Afterblog

I’ve decided it’s time to reel in Afterblog, and make it a place that people may actually like to visit on a regular basis. This of course would mean regular updates. I tend to promise regular updates about every 6 months or so, and these promises tend to be perennially sandwiched between three or four short personal grievances, a paper written for school, and an embarrassingly earnest and rushed poem. In order to break this cycle of sub-par content and false promises I’m implementing something of a system around here.

In order to keep myself writing, I am going to take advantage of the category function of wordpress. All posts will now be part of a larger project. Among the projects to watch for.

• “Business States” – A philosophical critique of modern business culture. Topics include: why business is a social construct intrinsic to human beings with more relation to language than politics, why unchecked business is government and government as business does not represent the average citizen, why conservatism by virtue of it’s ideology supports financial reform, how business has changed permanently along with post 9/11 society,  why money is a crude representation of social power and the evolution of money in the last century points toward a deeper change in global economy, information’s role in shaping the future of business and business’s responsibility in safeguarding individualism, and why global economic success and failure is a superposition determined by policy more than capital.
• “Ghougl” – A cyberpunk story set in a not-distant future where aggregate personal data is affected by a recursive algorithm which gives it self awareness. At first this creates avatars of people living as programs, which leads to integrations of selves creating a singular “superself.” Ethical issues arise when servers begin to purge self aware data,and a new social media springs up around the idea of a second society comprised of “net ghosts” or “ghougls.” The social hierarchy of the ghougl is explored, as more powerful entities represent those capable of moving fluidly through servers and acquiring data to represent their thought patterns, and lower level ghougls from an outside perspective only bog down the network, consuming valuable server space and outputting nothing. The rights of these entities as applied to traditional human culture is explored, as well as the religious implications of a self-aware informational super-entity creating and looking over a collection of lesser informational beings.
• The re-re-re resurrection of “Afterthoughts.”
• A continued stream of unplanned and unspecified outbursts which I will try to keep entertaining.

Thanks for taking the time to look through this. I hope you’ll enjoy the things coming soon.