Next Gen Marketer or a Has Been?
Several months ago I played around putting together some key concepts into a slide show, or at least key concepts in the circles I talk with. I prefaced it with simple question and asked below: Can you find the hidden themes?
The question:
There are many answers,
but only one matters…
Next Gen or Has Been? Pretty tough bar to meet. I do not know if I am right or not, but as the famous scientist I knew said- always question convention. No matter how simple it seems, and be prepared to be scorned or laughed at. If they are laughing you are exploring new ways to think and there is value in that alone.
So taking a cue from that I did some heavy reading and tried to cross-pollinate metaphors from nanotech futurists into today. If I could not pinpoint the right fiction, maybe a respected futurist would have hints. Based on this I set about sending signals to find other “thinkers” that were on that wavelength. You cannot push people to think or learn. They have to want to do it, and realize it can be play. Work can be fun and different and sometimes requires self motivation. This is not about intellect, it is about unlearning. An exercise is examination and a proof that risk is worth taking.
The Place They Love to Hate
The riddle has remained unsolved so I went from low immersion environment into a high immersion environment to look for assets. This person does not want to be named, but I knew, due to their thinking that they could crack the puzzle. Second Life is misunderstood and has a sinking reputation- fine. Let us find the “worst place” (sadville) and see who inhabits this “place” of woe. I know many of them and it is full of brilliant people if you learn the language they will talk.
He didn’t want to be named because he tried evangelism before and said it is a waste of time. That my attempt will fail, and go ignored, but go ahead and try because I am altruistic and naive. Of course he tried years ago…which is why he is at the top, in terms of output and respect, of the ecosystem or in Jason’s terms- food chain. As I said I really wanted to lash back at Jason’s retort on his blog, but that would set a poor example- flaming is camouflaged pollution. Blaming a label called “affiliates” in my eyes, is naive because there is an entire ecosystem and mindset that enabled this. So teach something and if you cannot change someone’s view on something, then let them see how you see the world. Since I am often misunderstood or cannot articulate things well, I took a cue from an original video, that touched off some neat social collisions, that I saw reverse engineered into text. Here is the video that Steve Rosenbaum injected into the stream so long ago, and it keeps making its rounds, this time the meme has not replicated 100% but morphed into a new way of seeing things.
Who let this happen? Who do we blame?
- Government
- The People
- The A-Listers who talk about the latest shiny tool but ignore the pollution
- Worse someone with equity who says please keep polluting so it is advantageous to me?
- The Networks- after all they enable this
- Do we blame the search engines? Who can’t get a handle on it?
- Security companies who cannot seem to contain the tide of slime.
- Society which has the system rigged like this or fails to act
- Affiliates and I ask which ones because nothing is ever as it seems if you follow the rabbit holes. If they are spammers they are not affiliates- they are spammers. If they are using deception they are not affiliates- they are liars.
- Maybe I should just blame everyone or no one or give up on laying blame.
Or maybe I should blame myself?
Maybe I failed to reach out to the Jason’s, or Scoble’s and others? I didn’t think too. I was myopic. They said they were open on their sites, but managing networks of that size is beyond our neocortex. I know I have played Scrabulous with Robert- as you can see the Attention Economy is pretty damn strange. I do promise no monkey phone calls…joke sir- a jest. Steve Rubel though I may send one- he plays the xbox so he is human. I know this because we twittered. It broke a hole in a tight circle. Ok I won’t, but theme is- it is ok to play even on the Net.
Let me set some examples as Jason did in his post- not in the past- but by what I do now. I was so locked in trench warfare that I forgot to reach to other influence spheres. That or perhaps it felt hostile? If you read up on social network theory you will see that networks that are too small and homogeneous are weak, because bridges cannot penetrate the circle with a new idea or thought. You have to have fluid networks, but strong ties…maybe Caledon?
I asked him to answer as he went along as if talking to you all. I interjected in parentheses we did it via Skype.
MAxTRIX- This Includes Hidden Messages
Obvious misspelling this means look for intentional mistakes as cues or Corwin’s hands are giving out again.
Includes hidden messages. Maker is well known for that. Bright sunny day. An illusion.
THE TRUTH
Looks like strange symbols…babble. Babylon? (You are close.)
In all caps means noob.
The truth as we write it, since it is human edited.
Most accept it as final authority because of trust.
Ask The Right Questions
Drawing on Second Life history this would have to do with Corwin’s land battle with Chung over preservation and formation of the College
of Thought. The goal is to ask the right questions, not to seek answers yet. The world is so new it will take time to find them. There I am done. There are many, but only one matters and that is that we ask the right questions. You think you are clever now? (No. If I were clever it would not have cost this much or taken this long, c’mon.)
