hack yourself

Independent thought is becoming scarce. We all have within, a computer that's hardly being used at full capacity. I want to share this particular post I StumbledUpon (literally, http://meatbot.stumbleupon.com) to perhaps remind us that we all have the capacity to be creative thinkers.

In such a fast paced world as ours today we run the risk of living a recycled headspace: Garbage-In-Garbage-Out, GIGO. By changing the way we experience and accept the world maybe we can turn garbage into Gold.

Here is the article.

Self Jamming means taking the techniques and ideas of Culture Jamming and apply them to controlling and eliminating the external influences in your own life, rather than society as a whole.

Developed by XLogicX and dual_parallel, there is an episode of Antimeme on Self Jamming, which introduces the concept. 

Culture Jamming utilizes existing memes and media of pop culture in creative and subversive ways in order to alter the messages being sent by corpolitical sources to something deemed more appropriate or constructive. In other words, using the corpolitical memes against themselves in order to limit the damage these memes create, or even better to change them into constructive forces.

Likewise, in Self Jamming, the idea is to alter the negative effects of all these influences into the neutral or positive range (as relative to your own life). 

You are more than likely assaulted with a constant barrage of various attempts to affect your thoughts and behaviour from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep. Logos, brands and catch phrases--ads and commercials, peer pressure (from others being affected by the same memes), radio jingles, pushy salespeople, billboards, political groups, religious groups--everybody seems to want a slice of you--your mind, your resources, your time, your vote, your money, your attention, your distraction.

Many of us develop a kind of natural resistance to this sort of thing. Being subjected to so much of this stuff for so long (likely your entire life), it begins to all seem the same. Eventually, many of us simply learn to 'tune it out'. Surfing the web, your eyes dart right around the ads on the page, never focusing on the ads themselves--automatic selective attention. 

So, you've already got that going for you. But, the thing is, some of that crap still gets through--and anyway, it's pretty much all going straight to your subconscious, and god knows how it'll be processed there.

All of this overwhelming input causes a constant background hum in our lives, and sometimes it's harder to block out than others. The idea of Self Jamming creates a filter with which to screen this constant input for relevancy and truth.

By stopping and asking yourself certain questions about things about an input, you are able to rate the input. Why is this person/ad/book/etc telling me that I want/need/should do this thing? How do I feel about this thing? How do I feel about the source making the suggestion? If I say yes, what will this mean for me (in terms of cost, life change, effects on family and friends,etc)? If I say no?

Are there dirty tricks being used? Plays on the emotions, sense of duty, sense of honor, desire for security? In short, what do I want? I--me--what do I really want?

Another tactic for controlling these outside influences in your life is simply to limit them--don't watch as much tv, read something constructive or uplifting or educational instead of pop culture and empty entertainment. When you go shopping, wear headphones so you don't have to hear ads and jingles and sales pitches. Take some time in your day to just sit and think about yourself, who you really are, and what sort of influences have entered your life.

If you consciously identify a source of attempted influence, it often loses its power over you, just because you are conscious of it.

In short, Self Jamming is anything that controls the negative effects of the corpolitical memes designed to control you. Make yourself immune, or even better--take these attempts to control your mind, and draw strength from them, instead.

The mentality of computer hackers is a powerfully potent state of mind. The drive is what makes them so dynamic--the constant compulsion to keep asking why, how, and what if i...? This drive, combined with an outlook that is frequently less clouded by social preconceptions than the average person, allows for many unique ideas and outcomes.

It might be surprising to realize that hacking is not relegated to the field of computers and technology. Hacking can be applied to anything. 

One of my favorite examples on the matter is that of a mechanic, who takes apart his car again and again, just trying to squeeze out that extra horsepower. He is a hacker. He just hacks cars.

He does it because he wants to--to see how far he can take it. 

If you can take this attitude, this outlook on life, and direct it at yourself, you can gain a powerful tool for affecting change in your own life.

Keep an open mind. 

Don't let preconceptions and other people telling you what's impossible rule out possibilities for you. Make up your own mind, and try to stay open for all the options, no matter how ridiculous they may sound at first.

Do it 'cause you love it. 

Part of what makes hackers so fruitful is that they are doing what they love. Steve Wozniak said about his development process of the Apple computer line, "I was just a kid with a crush on technology." That's powerful. He loved what he was doing, so it didn't feel like work to him, so much as a wonderful game--seeing how far he could push it.

Take that same mentality in your own life. Fall in love with being alive. The universe we live in is an amazing place, and we are living in very dynamic times. Do what you do to see how far you can take it--how far you can make yourself go. Try new things and don't rule out possibilities until you've thought them through.

