So while I was writing the script for Government: Earth I think the left side of my brain started to hurt from overuse and I ended up recording this, and kinda worked on them both at the same time.
the impossibility of non-transparency on the internet?
aaron moritz, July 24th 2010People get very riled up about privacy issues online, and I always have to wonder, who are you hiding from?
You, when you said your Facebook profile to ‘private’, what information are you protecting? And who are you protecting it from?
In a free society, you have nothing to hide from anyone. In a free society, there is no reason to fear for your cell numbers or your bank account… or identity theft.
Hackers have shown time and again that no matter what restrictions are placed on them, they’ll find a way around it. Look at Wikileaks, who gave the keynote speech at HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth). Even the most private, secret information corporations and governments are trying to hide is slipping out….
What does this mean for humanity? Living in a world where transparency is ubiquitous. Seems to be where we’re heading, and it seems to me a step in the right direction.
next day edit:
(thought this was very relevant to what I was trying to say)
Change the world with social networking from JD Lasica on Vimeo.
Government: Earth
aaron moritz, July 24th 2010my latest video offering (another coming real soon… if this was me exercising my left brain, my next video is the right):
oh the irony…
aaron moritz, July 19th 2010That snapshot taken an hour after I posted this tweet:

Strangely does not include any tweets that didn’t occur between 4 and 5 hours ago (except mine, in tiny writing, which only appears because it’s MY tweet, not as a search result). Nor does it include any tweets posted by people who had anything intelligent to say, or didn’t have 420 in their name…
And they say they “can’t bring up any older tweets”, but mine is not old. It’s new. Just strange.
Could be a coincidence, Twitter’s servers are constantly going down all over the place. It’s really unreliable sometimes, but this seems strange to me. Anyways, could be a lot of things (tech glitch, maybe nobody is using that hash tag… whatever), just thought it was interesting, and as my post title says, ironic.
will posting this get me fired from my job? (probably not?)
aaron moritz, July 16th 2010I just got home from a barbecue with some people I work with at and I walked into the middle of a conversation about a new policy I hadn’t heard about. Apparently, employees can expect to be fired for posting that they had ‘a bad day at work’ on their facebook page (or, you know, anything negative — workwise).
My immediate reaction was ‘isn’t that illegal?”, but my boss (well, one of them, who was there) told me that there was plenty of historical precedent for these types of policies, and that the company does need to protect itself. After all, I couldn’t just take out an advertisement in the paper that says their hotel sucks, now could I? I guess not, because that’s libel? But, me posting my opinion of my day on my Facebook page?
I’ve never once mentioned my job on this site or on facebook because I don’t mind my job. Anyone who follows this site at all knows my position on wage slavery, etc, but for being a wage slave, my ‘masters’ here aren’t too bad at all. It’s a pretty decent place to work. So why am I posting this?
Because, on this planet, when the interests of a company (their ‘image’) can trump the free speech interests of an individual… there is just absolutely nothing more disgusting I can think of (maybe one or two things). If I wanted to say that I had a bad day at work, I should be allowed to.
And I don’t even want to. I like my job and my bosses, but the fact that they signed off on this gross restriction of human freedoms is something I can’t abide. It’s disgusting, it’s atrocious, and I plead with the management to reverse this policy. Not for the sake of the company, but for the people who work there. When you start acting in the interests of a company, a fictional entity rather than in the interest of real human beings, I think it is time to take a look at your priorities in life, and if I believed in a soul, I’d say this was quite a soulless act.. How much freedom are you willing to take away from real people for a corporate entity? But what can I expect? There are no friends in business, as they say.
To my bosses: why does your job matter to you more than the people you work with? How are you ok living in, and supporting, a world where people are not free to express their opinions openly? Even if this is only a fractional microcosm of a much larger problem (as I believe it is), I implore anyone involved in making this decision to find their humanity, to realize that freedom isn’t something to be taken for granted and to re-examine your stance and role in today’s society. Do you believe the past impossible to repeat itself? Do you believe that these tiny, incremental, steps towards FASCISM are insignificant, or are you just ignoring them.
I’ve worked there for almost three years now. I’ve never had a problem with a co-worker, I’ve never even asked for a raise, I just do my shit and go home for the day. I’m gonna hit publish, right now, because I feel I have to. Maybe this will never be read by anyone at my work, maybe I’ll get called into the office on Monday… all I can do is what I know to be right.
Because what they are doing is wrong. Companies do not deserve the same protection as humans. Common sense people. We are all unique biological individuals who deserve respect, and the money and the companies we work for are abstractions. Buildings and logo’s and bullshit.
