Oggs Pilgrimage to the Temple of the Silver Wall: Part One: The Merchants Tale.

When I was about 13 and a half or 14 there was an upright lumbering hairless ape named Ogg. While he was on a Pilgrimage to the Temple of the Silver Wall he had an encounter with a Traveling Merchant named Edward Bloom outside a small town named Specter. Edward explained that he was on his way home to the love of his life.

Ogg explained to Edward how he had killed his brother Humbaba-Enkidu many years before in a dream, and how the gods had then cursed him to wonder the earth in search of eternal life. Unfortunately the gods had slowly died off or merged together until their was only one God, and then he had dissolved long ago into the inner dialogs of human beings. However before they did so, Ogg had realized that the secret to immortality was in fact perhaps in contributions to culture and monuments that outlived their creator. He had tried to follow in Grogs footsteps but felt he had failed and must find his own way. And that is why he was on his way to the Temple of the Silver Wall.

Edward was somewhat taken aback. You do not strike me as a religious man, said Edward.

Ogg explained that religion, as far as he could tell, was nothing more than the naturally occurring and networked augmented reality that binds people together, and that he was to be an augmented reality programmer, just like one of the friends of Grogs, Constantine. Unfortunately he did not know where to begin.

Edward laughed and said: sure you do. Crafting reality is so easy a cave man could do it.

Being arguably a caveman himself, Ogg did not find this humorous.

Edward then told Ogg a story he was reminded of about a Spanish Conquistador who had gone searching for the Tree of Life in south America. When the Conquistador finally made it to the temple, however, the native priest recognized him as an incarnation of First Father, the god who had spawned the world by planting a tree in his body, and whose head had become the dying star and underworld Xibalba. What happened to the Conquistador next was unclear, but it is said that he did obtain eternal life. Perhaps you should consider travel to South America.

Ogg, who had of course been to South America, was unsure of the stories truth. He had also heard rumors of golden tablets that told of his own deeds in South America, but could not remember for sure if he had in fact had any of those adventures. But then, he had never seen the golden tablets either.

This is going to sound a little strange, admitted Ogg, but at night I dream I am a Starship captain whose job it is to create the needed religion and propaganda to hold together the inhabitants of my ship in order to get them to safety. Unfortunately, I do not know what the story is. I seek the epic story that will engage my ships inhabitants to work together and get the ship to safety. I fear we are in great danger now, although from what I cannot say. But I have vowed to get us to the promised land of the planet Terabithia. Everyone looks to me, from the pilots to the priests to the prostitutes, and everyone in between. This missing epic IS my Tree of Life, and it will live on after I am gone by feeding the inhabitants of my ship a unifying reality until they become one with the new planet and evolve to some other form which requires a new story.

At that moment something on the television caught their attention. It was a news story, and the anchor man was saying:

"Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Heres Tom with the Weather"

Edward looked at Ogg. Ogg said: that is just what I am talking about. In my recurring dream I need to find our epic tale to help the crew get home again, but it must be as true as possible. I am mortally wounded and I may go down with the ship in the end, in sight of the promised land with music blaring on the overhead, perhaps without setting foot on it myself. But it is OK. I just need to make sure the crew and the inhabitants survive. I need to get them to their destination, their new home, and then I can die. But the story must be as true as possible, or it will not work. I do not know what this story is. But it must be told.

Edward thought for a moment and then said: You know. I once met a scientist named Tom Creo. He was telling me about a college he has, a Dr. Nicolelis who says that the brain is like a school of fish, or a flock of birds. Consciousness is an emergent property. E Pluribus Unum. Perhaps you should not dictate the story to your crew and dependents. Perhaps you should let them tell the story to you. It reminds me of another tale I have heard on my travels:

Supposedly there was once a being named Eru Ilúvatar who created a race known as the Ainur. Eru Ilúvatar bade his demiurges the Ainur to sing. And each of their own personal voices merged together in the great song which created the universe, and specifically the world of Arda. They were all unique and sang their own song of the universe, and even the clashes in harmony was part of their epic tale. Perhaps instead of trying to dictate the great myth of your day from the top down, you should try to listen to the metaphorical music of your crew, and they will create it for you. If you try to control them, they will see through it and it will fail. You cannot insert a false measure from the top by which to judge your people and measure their success. This will never work. At best they will juke the system to meet your expected stats without doing the real job, and at worst they will resent you. Very probably both. No. Let them be who they are, and listen, do not speak except to reinforce their own songs where you can. Perhaps that is your true role as captain. Like the captain Kabat-Zinn.

