some awesome (pipe) music from valencia, though they mix many sounds from all over

for a long time i felt the information overload was somehow focused, as if the overload wasn’t an overload of everything, but of specific things. i’d like to look into this in terms of asymmetry of information. i’ll go through some examples, including one of my pet peeves, social media

one of the main things about the way we perceive things is that our understandings of those things make us induce extra things about what we’re seeing. simplifying, if someone is wearing a lab coat, we will instinctively think that they somehow know more about something because it looks like they do. say, an actor with no training in pharmacy can be hired to do an ad for a bogus product, but since they look like they have a say, we will feel they have a say. since we are dominated by our emotions rather than reason for the most part, we will then attribute that feeling of authority to a real projected authority. if something looks like it is something, then it must be. it’s a common way we simplify the complex world around us, creating on one hand prejudices and biases, but on the other hand, very efficient ways of dealing with the world. say, if it looks like a door, it must be a door, so i will try to use it as the previous doors i’ve seen. we’ll see how this is important

i’m focusing on feelings because for a long time i’ve believed (though for the most part i can’t prove) that the way we feel about things defines more about our actions than the way we think about things. feelings decide, then we rationalize. obviously, critical thinking protects us from this, but then again, one can’t be critical 24/7

one of the feelings that is incredibly interesting for me is the one that marketing and advertisement exploits, in the form of smiles, beautiful faces and engaging scenes and actors. if you have a billboard with a beautiful half naked person looking straight at you the feeling we get is immediate and real. it is a beautiful person looking at us, maybe we’re special, maybe that person wants to do something with us. in reality, it is a beautiful person that was made up to be beautiful (by lighting, make up, surgery, etc), looking into a camera and pretending to be engaging with that camera or the photographer. it is someone that was hired by a panel, stood in a room for hours posing in fake engaging scenes that will be perceived as a real human connection. when someone stares at a camera that will broadcast something to millions, be it a billboard or a tv, we are creating a one way asymmetrical connection between the actor and the targets. asymmetrical because the actor didn’t engage anything but the camera and did their job, but on the other hand, everyone that will see that ad or video will feel engaged by that very same actor. they will feel there was something there even though there wasn’t, and that feeling will be multiplied and copied thousands of times. each one of these individuals will feel engaged by someone they will never meet, never really engage with, but already feel connected to them, creating a strange sense of on one hand familiarity but on the other hand isolation and loss (there’s that beautiful person looking at me again, but i’ll never meet them and they’ll never be mine). funny enough, this can go to extremes as far as making fans go crazy over being touched for a few seconds by one of these actors (i’ve been calling them actors, but performers in general, celebrities, etc). the power of this asymmetry means that all these fans have a feeling of being connected to someone who doesn’t know (and most of the times, doesn’t care) who they are or how they feel about them. in my opinion, this emotional asymmetry creates a permanent feeling of ineptitude, of loss and of longing – ideal characteristics for a consumer and a submissive citizen. a property of this asymmetry is that it will always create an imbalance and a craving on the masses for that particular feeling that was being sold. again, if it looks like that singer really loves me, they must, so i’ll love them back. never mind they were singing to a camera and only interested in the sales

applying this same reasoning to the way social media works in most platforms, one sees that this same idea of broadcasting something an audience will “individually” connect with is there too. if i tweet “i love you” and have one million followers, each one of those will feel the message was for them, even though it’s a form of diluted love. one might ask, if someone writes something like that to one million people, how could they ever express it? probably they won’t. but since social media is about sharing thoughts and things that matter, but also about popularity, what are the things that are most guaranteed to be successful? the very same individually engaging things that tap into those good feelings, but can be told to anyone. we encounter this pressure to share things that are going to be perceived as engaging and that will make people want to read and connect with. but the vast majority of things we encounter every day aren’t like that: most of what we do and what we encounter throughout a day are menial, boring, uninteresting things that don’t matter, so we won’t share that. we will just share what “matters”. but if everyone broadcasts only what matters, to someone listening it will seem that things that “matter” happen all the time, and that each individual’s life in comparison is lacking. if we have 10 friends online and each shares one meaningful thing in one day, and we had one meaningful thing happen to us, that day will have 10 times more goodness happening in other people’s lives than in ours. and again, if someone else looks like they have a lot going on, then we feel they do