Protect your box. 

If you think of your brain as a piece of biological computer hardware, then it stands to reason that your mind would be the software running on top.

Continuing with this metaphor, there are negative influences or 'malware' coming in through your senses in order to attack your mind. These mal-memes are put forth from a variety of sources for a variety of reasons (to make them money, to control your actions, to make them feel better about themselves, etc.), and work in a variety of ways (confusion, fear, peer pressure, subconscious, moral, emotional). 

If you think of it like that, you can begin to develop mental tools for excising these mal-memes, and controlling them as they continue to be introduced to you in the future.

This metaphor can even continue to another level--in computer malware removal, there are a number of tools which are utilized to control different types of threats. Just as in the real world, we have multiple vectors to protect against. Pattern recognition snags a lot of the unclever, copycat known threats. Once bitten, twice shy--after you know what to look for, certain techniques stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. They lose their power over you. 

Heuristic analysis algorithms and run-time protections attempt to find new threats by examining what code is trying to do, rather than relying on a signature of something you've seen before. More proactive, but you have to weight the results for what they are because of the increased chance for false positives.

Immunization patches. If you deal with the underlying vulnerability, the threat is nullified. If you control all of your wants, the push/pull engine of consumerism loses its hold on you and commercials don't affect your judgement as much. If you come to complete acceptance of the reality of a particular situation, the emotional poison of someone taking jabs at that certain subject begin to lose their sting. 

Footprinting.

Gaining knowledge about a particular subject or target before directly engaging. If you're the target, you'll need to footprint yourself. Find out all you can about yourself.

Take personality quizzes, write yourself up a character sheet, tally up your likes, wants, needs, and vulnerabilities and strengths. You need to be honest with yourself, and I think this may be the hardest part. If you're not honest, you won't have accurate information to work with.

Luckily there are tools you can wield to help clarify your objectivity somewhat, but it still has to come with that inward desire to seek the truth, or else you'll simply see what you expect to see, what you want to see.

Journals can be a powerful form of externalization. When you go back and read some of your older entries you'll be astounded by what you may have been thinking. There are several tests which can give you some sort of external perspective, but you must again be careful--if you're deceiving yourself, and you're intelligent, it is often easy to manipulate the results of these tests. The Alexander technique is another tool for gaining an external perspective on yourself. The more objective, honest, and complete your information gleaned from the footprinting, the better equipped you will be to maximize your own efforts.

NLP. 

There is also some research being done into fields like neurolinguistic programming, hypnotic suggestion and the like. I've heard of techniques similar to buffer overflows where many topics or ideas or loops are opened in rapid succession and the mind assigns some part to keep track, but none of them are ever resolved, and eventually, the person becomes lost, and as such more susceptible to influence (i.e. more likely to involuntarily run somebody else's code). 

-cid

0wn yourself

Evolution by Choice. Two simple parts--evolution--growing, surpassing the former, adapting, changing, and choice--decision, action based on a specific intention, deliberate.

Part of the beauty of this meme is it's ability to function across several layers of abstraction. For instance, you could take this idea at the personal level and choose to adapt to some part of your life that has changed, or perhaps that you weren't taking full advantage of.

On the other end of the spectrum you have the entire species and the possibilities for enhancement beginning to look like real possibilities--genetic alterations, cybernetic enhancements.

Not only in the science fiction turning reality front, but the concept can be identified in more subtle roles as well--the steady homogenizing flow of information/education to the general masses. As the gestalt of human society becomes more and more saturated with the combined general knowledge of the species as a whole, people are empowered with the ability to start with knowledge somebody else has already discovered, and thus go further than before, or avoid certain pitfalls, to 'Stand on the shoulders of Giants' as it were.

Does it ever seem like people are smarter than they used to be? Maybe they've just got better mental tools to use.

The point is, we all make choices every day that affect who we are becoming as a person, and what direction our society is going, as a whole. You may not think about it like that, but perhaps you should. Every person has a little bit of power. We've all got our own ideas on what's 'good' or 'bad' or whatever labels you want to apply--things we want versus things we don't want to have happen. Anyway, in a democratic situation, everybody's putting their energy/time/resources/votes into whatever they want to see happen, and when ideas line up, there's motion--when there are equally opposed ideas/opinions, there is stalemate.

But everybody _does_ exert _some_ level of influence, whether they realize it or not. So, make your decisions like they count.

When you have a choice to make, make it with the intent of improving yourself, and your society as a whole. Make the choice to help Evolve into a better form.

-cid