Pages

7.13.2009

Hacking a third nature

Over the weekend, I've been getting my head around McKenzie Wark's A Hacker's Manifesto. Here are a few of my ruminations from passages that have resonated with me deeply.

There is a realm of pure potentiality, unfettered by limitations or necessities. In this realm, all is possible. Thus any contact with this realm is an experience of abundance and freedom from scarcity. This realm is virtual, not yet actual. It is natural, not contrived by human nature or modified into a second nature. It is living, not dead, inert or rigid.

We enter this realm by going within, by being empty of preconceptions and by waiting for inspirations to come to mind in their own good time. We may label this realm cosmic consciousness, the Universal Mind or some other representation of it's infinite potential. This is where we go when we get creative, inspired, innovative or in the flow of coincidental occurrences.

Those among us who access this realm with elegance and technical sophistication are hackers. We bring what is virtual into the actual. We disrupt the status quo with more of what's infinitely possible and abundant. It costs us nothing to take ideas, answers and solutions from this realm into our understandings, designs and expressions.

Costs, limitations and necessities only come into play when the hacks get communicated and replicated. A material component involves commercial transactions. The world of scarcity enters into the picture. The freedom from limitation and experience of abundance get lost in translation. What felt very much live when accessing it become dead communicable forms to be shared with others.

There's no going back to the original nature of the virtually infinite possibilities. The second nature of limitation, necessity and scarcity offers yet another opportunity to elegantly hack the status quo. The second nature can get abstracted by redefining the problems, reframing the evidence, re-conceptualizing the limitations and reinventing the obvious. A third nature will emerge that better reflects the unfettered and abundant source of the original inspirations.

No comments:

Post a Comment