when we cater to this paradigm of individual broadcast and consumption, filtered to make each shared item more popular, we are creating a mass of airbrushed and made-up lives for an audience to see. if all we share are meaningful and interesting things and hide the menial and downright banal things we do, we are effectively doing “plastic surgery” on our lives so they fit this paradigm of popularity. and since there will always be more “meaningful” broadcast messages than our own, we will always feel we have done less, felt less, lived less, because it looks like everyone is living more

the issue here is both asymmetry, in that we are looking at multiple shared things as an individual, which pretty much guarantees that things that happen to us will be fewer just out of sheer numbers, and the problem of inducing things based on biased data. if our sample of other people’s lives is social media, we will be basing ourselves on a doctored, media ready version of people’s lives, not a real historical account

the challenge will always be, in my opinion, to see the through the billboard and realize that this is all part of a poorly conceived marketing ploy to make us want to sell our lives for the highest bidder, liker or follower. popularity is hardly a good measure for quality or meaningfulness, and above all, every time someone in a photo or a post is engaging us “personally” in a broadcast message, they will continue to contribute to the erosion of the feeling that life is being lived fully, since in comparison to this mass media broadcast, it is lacking in many ways

no wonder we feel uglier, lonelier, less apt and less skilled. in a mass media world, only the masterful and popular are promoted, so in proportion, we will always be lower on that pyramid. it seems the bias for popularity has overcome the fully horizontal nature of networks, and that has made us live in a strange made up plastic world where lives are incredible and we will never be able to get there

how can we protect ourselves? how can i live my life without being “engaged” personally by scantily clad men and women whose looks are surreal? how can i live without being told i should have more, be more, do more? how can we let urbanization turn our lives into this terribly oppressing environment? if we are to be a city species (as it seems we are becoming), how can we build cities so that they empower and nurture each individual, and not make them feel like a cog in a machine?

kilfenora jigs, a recently discovered favourite

ever since i moved i’ve felt different in a lot of ways. mostly i would say it was due to the clear lifestyle changes: new job, new culture, new language and so on. but along that came a feeling of uneasiness, something i had a hard time putting into words until now.

when i lived in lisbon, the clear and visible corruption of governments and the economic sector and the consequences of bad policy in everyday life were so blatant that i had no trouble in being aware of them at all times. this gave me a strange comfort, in that somehow my individual shortcomings were irrelevant when considered together with the massive financial crisis. in a way, i wasn’t even aware of my psychological limitations, since i could attribute everything that would possibly go wrong to these blatant outside forces. the oppression here was explicit in that it was known by me and everyone i interacted with, creating a sense of individual innocence. i had no weight on my shoulders — everything was the crisis, the politics, the corruption. i was on one hand suffering anti-democratic influences in my everyday life (in this case in the form of the economic oligarchy’s manipulation of my everyday livelihood) but on the other hand free in my mind: i knew i had had no role in it, no responsibility for what was going on, and that carried with it a feeling of dignity from being oppressed by these economic forces but at the same time emancipated by my own education

fast forward to my life in sydney. all of a sudden, the social state worked, employers were nice and worried about work ethics, i had no money issues or any political concerns whatsoever. in a way, i could no longer blame “the system”, because in a way the system worked fine. all of a sudden, i had to analyse why things would go right or wrong including my own capacities in the equation

life here is not only easy, it is promoted dogmatically as such, with an almost obsessive promotion of success, happiness and indulgence. this means that somehow for me there was no explicit blaming possible, no innocence by default. this made me start to experience an entirely different type of oppression: that of the implicit rules and values of an apparently functioning society. the constant exposure to beautiful people (in a superficial sense), to beautiful objects (in a materialistic sense), to wealth and exterior happiness started creating in me a sense of inadequacy that i never felt before

