealist cryptoart experiments I have done for the past several years, without having a name or genre to slot them into–until now.

I’ve quoted it once, I’ll quote it a thousand times:

Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.

Wikipedia

With press releases, the purpose really is to get others to pick up your facts, and re-transmit them as their own. It’s largely what “news” as an industry appears to be based on.

But there is another path.

The path of counter-engagement. Where you pose “facts” with the intent that they will be argued against, and shot down by self-proclaimed “experts.” In so doing, you help to drive the narrative forward, increase the SEO footprint, and expose new people to the ideas, while fully acknowledging their disparate existential footing, thereby circumventing cultural immune systems by activating them.

One branch of the many paths through the forest of counter-engagement lies through Quora.

If you’re still wondering what I mean, browse through this search results page for “Quatria” on Quora (archived), a site positively FILLED with experts!

Here are some choice samples, with questions asked anonymously on Quora marked below in bold.

Note: I am obscuring some of the personally-identifying information of responders here, as my purpose is not to name or shame them, but to use these examples to illustrate the vagaries of the hyperreal world we now live in…

Debunk me

While I respect this person likely has some authority in the domain of history, the argument seems to be, “I haven’t heard of this, therefore false…”

Of course, this argument further falls apart once we understand what a crypto-civilization is, and that by their very nature, they’ve been hidden from conventional history… Around and around we go.

From the same source above:

This responder above even took the time to Google & re-transmit my article about the Quatria Theory to myself & others. Very helpful, very hyperreal!

Another Quora thread:

I would rate this answer as only partially true. There is no “work of fiction” entitled Quatria. There do exist certain very real volumes of collected Lore from that supposedly “fictional” culture (debatable) called the Lost Books of Quatria, put out by Lost Books, an indie blockchain publisher. The first volume is even available as an NFT.

However, none of that precludes the very real possibility that ancient or even pre-historic cultures could have made it to Antarctica. Especially since we know it was once more close to the Equator!

Hit me one more time:

This is exactly the creeping feeling of the hyperreal… You don’t know if it’s a “real” fake, or if its a fake fake that some might take as real… The circle never ends.

I often think that it must be reassuring to be this certain that one’s own ontological conception of “the real” is the sole and correct one.

It’s also interesting to me that there are people who feel so strongly compelled to act as Guardians of the Real that they fight it out daily in online forums. Bless their hearts for that… but I hate to break it to you…

Quatria is def real, y’all:

Guardians of the Real, assemble!

It’s interesting that at Quora, it’s normal to make existential determinations on behalf of all humanity and its past, hidden beyond the veils of time. What would they do if they found out Quatria is real…?

Meme: (Morpheus) “What if I told you… Quatria Is Real”
Quatria is very very real, I am afraid

But once in a while, you strike on a compatible hyperrealist fantasy of someone else, such as this person who has combined quite nicely the story-myth of Kumari Kandam with that of Ancient Quatria. It almost makes me wonder too if there isn’t some match here, cosmic forces of a sort driving together the two complexes of ideas & borrowed bits of history…

Where is it mentioned indeed! Perhaps a better question, and one more telling, would be, where isn’t it mentioned?

That said, one must also be careful: one person on Twitter, after posting one of my conspiracy articles from Medium, told me that their father had “worked on Quatria…”–whatever that means. I didn’t inquire further, but perhaps should have.

Or perhaps I did in an alternate timeline, and a huge holographic refractor in space is blocking memory of it from my present self…

Wait, what *is* the Quatria Conspiracy:

I would actually subscribe to this monthly club, perhaps, if the price & contents were right! Hyperreal Trend Report Monthly. Sounds like a Substack waiting to happen.

Others go in directions I don’t quite understand. This one starts strangely, and then…

…well, I guess I’m not the only one stranded deeply in the hyperreal. It’s just that each of us calls it something different, and dresses it up in the decorations that are the most familiar to us.

Is this person suggesting there IS a true life conspiracy to suppress knowledge of Quatria? Did I, through this simple ritual of asking troll-y alt reality history questions on Quora, accidentally invoke one into existence? Only time can tell!

Bringing it all back home…

Time, or another few examples from Quora threads, saved for posterity:

To each their own, I guess. I don’t have an all-seeing eye that tells me none of those things are even remotely possible. Perhaps they are not. But perhaps… Teletubbies to the moooooooon!!!

How do we determine anymore what is “of substance” in the Age of the Hyperreal? This person seems to be also, perhaps inadvertently, admitting there is indeed *some* evidence of this ancient lost civilization after all!

But seriously, how do we know all trace wasn’t simply removed from the web about Quatria, save for a few ramblings by confused authors who have dreamed a dream from outside of time? We really can’t be sure either way!

If you don’t believe me, you could always believe this news article on publish0x, the famous reputable news site (archived).

