RU Sirius chats with Howard Bloom

A mind-blowing interview with Howard Bloom:

Right now, the jigsaw puzzle of human culture is so primitive that it defies belief. The clichés we use to try to discuss what we are and to understand our emotions are extraordinarily primitive. Until 1812, we did not have the word “unconscious” or “subconscious.” The guy who invented the word took it nowhere. He didn’t market it. He didn’t promote it. And consequently it did not enter the public mind. It didn’t become a tool in the cultural tool kit-a cliché — until somebody who had studied the art of promotion by studying Moses took it up. Specifically he tried to figure out how Moses had promoted, marketed and publicized, how Moses had created a chosen people from nothing. The guy who put the unconscious on the map — the man who gave the concept to you and me — traveled from Vienna to Rome every year to ponder Michelangelo’s statue of David so he could figure out exactly how you start a movement that spreads your ideas. This guy took up the idea of the unconscious and the subconscious and implanted it in our vocabulary. His name was Sigmund Freud. So it took roughly 88 years from the first mention of the conscious and the unconscious before it got into our common cultural toolkit. And it took the skills of a man with many curiosities, the skills of a man who was as fascinated by the science of the mind as he was with the science of idea-planting, the science of benevolent marketing.

grammaton ultra herypashia

houndago conflates several moofudashas while conspiring to eat the contactival/contracutical basis of several troubadours mouncing limemelon in the higher lunarial suckerpunchas

elsewhiles, since-making key blathers just mackledoo the heepdoraller. keepyteen mine ersterworsceters, there’s gold in them thar nattypoos.

jilted fingaroo gries feeply: yes! noah titles in the sun, cracknjackered the filping scaratoads.

The bounteous serendipity of the internet

I’m constantly amazed by the wonderful serendipity of the internet.

Some few days ago, my friend Lion, dropped a new link onto his website. It turned out to be a link to the website of an old friend of mine, Vinnie, that I hadn’t seen or heard from at all in probably 8 or 9 years. Vinnie, in turn, had a link on his website to my friend Matt’s website, who I hadn’t heard anything from in probably more than a decade.

I think about life before the internet and how difficult it would have been to find someone vanished into the crowd. Now, with virtually no effort of my own, I’ve stumbled upon two old friends, simply due to the internet’s social construct of linking between webpages.

Lion likes to talk about the ways in which internet technologies enable people to find and congregate together in real life, in other words, as an enabling technology that lowers the barrier of social networking. (Speaking of which, Lion’s been doing some excellent work on lowering the technological barrier–or the laziness barrier?–to linking with LocalNames. It’s very cool and I look forward to the time when the technical barrier to entry is low enough for me to take part.) I don’t need to know where someone exists physically; I can very quickly make them a virtual neighbor by linking to them from my virtual location.

We live in a very cool time.