when i was living the peasant life under an incompetent government and a crippled economy, i had nothing to live up to but my own sense of ethics, since society was not an example to follow. in fact, i felt most of my ideas validated by the mistakes the government would make. now, since everything is easy and functional, i start to hit my own limitations, be it how smart i think i am, how attractive or how talented. these pressures are created by these implicit forces that exist in a society devoted to these ideas of success. successful careers, successful families, success in everything. this standard is too high for anyone: it’s a standard that guarantees that individuals will always feel inadequate, because any goal in a pyramid will mean the number of people at the top will always be outnumbered by the ones at the bottom, no matter the hierarchy. but these pressures are also entirely unnecessary and virtual. if i were to transplant my state of mind from one place to the other, i would be incredibly happy here. but with the easy life came these artificial standards that i was never exposed to. i started feeling like the guy that has a car but since everyone has two, feels like he has no good way of driving around. my guess is that these forces came with the dominant cultures, that work in terms of competition and pyramidal structures of power. nowhere is this spelled out, since it’s not part of any law or government. but it is everywhere in how people act with each other. never before i’ve been more told what to do “for my own good” by random strangers. it’s almost like taking a $1,000,000 mortgage is the right thing to do because that’s how you “make it”, even when that doesn’t mean anything. or when you work out too much because that’s how you’re “meant to look”, or when you spend lots on gadgets or ikea furniture because that’s what your money is for

in a way, i felt freer in a society where i knew where the boundaries of my cage were, explicitly, than in a society where the boundaries of my cage were inside my head, in a twisted mix of outside conditioning that implicitly controlled me directly through my thoughts. to this day i’m still not sure how to live here and how to deal with this pressure. i brush it off thanks to some self analysis, but it contributes to a strange erosion of my dignity, in that thoughts of inadequacy come up much more, even if they are unfounded. i know i’m a great engineer, i know i’m not ugly or unattractive, i know that i’m not poor any more, but permanent exposure to these artificial standards makes me feel it isn’t so

this path of self discovery has coincided with my slow distancing from the anarchist groups here, and from non-authoritarian activist groups in general. i’ve been slowly realizing that by not making rules and hierarchies clear and explicit, not only in what they are but how they come to be, is a dangerous game to play that will inevitably lead to the most manipulative, charismatic or passionate to naturally bubble up to power. when there is no clear distribution of power done by some kind of accountable supra-entity, we fall back to our basic tribal instincts that make us much more susceptible to be manipulated, consciously or unconsciously, by someone with charm and charisma. i’ve slowly been realising that the real (ideal) role of power is not to press but to protect the oppressed, to prevent these natural tribal behaviours to bubble up, to put bullies back in their place, to prevent victimisation of anyone. in a way, this means that even though i’m still a leftist, and certainly not a communist or a socialist, i’m also not enticed by the anarchist way of getting things done. too much time is spent trying to have no power structure, to the point that the collective becomes structureless and with it, powerless. the best moments of community work i’ve ever had were possible thanks to a common vision but above all, a sense of structured progress that i feel lacks in a lot of activist groups these days

both these points tie in with each other in that i see transparency and explicit definitions of power and motives to be more empowering to the individual than letting us loose with all the possible implicit forces that are stronger than us. with this i don’t mean we’re born evil at all — i mean that we have our shortcomings and that the job of collectivising into structures of power should be focused on liberating us from these implicit oppressive forces, even if it means to be oppressed by explicit (and therefore, controllable) forces

i’m reminded of the film ‘the day the earth stood still’ (the original 50s one), in which the superior race submits wilfully to killer robots with a higher standard of morals than they individually posses and with it achieve a peaceful and flourishing society. does this mean, then, that neither right nor left are good paradigms any more, and that our new insights into our own shortcomings as a thinking animal might be the first step into politics that’s done with one foot in empirically tested truths and the other in ideals that go beyond our ancient tribal baggage? i certainly think that time is coming

one of my favourite aussie artists. the pipes are there too, as to not break the cycle

i change a lot. maybe this post will be more personal than usual, but i just had an interesting realization. over the years i’ve been certain of hundreds or even thousands of things, only to predictably contradict myself a little while later

the easy way out is to claim that self contradiction implies richness of character, but i see that as the usual argument employed by crooks and liars to get away with anything. instead, a great deal of my time is spent trying to improve my understanding of the world around me, to the point of exhaustion. instead of conservatively reaching conclusions that survive the test of time, i constantly jump on the best ideological bandwagon for that moment. going back through the years, i have a succession of comical caricatures of myself, deluded by whichever absolute truth was around then. this succession means i’ve had many lives, if one can call it that: if at a given time i had full purpose, meaning and goals, my life would be entirely shaped around it. for example, while becoming a robotics researcher was the story, so was my entire mind. at the same time, these ideas would co-exist with other ideas and other lives, be it music, arts, or even, for the past years, relationships and communities