When a companies ability to control your actions extends outside of the time period you are ‘working’ for them, that sets a dangerous precedent. So Jane, Dave, (whoever the head office people I don’t know are)… I’m willing to lose my job, but please don’t fire me. It is my fundamental right as a human being to express my opinion on this disgusting infringement on human rights and my contempt for a system and a society that allows these things to pass without massive outbursts of dissent.
so what happens if i don’t live forever? (also how i became an athiest [extremely abridged])
aaron moritz, July 11th 2010When I was in 7th grade my religion teacher told the class that it was ok to be gay, but that having gay sex was a sin. Tell any 12 year old kid he can’t have sex (well, the kind he wants to have) and you lose ‘em. And Catholicism lost me. But that didn’t mean there was no God, not for sure anyway. I was content, for many years, to think that the church just gets some things wrong, that of course, an ever loving God would never send me to hell for sucking a dick (especially when he’s the one who made me want to do it…)
So I embraced my agnosticism, which by the time I graduated, had turned more into a quasi-spiritual pick and choose belief system when I got into mysticism and spirit guides and healing (note: not heavily into , I was just… browsing), and now my stance is basically… wait and see. But my intuition is that there is no afterlife.
The more ‘atheist’ I became, the more I began to feel free. There was no God watching and judging everything I do. I am the ultimate judge of myself. I am the only person with that power, truly. I once mentioned I was an atheist to a casual acquaintance and he said “…must be lonely sometimes.” I never looked at it that way. The only thing atheism has given me is less guilt, and a feeling of purpose.
I’ve been digging into Transhumanism for a while now, and I’ve become fairly persuaded by the evidence that we are developing technologies that will radically extend our lives (possibly until the end of the universe[or the beginning of the next one]). But lot’s of people like to say that this is nothing more than technologists wishful thinking, their own scientific version of religion, creating heaven on earth, rapture of the nerds some people have called it. And until I see the actual technologies working, on humans, I can’t have 100% confidence that they aren’t wrong. So what happens if I do die?
Well, I was an atheist (well, let’s say… 96% atheist. There’s always a chance the theists are right) before I stumbled upon transhumanism and my stance on death hasn’t changed much. If death is inevitable, then all that means is that this life is more precious. There is no garuntee, or even reason to think, that there is anything after this life. So make each moment count. And don’t worry about dying, because if you do die, you’ll either be starting on some great adventure, or you’ll be nothing, like before you were born.
The Sultans – Lion in the Night
aaron moritz, July 7th 2010This is a little music video I produced for my good friends The Sultans.
follow me on twitter
aaron moritz, July 6th 2010i’m doing this in an effort to focus the site. I like posting other people’s content, but really the reason I pay for a domain name is to post my content. SO, from now on, if I just want to share something, or have a quick thought, I’ll post it on twitter l) (I’m gonna work on getting a feed up somewhere on the home page, so that even if you’r not a twitter user you can still see my stream), or facebook, I like connecting on there as well.
I will still include other people’s content in my posts on this site, but only if I have something substantive to add to or say about it.
society needs a ReMix [HQ]
aaron moritz, July 4th 2010i figured out how to upload the high quality version:
a remixer’s manifesto:
1. culture always builds on the past.
2. the past always tried to control the future.
3. our future is becoming less free
4. to build free societies, we need to limit the control of the past.
visit my youtube channel at: http://www.youtube.com/user/saydaysago2008
Top Ten Reasons Global Revolution WILL Happen
aaron moritz, July 4th 201010. Peak Oil:
Everything plastic or rubber is made of oil. Oil fuels our transport, our trade, our economy. Our entire civilization is based on the use of fossil fuels for both energy and materials.
There are ways to fix these problems, but since we’re barely even attempting to implement them, the problems associate with depleting oil are escalating.
9. Bio Engineering:
We’re learning so much about how our bodies function at such a fast rate, that the applications seem almost science fiction, like the recently developed ‘bionic eye’ for blind people, a small camera either implanted into the eye socket or word on glasses that wirelessly sends a signal to an implant behind your ear, which interfaces with your brain to produce an image (see video here). If we can replace an eye, why not a heart? Or a brain (after transferring the data, of course)?
We are experimenting with being able to switch genes on and off. We are learning to literally grow tissues, or even entire organs in a lab, and implant them. We are learning to reverse the biological processes of aging. We are on the brink of attaining an unprecedented amount of control over our biology and the biology of our descendants. This raises many questions that are unique to our times and deserve a lot of discussion.
8. The Emerging Global Police State:
International Bankers, largely based in and in control of the United States and the other central UN nations are quietly imposing new laws that restrict people’s freedoms ad create an environment of fear, which leads to submission. But people will only accept so much, sometimes all too many of their freedoms to be taken away before being pushed to the brink, but there always is a brink. And the confused, power-hungry, fear mongers are always pushing the limits.