Or this helpful video, published by bollyholly143:

Lorecore x Borecore x Snorecore

Forgive me, oh blogging Muses, it has been too long since my last proper confession. In the intervening years, how I have wandered… over hill and dale, and been lost for many a long age in the dark jungles of “social media.” I can only say I’ve regretted every minute of it (well, nearly). Oh, how I’ve longed to sit by your cool dark stream of consciousness again, and just let er rip. So please accept this humble offering…

What were we talking about again? Oh right, Lorecore, or as I also like to call it Borecore or Snorecore. Have I lost you yet? Are you already ZZZ emoji? Good, because that is the essence of Lorecore. The essence of Lorecore is lulling the reader to sleep with an avalanche of exposition, examining the world, or a given domain, down to tiny excruciating detail. And once they’ve fallen asleep, they dream in that world, and move about in it. Tolkien’s “subcreation.”

There’s a Thoreau quote I’ve always carried with me (in paraphrase at least) since reading it a decade or two back, which equally applies to the diatribe at hand:

“Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.”

Thoreau

This has long stood out as an ideal for me with creating art or narrative as well. That we can pick it up, and look extremely closely, and change our perspective and whole way of looking, and still see deep and freshly in it again, just like in Nature.

Nature, in fact, is completely made up of Lorecore. Each bird or beast or fish or plant has its own ways, its own knowledge and experience, histories and relationships, its own deep lore. Ecosystems and biomes are the interpenetrating lived compendium of that lore. To me, that idea is endlessly fascinating that we could zoom up or down at any scale of a narrative and find another narrative hidden within (and another and another…), which ultimately adds up to more than the sum of its parts in the Great Tapestry of Story & of Being: The Great River, in Quatrian terms.

I see Lorecore also as something like an Open World game, but for books, or for trans-media story-telling more broadly, where the narrative is distributed among many artifacts, voices, channels, etc. The “player” is the reader/experiencer who may or may not know or care about backstory, but who has landed somehow or other on an intriguing artifact.

See also: Networked narrative

A networked narrative, also known as a network narrative or distributed narrative, is a narrative partitioned across a network of interconnected authors, access points, and/or discrete threads. It is not driven by the specificity of details; rather, details emerge through a co-construction of the ultimate story by the various participants or elements.

Networked narratives can be seen as being defined by their rejection of narrative unity. As a consequence, such narratives escape the constraints of centralized authorship, distribution, and storytelling.

Wikipedia: networked narrative

Here’s a related quote from Henry Jenkins on Transmedia storytelling:

Most often, transmedia stories are based not on individual characters or specific plots but rather complex fictional worlds which can sustain multiple interrelated characters and their stories. This process of world-building encourages an encyclopedic impulse in both readers and writers. We are drawn to master what can be known about a world which always expands beyond our grasp.  […]

Transmedia storytelling expands what can be known about a particular fictional world while dispersing that information, insuring that no one consumer knows everything and insure that they must talk about the series with others (see, for example, the hundreds of different species featured in Pokemon or Yu-Gi-O). Consumers become hunters and gatherers moving back across the various narratives trying to stitch together a coherent picture from the dispersed information.

Henry Jenkins

Are you with me still? Have I lost you yet? Have you closed out this tab and clicked to another one, searching for the next marginal online thrill? Good, I hope so. Because Lorecore is Borecore is Snorecore, and that is the power of it. To the outsider, who has not ears to hear, these words will be a bore. But to those touched by the gods of Lore, nothing could give them more pleasure.

One last quote before I end this awkward blog post that had no arc in an ending that yields no resolution:

Lorecore is also the realm of hyperreality, and is the world we’re increasingly heading into technologically.

Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins. It allows the co-mingling of physical reality with virtual reality (VR) and human intelligence with artificial intelligence (AI).

Wikipedia: Hyperreality

If this doesn’t just describe it to a tee, I don’t know what does!

To be continued, as I plan to keep flogging this topic til it drops all its jewels on the cold wet earth, and its seeds take flight…

Question: profiteering from fake news

I don’t remember seeing it addressed in any committee hearings, but perhaps it was. Has anyone answered how much money Google has made as a result of AdSense ads placed on fake news sites? Would be really interesting to see an analysis on that…

Is the Akashic Record a massive violation of privacy?

According to the internet, the Akashic Records are a kind of magical record of everything that ever happened, is happening or will happen. Wikipedia quotes Alice Bailey in 1927:

The akashic record is like an immense photographic film, registering all the desires and earth experiences of our planet. Those who perceive it will see pictured thereon: The life experiences of every human being since time began, the reactions to experience of the entire animal kingdom, the aggregation of the thought-forms of a karmic nature (based on desire) of every human unit throughout time.

The inestimable “Crystal Links” references an associated myth:

“A Chinese man named Sujujin was reported to need only the first name of anyone to access the Akasha and describe their life history.”

From a privacy and data protection perspective, this sounds pretty alarming. Why aren’t adequate security measures in place? Why haven’t the known risks been mitigated? Who is responsible in the event of a data breach? What rights do I have as a data subject to not be included in this so-called “Book of Life”?

Countless pathways to infringement of PII (personally identifying information) have been laid out by careless Practioners in books such as Linda Howe’s How to Read the Akashic Record.