one of the side effects of this is that at any given point in time, my blind certainties, passions and drives give any observer the illusion of consistency: that that certainty is set on solid foundations. that has been, i imagine, the key to every situation where my charismatic leadership capacity stood out. it wasn’t that my ideas were necessarily right, but the fervor with which i followed them made it all the more believable. an excellent example of this was one of my past lives as a community organizer, that is to say, someone that rented out a place and would let strangers in, or co-squatted alongside an eclectic team. during that time, and over time, i would provide the passers-by with my “truth of the moment”, my apparent solid theory of everything

fast-forward about 3 or 4 years, and the echoes are coming back, like ghosts of a former self, in the form of these strangers, revisiting me, or contacting me again. but for every echo, i’m faced with a contradiction of myself: as the revisiting stranger mentions ideas i raved about, they no longer feel mine, they feel distant and alien, as if someone else had said them

what allows for this is the fact that i continuously hosted people over more than 4 years, and at every point of the way, i made deep connections with people. but now, whenever an echo hits me, like an aftershock, i’m forced to acknowledge that i’ve changed, wussed out or even flat out lied. that now i live in a rich country, working 9 to 5 and do virtually nothing of what i promised any of these former selves and to those that were listening. i’m forced to acknowledge that i’ve co-opted the dominant anglo-saxon culture for my own benefit, that i rent, pay insurance, save for my retirement, that i’ve treaded the path i loathed. hell, what happened to all these dreams i dazzled people with by the bonfire? they burned out with it, only to come back every now and then through other people’s mouths

as my last encounter went on about how much my ideas were inspirational, i felt a mix of selfish happiness from the feeling that i could change someone’s life, and an incredible feeling of helplessness. i felt i wasn’t on the driver’s seat at all, that i wasn’t in control of my own life. that somehow no matter how strong these ideas were in my past, what determined my future was entirely beyond my control. that somehow, no matter how much thought i had given to how i should live my life according to my ideals, these external forces controlled my every move, while i told myself and others proudly that they didn’t. i realized that preaching is too easy, especially if sugar-coated with some apparent action. i was confronted, yet again, with the blatant hypocrisy of voicing an opinion and not living according to it

i’m yet to turn all these emotions into a proper line of thought, but if anything, i’m coming to terms with the fact that to learn and to grow is to deny the self of any sustainable constancy, other that the process of growth and learning itself. luckily, these echoes do not come with judgement, but with love and friendship, which can be reciprocated beyond the realm of facts and figures. this begs the question: does that mean, then, that consistency is irrelevant, and that the realms of love and friendship exist beyond them, in an inscrutable universe of emotions that reason contributes nothing to?

it should have become clear by now that i’m not in love with australian culture. and while i’m not one to winge too much, it made me reflect on how the narratives created in societies can make basic interactions be so dramatically different between cultures. one of the main issues i have run into, put simply, is that of the winner and the loser.

if one is to promote this idea of winner and loser, that being, an idea that everywhere you are and anything you do is a race to a finish line and you must come on top, i would like to argue that it entails a side effect that is rarely noted and has real effects on what kind of human beings will be created with it.

what are the requirements of a win-lose type situation? someone wins, everyone else loses. to the winner, it is not necessarily clear that those that lose are part of his victory as much as he is of their loss. but most importantly, whoever feels good in a winning position needs to develop their capacity to not empathize with anyone they ever beat. the best analogy is obtained with the following question: what type of human being feels good in a winning position knowing that it requires that many of his fellow human beings lose? in my opinion, a very dangerous type of human. one that would rather climb an artificial ladder than reflect on its artificiality, one that would rather ignore their peers’ emotions than give up the win or the award. the nature of winning and losing, is, obviously, richer, but it is richer insofar as it creates both situations in equal probability. what i am discussing is how this winning narrative creates a distorted personality simply by creating the desire to be a winner more strongly than creating the capacity to be a loser. what it does is create hordes of individuals that become so driven by being winners, that both they lose the capacity to empathize with whoever they have to bully to get ahead (hello any mid manager wanting to get ahead), and they ignore that losing is where learning happens.

and so we’re left with endless isolated winners, each one at the peak of their own self-built mountain, blindly following the narrative their culture imposed on them and failing to see that their condition implies that they are not winners in the sense that they are better, but they are winners in the sense that they are capable of trampling others using skills that should embarrass any human being.