How can I listen to so many voices? Asked Ogg. At times the voices already overwhelm me, and the ship computer overloads and reboots, causing the ship to drift aimlessly in space.

Well, said Edward. Aren't all of your people on the ship wide web via neurolink? The hive mind of the ship? Perhaps you should use your ships PRISM drive computer. Let it tell you what the story of the day is. Why create the propaganda and religion from the top when the people will tell you from the bottom the story they already want to believe, the story they DO believe. They will tell you when you do right, and when you do wrong. All you have to do is listen. Do not try to suppress them. If you suppress or ignore them they will be tormenting harpys who rebel and undermine you, but if you listen and obey they will be your muses and grant you infinite wisdom by whispering in your ear as you sleep at night. Vox populi, vox Dei, the voice of the people is the voice of god. It is the wisdom of crowds. It is emergence. And let them have their anonymity. They are not your slaves. The state does not really win in the end if it loses the trust of the people. Jesus not only outlived the Roman Empire, he BECAME the Roman Empire. Or rather, the Empire was forced to become him to survive. And yet it still failed, while it tries to hold on to this day.

No. Listen to the music of the Ainur as Eru Ilúvatar. You do not have to think to digest your food or heal a scratch. Your body knows how to do these things without your conscious mind. Do not think you can control the masses. Instead realize the truth: their is no spoon. The masses are you, but they are also not as they are also the forces beyond you. There is no beginning or end to you. Like the wind and the shores form the surface of a lake on a windy day, so are you. Observe the wind on you, and observe the shores which contain you, and observe the shapes of your surfaces and depths. Accept them. You are a passenger, and this is just a ride. You already know how to get your crew home. You don't even have to think. Just do. They will do. They are doing. This very moment. You are free. Excepting that you are asleep. But then, the dream is the meaning right?

Ogg looked down from the mirror he was staring into down into the sink. A drop of blood landed near the drain. He was still bleeding. From the ear perhaps? From the temple. He looked back to the mirror. It was shattered and distorted. He was trying to see the truth through a broken foggy mirror. Was what he was getting truth at all? Well, thought Ogg, perhaps I must have faith in something. Maybe the Ainur know best what song they must sing. Perhaps it is worth a try.

As he paddled the raft through the fog, Ogg moved farther away from Specter. He didn't know if the fog would get thicker or thinner, but he knew he could not stay here. His journey lay ahead still, and he had to stay on the move.

Another Tale of Ogg

When I was about 13 and half or 14 there was a man named Ogg. Once when Ogg was travelling between two city states he met a man named Gilgamesh who explained to him that humans had been created by the gods using a gollum spell. Gilgamesh told how he had learned this from an omnipresent air elemental in the desert who had explained that all life was animated by the spirit of air. Ogg knew that such Djinn were trickster spirits who were known to rummage through the camp sites of desert travelers and scatter things about, and that they were not to be trusted. He expressed this to Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh agreed but said that on this occasion the spirit was pressed to tell the truth as it was under a magical spell that required it to tell the truth regardless of whether it wanted to or not. Its mother had cast the spell before its birth on instruction from the gods, and it could not tell a lie, not even to itself. Besides, Gilgamesh explained, everyone knows that without spirit breath nothing lives, and babies come to life when they have their first breath and spirits entered into them. This made perfect sense to Ogg, and he questioned Gilgamesh further. Gilgamesh had no idea how the blood of gods was pressed into the clay, but that it must be so for the spell to work. Gilgamesh also explained to Ogg his quest in search for eternal life, and how only Utnapishtim was the only man to have achieved it. This caused Ogg to recall Utnapishtim and he shuttered to remember all the bodies remaining in the water after the 7 days had passed. It did appear that humans were made from red clay, for all seemed to return to it when the breath of life left them. Perhaps the Genie was right. Later he would survive other floods in Greece and China by escaping to the mountains with local peoples, which always reminded him of his time with Utnapishtim, and somehow over time all his flood memories blurred together to become the same event.