The illusion of freedom and democracy that has enshrouded the western world is dissipating due to many of the other factors listed here.
7. Technological Unemployment:
It started when tractors replaced farm workers. Then the people who built the tractors were replaced by automated factories. So everyone moved to the service industry, but now we have ATM’s and automated restaurants and waiters and vending machines.
The fact, is that in any industry, the more we automate the work (ie; assign it to machines rather than humans), the more efficiently the work is done. Machines are stealing our jobs (and they’re better at them, too)!!!! That’s why we can’t keep people employed. There isn’t enough work for them to do, and since they can’t work, they can’t spend, so companies has to cut costs, fire more people, further diminish the purchasing power of the individual. You see the diminishing returns here. This type of loop cannot be sustained.
We’ve ignored this (shifted people to new industries) for almost 80 years, and it’s finally starting to catch up to us (there really isn’t much work left for us to do).
6. Between 10% and 20% of the World’s Population is Starving:
and the global wealth gap is widening, which will only increase this number. As Citibank stated in their leaked internal memo, while they have successfully achieved the accumulation of power through monetary means, government, unfortunately still remains a one person one vote power structure. This clearly shows the mindset of the super-wealthy, who could easily afford to feed everyone on the planet, but choose, instead, due to their conditioning, to allow people to starve, tacitly allowing millions of deaths every day.
I wonder how far they think they can push it, before people start to say enough is enough. I know I’m already saying it. And so are a lot of other people.
5. AI:
Many parts of the brain have been modeled. Neural networks have been simulated. We don’t yet have all the processing power and neural models available to ‘build a brain’, but the pieces are falling together, if you pay attention to the news in that area. Ray Kurzweil projects we will have human level machine intelligence by 2029.
If a robot has the ability to react, discuss, argue that it is conscious and can feel, who would we be to say that it doesn’t? What if it has had the memories of a loved one transferred into it? The philosophical and intellectual debate this poses over what it means to be ‘alive’ or ‘conscious’ has the ability to fundamentally alter our perspectives on what it means to be a human. If that’s not revolutionary I don’t know what is.
4. Environmental Crisis:
Whether global warming is man made or not, we need to take care of our planet and our environment holistically. Failure to do this will inevitably result in environmental catastrophe. When this happens, something big is going to need to change.
3. The Flopping Global Economy:
The world-wide debt balloon is bursting. There are signs of it everywhere, world leaders are meeting to discuss it, and coming up with no real answers, just empty targets that won’t be met, and wouldn’t help even if they were met. A market economy is based on growth, but we only have one planet. It and the amount of resources on it are not growing, so we can’t keep using them at an accelerated rate.
The fact is that we live in a global Ponzi scheme, an upsidedown pyramid that is about to tip one way or the other. We need an ‘economic’ system that is based on the holistic management of the entire earth, it’s life, and it’s resources.
2. Nanotechnology:
Nanotechnology brings the promise of being able to manipulate matter at the level of molecules. In Eric Drexler’s Engine’s of Creation, a seminal book on Nanotech, he describes nano-scale assemblers that would have the ability to arrange matter in any way (ie; make apple pie from thin air, simply by re arranging the molecules). How is the economy going to work when everyone can have any material possessions they want at only the cost of raw materials?
Nanotechnology also carries with it the promise of being able to upgrade our human bodies. More efficient neurons, better red blood cells, better internal defense systems for healing cuts and bruises.
Nanotechnology takes it’s cue from our own molecular machinery (cells and the like), yet allows us to manipulate and improve upon it. It will likely also function as a catalyst for both AI, and is intermingled with Bio Engineering, in my opinion.
1. The Internet, ie: The Freedom and Spread of Information:
Hey guess what everyone? The United States and every member of it’s empire and most of the rest of the world is living in a Police State (see #8). We are not free, not in action, not in the choice of our governments or money masters.
But we all know that. We haven’t all been tricked, and we’re telling each other about what’s happening. We’re working right in front of their faces to remove them from power. Until about ten years ago, they were very effective at controlling public opinion. We all thought what the TV told us to, we all thought what was on TV was real. Now we know it’s just reality television, a drama played out for our amusement and distraction.
How do we know? Because we’re making our own videos, we’re learning how to think from each other, rather than from a single source, and that is unfortunate for anyone who wants things to stay the same. The printing press caused a revolution due to it’s ability to spread information. The internet does this on a scale many orders of magnitude larger, so should we expect that the resulting revolution will also be on a scale many orders of magnitutde larger?
Any one of these things has the potential to start a monumental revolution, either of the mind, or of our external environment. The fact that they are all happening at the same time is why I feel confident in saying that something big is coming.
What should we do about it? Well, if you ask me, I like the direction of the Zeitgeist Movement. To me it seems like the most reasonable option we have left.