For thousands of years, mystics, masters, and sages from various world traditions have read the Akashic Records-a dynamic repository that holds information about every soul and its journey. Once reserved for a “spiritually gifted” few, this infinite source of wisdom and healing energy is now available for readers everywhere to answer questions big and small.

If you ask me, giving free and unrestricted access to just anyone to the universe’s vault of secrets about every person creates a major vector for harassment, hate postings and many other types of abuse.

I reached out to AKASHIC RECORDS LIMITED via their LinkedIn profile to find out what they were doing to bring their systems into compliance in advance of the GDPR coming into force on 25 May, 2018. I have yet to hear back from them. To be on the safe side, I also reached out to LIFES AKASHIC RECORDS LIMITED, also a UK company. I’m uncertain which of these organizations, if any, are responsible for this mess. For what is supposed to be the biggest database in the Universe, I couldn’t even find an official website.

Keyboard that inputs words not letters

Is there a way on Mac OS X Sierra to enter whole words rapidly, instead of letter-by-letter, as per normal typing?

I’ve experimented a lot with Dragon Dictate for text entry and it can work well under specific circumstances – one of which is having an allowance for vocalizations in the workplace (not always convenient).

What I’m after is to basically be able to set up word banks, and then rapidly plop in values from each group to form descriptive sentences  for SEO on a high volume of images. Since many of the subjects of the images repeat again and again, I’m wanting to split them up into re-usable chunks.

So it could be a little like this, genericized:

[Person][Action][Preposition][Location]

Where each item is a bank of related words, which I can quickly flip through to find the correct combination, something like:

Man walking on a beach

I have aText, which is a decent basic text expander app, and I see people talking about some autocomplete options in Mac OS, but so far nothing quite fits the bill.

I guess the closest I’ve come so far has been finding (more on iOS) some applications for augmentative/assistive communications boards, like so:

If I were able to customize this kind of thing with my own word banks, and make it into like an app that can be called up system-wide (or at least in Firefox), and which will output strings of text into Google Sheets + allow for easy switching to regular text/letter-by-letter entry style, I would be pretty much golden…

Maybe I’ll just have to cobble it together myself though, it looks like.

Amazon Prime Minister

If there’s an Amazon Prime, is there an Amazon Prime Minister?

To weirdos with questions

I’ve been ? investigating what it takes to become a licensed private investigator in the province of Quebec. Kind of just for fun, really, as an extension of a burgeoning interest in privacy and data protection.  Apparently there is a 135 hr training requirement, but no one seems to be able to point me to an equivalent training that’s both available in English and online.

Okay, fine. So sue me for living in a French province in a bilingual country and asking for resources in English. I get it, there’s a charter to protect the French language from being overwhelmed in a predominantly English-language culture. But still. We can do both, right? I think that’s the ideal.

Anyway, I’ve been simultaneously querying a variety of agencies for help: from associations, to training providers, to provincial authorities in neighboring Ontario. My hobby is emailing people I don’t know, with some weird questions. So I’m actually pretty used to this now.

Ontario has, by comparison, an only 50 hr training requirement which is significantly less than Quebec. Unclear still if you have to actually *be* a resident of that province to be licensed there.

I don’t know though what your practice would conceivably consist of though. If you’re licensed in one province, but operating in another. Maybe I’m going about all this in the completely wrong direction.  One possible pathway would be to have the operating province recognize the license given in the other. But for what benefit and to what eventual end?

I’m really not an expert on these things. I’m just someone with a lot of questions. ? ❓ But here’s the thing you find when you start asking the people or the agencies, or the people who are out there and who *are* the experts: no one necessarily knows the answer. The questions may never have been asked before. A specific pre-built answer may require interpretation and invention.

And few people acting in official capacities are comfortable being publicly wrong. So it’s a natural human response, I’m sure, to just not to want to answer weirdos with questions. At least that’s commonly where I end up on these hare-brained tangents of mine where I end up emailing a dozen different people for help or answers with a specific question or problem.

There exists, a certain, I guess we could call it ‘tenacity of research‘ which one may possess or perhaps develop as a personality trait… such that following through with it in fullness, and learning to harness and direct it, may actively create answers that didn’t exist before through a radical act of questioning. In the course of asking and answering certain questions, you may through patience and persistence become the eventual expert. You might just invoke an unthing into being.

I don’t know what any of this means, though vis-a-vis where we started. Except, if you gotta ?, then ?. If you look and you find there’s no answer, you make one out of what’s available and what you can dream up.

 

Format: Flash Cards, Q&A

To convey a storyline using a series of Q&A flashcards which must be memorized and an examination passed before the next chapter of the story will unfold.

Emotional spectrum

I’ve been exploring the radio frequency spectrum with CubicSDR and a dongle from Nooelec I bought on Amazon.ca. One thing I’ve been wondering is with emotions: do they have an equivalent “spectrum” which is somehow identifiable and/or reproducible, just as electro-magnetic energy does?

Moreover, could EMF spectrum points somehow be pegged to/triggers for physiological-emotional responses in humans and other living things?

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