It is so Ev’ing Obvious
Not sure but Corwin makes references to Ev, the CEO of Obvious, owner of Twitter which frankly I didn’t try until long ago and can see the uses. It explains Cor & Bleys making SLTweets HUD (Heads Up Display connecting Second Life to Twitter or High Immersion to Low Immersion), but curious as how he know to start then? Here Ev is responsible for something? We see the Maxtrix or Matrix is Ev a celebrity? (Never met him. Internet famous perhaps.) This predates Ev following Cor and Corwin’s Unicode injections. Corwin is saying it is obvious that Ev is responsible for some type of shift or change? (Nods)
Real or Unreal
Rhetorical question. I know Corwin believes reality is negotiated and subjective. Just like aesthetics or quality is relative. Try telling that to a builder or scripter. (Nods. I know that great pride is taken in creation that much of the best never sees light of day.)
Shadow or a Shadow
Same message only there is no opposite. He is probably confirming his belief. Reality is negotiated.
Pixels Don’t Die They Decay
Corwin has referred many times to Monolith 8 (A study he and Time did on genetics, memetics, and who knows what.) It was designed to test a proof about avatars and life span and all kind of things like scarcity of virtual goods. They do decay as in Second Life your reputation is valued and they can be lost or stolen. You are what you do. Friends are not like on Facebook, as was said in a post when you click on that button you think because this is a real friend. (Nods- Avatars are not like EULAs)
Ask the Right Source
Don’t be fooled. Ensure where you get know our knowledge is not deceiving you.
Systems Remain Random
Either Corwin or talking about how people are fooled by randomness. Entropy.
We Love You Shannon
(M.W. another bright person got this instantly).This is information theory, the Shannon entropy is a measure of the uncertainty associated with a random variable. Information contained in a message. It is the minimum message length necessary to communicate information. Corwin is talking about the famous mathematician and references Ev and Sumerian theme of a language of control.
He injects unicode into twitter. More efficient, like glyphs. He has glyphs on his RL background twitter thing. No need to know what they mean.
XOR>ROR>CAPTCHA>FAILED
Looks like assembly code, then a touring test and they did not pass. Not sure.
I do know Corwin can program assembly, but his LSL is phail, as we say. Not sure.
Perhaps make sure you are aware of robots, or machines. They fail certain tests- rotating bits.
NO TEXT-Picture of Movie 300.
You are the one that speaks Greek. LOL. (Refers to Battle of Thermopylae The odds sucked and they got creamed, but if they had not stood, it would have been a wipeout. Thus the monument, ironic if you think of Monolith 
Buffers Overflow
Probably Cor on a typical day slurping up information. Stack overflow maybe? It is a typo. 
Ubuntu runs faster on Beer
I do not know who this, so know context. Lots of things run faster on beer. Most humans do not.
(asks who this is person is and I point them to Sam Harrelson’s pages…wait) LOL. Stupidly obvious and rather funny.
Is he in on it? (Not this one, but he doesn’t have to tell me. He signals)
Gets me Investigated More Than I Investigate
Someone Corwin knows gets him into trouble more than he can look for it.
The trouble is probably “prototypical”. e.g. film (Person asks who this is)- ( you are better off not knowing.)
Interopia Head Quarters- Deep Grid
IHQ is unknown. I cannot speak to the Deep Grid.
K33P LiN35 OP3N
Obvious hacker language. We should listen to the messages no matter how odd the source. Do not exclude the younger generation or immature.
Learn Languages of Control
That could be a long answer. I would simply say understand there are many languages. Be fluent.
Obfuscation is the Elemental Way
Often events have to be made unclear before they are clear. There is a cost in learning.
ghostmachine
This, I know is reference to paperghost. He is British. Corwin recruited him during some strange experience with the Spazbox Botnet. It also matches song and British philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s derogatory description for Descartes’ mind-body dualism as well as an episode on X-files.
At Peace
Without war we have peace. Dual forces (Yin and Yang)
At War
Without peace we have war. Polar forces again.
Pick a Three Letter Agency
I do not know many, as I am not a US Citizen. This is rather obvious Cor.
Return Your Calls
You must make investments back when people try to call you. It might be very important. If you fail to answer you will never now.
If people reach out to speak and you miss the message you should return the call.
The Sumer of Sermons
Misspelling cue. Sumer is the theme again. Corwin referenced earlier that Sermons fail, but this creation predates that entry.
Probably he feels he is sermonizing with no effect. He crusades, thus the archetype of knight so he must continue.
Choose Right Ammo
Without right ammunition you cannot fire back. This could be a quill, or a pen or sword or a gun or just about anything.
Summer She Snow Crashed
Set-up from first. This avatar “snow crashed”. That is up for debate, but my answer is right because the goal is to
understand that asking the right questions is more important than finding answers at the moment.
Choose Right Weapon
If you have wrong weapon, your choice of ammo is meaningless. Coupled together these means
be prepared to fight and do battle. Stand up for convictions. When you see wrong you should intervene.