and what about the losers? whoever gives up this race is automatically labeled and pushed aside. but what does it mean to not want to race, to compete, to climb? in my opinion, it mostly means that the race is not relevant, and that accepting a lower position most of the times does not mean one isn’t skilled or talented, but means simply that one is not willing to give up basic human traits for an opportunity at the top of the hill.

this is where i realized i didn’t fit the culture. i am not ruthless and unempathetic and certainly do not recognize the validity of any ladder (be that the employment, career, music scenes, sports, etc). i do not enjoy being bullied, but i do not bully myself. and certainly, if someone pounds their chest in front of me, i will step aside. not because i am afraid, but because it disgusts me to engage at that level. to an observer, this might as well be cowardice. so how can we ever say we know the true motivations of the one that steps away from a fight? clearly competition as a race with winners and losers can’t guarantee that the winner is the most talented or skilled, it can only guarantee that the winner is the most skilled at winning at any cost, whatever the activity may be.

i’d make the analogy with a political campaign. the one who wins is the one that has the best team working to make them win, because the winning itself is what matters. if a politician was to be judged based on talent, they would not need to compete, since their talents would be both comparable and easy to measure between them and their opponents. in my opinion, it follows that any political or organizational system that allows a hierarchy based on anything other than empirically verifiable talents or skills will always promote professional “winners”, people who develop the skill to compete with others and win, irregardless of what they’re competing for.

let’s compare that to a competition between, let’s say, musicians. each one of these musicians will not need to worry about anything more than their own talent. if the jury is capable and impartial, their choice will be unambiguous. but most importantly, whoever would be considered a winner would be also recognized as so by their peers. if the qualities for which winning or losing is defined are empirically testable, then no member of the win-lose group will feel emotionally distressed, since mastery is an opportunity to learn.

the key distinction here is how testable one’s talent is, and to what extent it can be unambiguously defined. even competition breaks down at high levels, when mastery becomes so intertwined with interpretation.

without wanting to dive too deep in this matter, i’d like to come back full circle. here the ladders to climb are the car, the career, the body, the fortune. none of these require any mastery, other than the capacity to make money and get ahead no matter what. and more often than not, when an aussie pounds their chest to assert dominance or supremacy over me, i’ll gladly step aside. what i wonder is if living away from this unidimensional pyramidal way of looking at things is sustainable in the long run as a way to live here. what i’ve found is that if the precedent is set, then there is little to be done, and the chest-pounding horde will just trample through. what ended up being very interesting to me, is how not being involved in these schemes opened up a whole new world of understanding of how things work, and how those who shy away from situations sometimes might end up being the bravest and most interesting after all. and with it, a new found complicity with others that also chose not to play games in their lives, like a newly discovered brotherhood that exists beyond all these false idols of an individualist society.

ntrrudu · redondo/campanitas [midi pipes + gba synth demo]

another year, another mandala. featuring another of my game boy experiments. sound is pretty shitty, but i’m hoping to make it get better with time

i’m quoting here what i wrote for the garden blog, the community i participated in for my first 7 months in australia

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a mandala for the goddess

i left the garden yesterday with the sobering feeling that it will be gone soon

it was perhaps the most successful and beautiful of all events we ever put together (thank you Sara). everything worked perfectly, thanks to the months of devotion, hard work and generosity of everyone involved in the garden project: residents, guests, friends, and Ash’s guiding vision

it is hard to see it go, especially when we are ending on such a high note. but i’m not left with a sense of loss but instead with a sense of exhilaration. in tibetan buddhist tradition (of which i’m not a follower), there is a ritual called the sand mandala. monks gather around for a very long period and draw a symbolic circular sand picture. when the picture is finished, the sand is swept and poured into moving water, to return it to nature

during the last few months, we drew a giant warehouse painting, colored with the life stories of over 100 people that visited from dozens of countries, contributing and donating their creativity and work to the space. these contributions were driven, among others, by the natural desire of human beings to be part of a purposeful meaningful space, where beauty, art, music and conversations intertwine every day. a desire, i’d argue, to step out of the concrete boxes we live in every day and to let out what these boxes won’t allow us to: our songs, our colors, our sights and dreams for a better world

as we wash away the life from the warehouse and return it to the goddess, we will also be making a statement on how nothing lasts forever. this being both the shepherd street garden and the concrete boxes it questioned while it existed

so here’s cleaning this one and start drawing the next

物の哀れ

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i already found a place and am living alone at the moment. what we did was very well received so i imagine there will be more. for now, i’m taking a break

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