Educate so They Don’t Hesitate
Teach your children values and ideas so they do not hesitate. Since it is Cor and Jr. here. Poor Jr.
Those who study are prepared and ready when or before change comes. That is my take.
DECAY – decline
Easy. We are an increasingly virtual society in a state of “decay”. Like sims (islands or land) are here one day and gone the next.
Cor has been working on solving sustainability so perhaps that ties in. Hurry up and solve the proof please.
If All Tried One- Wars Would End
If those who ordered the war actually had to carry out the destruction, or if every citizen saw the power of the
destruction up close humans might stop fighting and unite. I am not sure I buy that. Humans are conflict oriented.
Animals of a Feather Flock Together
ROTFL. Like minds can find each other if they radiate right signal. Perhaps a hidden joke on feathers for a certain person.
Long Range and Short Range
Distance is immaterial in a virtual world. We can fly or teleport. Physics are what we make them.
Extropy Syntropy Ectropy
Extropy- (metaphor, transhumanism) the extent of a living or organizational system’s intelligence, functional order, vitality, energy, life, experience, and capacity and drive for improvement and growth. The philosophy of Extropy, written by Max More is the original philosophy of transhumanism. I know Corwin is no fan of transhumanism because it is tinkering with things not understood, but he keeps running into them in deep immersion environments. Maybe you don’t know you are one? I would say this was picked up from Drexler’s Engines of Creation. Cor uses it often to find metaphors. He really doesn’t stop.
I inject a link here. and have to quote self.
Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler. Drexler is one of the foremost thinkers on nanotechnology- certainly an important discipline. However, I find metaphors galore and many useful. If anything it will spin you around. I had read it years ago, but not with the clarity I have now. Amazing how the years help perhaps.
For example, bulk extractors (think “flint chipping”- moving a few hundred thousand atoms at a time- like American Indians did with their arrow tips) and nanotechnologists (people doing the tagging, social bookmarking, etc- protein engineering and atom sculpting) could be useful metaphors for current search engine analysis, not to mention the sudden utility of the concept of “microchunking” and XML site maps. For example, why not get atom shapers to masticate data for you so it is easier to swallow? Question is (as I pose to Nick of Metaversed in a twitter exchange- is this dynamic make-up of SERP “COMPOSITION” driven by AI or something different? Good question.
(Important Note: I don’t care what “HTML pages” are returned- I don’t see the world as web pages- I see them as media types.)
Thus SEO as you know it is or will be dead as we transform into the social web- the terrain and patterns will be too. Search engines, the “bulk extractors” are having trouble handling the gobs of data or perhaps the gaming of the system since gaming the system to much disrupts the AI. This is why Google passed on Facebook and perhaps why they are creating Open Social and everything they do has an API. This is why Twitter is significant as it forces people to “atom sculpt” or chew up the data into easy to take chunks- easy for people too. Most do not not spend the time to study or play for sake of play let alone read.
Time is a resource in short supply because of how society is engineered. In our modern day we should have MORE time. Therefore “quality of content” is hard to discern if you are not aware of what content or medium is important to the engine. A profit driven enterprise would study composition and realize that “pages” are silly in some ways, especially with disruptive terrain coming in a year or two. Helping guide people is great, but Mahalo might wonder where people are going to be and what they are going to do?…they are going to go back to the lowest form of social grooming- language. Therefore something like this puzzle is engaging and different, but spreads memes and ideas. A campaign I am involved in with the unnamed spans multiple media types and has varied levels of immersion.
I think this multi-terrain ARG serves as a prototype for engagement. This is Next Gen.
Syntropy (stats, signal process) archaic use for the process Corwin. This is from information theory and statistics, negentropy is used as a measure of distance to normality. You phail, unless this is the 3D world search.
Ectropy (thermal process) ectropy is a measure of the tendency of a dynamic system to do useful work and grow more organized. This would be the inverse of entropy or a fall into decay. A system becomes disordered perhaps like what we see above. Seems to be some sort of process here, but I am not sure decay, signals and then reorganize. It doesn’t matter. We aren’t seeking answers yet because we don’t have enough information. We are in a state of flux and it is going to get more chaotic. The web people can hope for ectropy. Good luck.
That is All
And that is it. It was a very simple exercise in thinking. I did send to some, but it was random selection. Now this particular person is incredibly bright and to be frank one reason I have stayed with a world in decay. I keep running into people who are thinking way ahead of the curve or if they are behind the curve then something is wrong. That is critical in my mind if you are a next gen marketer. It isn’t hard, and there are plenty of games and symbols all around you. Just play, or disrupt your environment so you are free to do so. R & D. Am I right? I don’t know. I am not sure.
I just keep looking for the right questions. The answers will come.
ADDENDUM: If you found any value in this let me know. So the naysayers who say- people don’t think or want too will have a proof.
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