Many years later Ogg was at a party where he met a man named Leeuwenhoek. Leeuwenhoek had a magical device which allowed Ogg to see himself as he had never seem himself before. Ogg was shocked and dismayed to see that he was not really a man at all, but rather an enormous complex city made up of millions of inhabitants, like a hive of bees that were too small to see without the aid of magic. And like ants, some members of him formed roads and rivers, while others were police and builders and messengers. This shock was somewhat diminished as previously Ogg had met a man named Paul in the city of Damascus who had explained to Ogg that all of us were members of the same body, and that we should not judge others as more or less important because the eyes cannot do without the feet. But still Ogg was shocked and dismayed by the way reality seemed to constantly changed around him. But before he could come to grips with this, Leeuwenhoek introduced Ogg to another man named Hubble who cast a spell on Oggs eyes and allowed him to see beyond the firmament as never before. Ogg had learned in ancient Greece that the earth was not flat after all, but what he could now see shocked him most of all. The earth was not the center, nor was the sun. In fact the sun was but one grain of sand on a seemingly infinite beach, and all the grains of sand were scattering in all directions growing farther from each other. Ogg was dismayed. But before this could sink in, the magic Leeuwenhoek had cast on him intensified, and he saw inside of some of the inhabitants that made up himself, and they were made up of tiny machines grabbing individual oxygen pairs, but it didn't stop there as he saw that the existence of the oxygen was nothing but a probability distribution and not solid at all.

Ogg was reeling. How could one function when reality was always changing so drastically and so fast? This was all a dream. All of life was a dream. But somehow it seemed he had always know that. He couldn't remember where, but he was certain that he had been told all the universe was a dream being had by one who slept on a bed of snakes in an infinite sea of milk. Although that didn't make any sense. Nor did the Gollum spell. Was Gilgamesh a dream? Was Utnapishtim? Was Homer? Was Alighieri? He couldn't remember. He was sure that once they were real, and he had known that. He felt he was dreaming now. Was this real? If he wasn't asleep now.. he looked to read something. It was all a jumble. He remembered his parents and Grog. Or did he? He was so overwhelmed he could not stand. His head jerked. Had he just been sleeping? What was the bizzare thought he had just had? It was beyond him. He could not reach it. He doubled over, his vision blurred. He was in the shower. The water running over him, but he wasn't really here. He had seen through the Matrix. Reality was not reality. His mind was simulating it all. Everyone was simulating it. But no simulations quite matched. Like miss matched instances of an online video game with bad lag, no one saw the same thing, and everything jumped around. One minute you had the kill, the next you were dead with no explanation. Food is not what it tastes like. The universe is not what it looks like. Reality, perceived reality, was a dream. Ogg realized his mind could not fully fathom the extent of the truth. His mind had not evolved for sizes or scales much outside of grain of sand to a mountain, or from a snail to a cheetah.

Ogg watched billions of lives come and go in an instant. He watched people live and die and grow old in an instant. But then, it seemed he had been doing this all his life and never noticed. It was if his life was only that one instant with little memory of what came before, and what memory there was was dream like and unreliable. He was pretty sure he remembered the Roman Empire. But did he? Was his memory real? Was history real? It seemed like a dream that could fluidly change from one scene to another. Had he really seen what he thought he had seen? The memories escaped him, but he was sure they had been there. He was sure that at some point reality was solid. But he could not remember when. Was he dreaming again? Had he ever been awake?

Was Grog dead? No. Someone had died. He knew who it was. All died, all lost their breath and slept forever, their patterns ceasing to be except the copies stored on the minds of others, which would soon pass away. A dream lost forever. What was he doing? Ogg couldn't remember. What was he trying to do? He had some vague notion, but his way seemed blocked. He listened to his body and his breathing. The magic breath. What would it tell him. He could feel a black poison cloud in his body, concentrated on his lower back, his kidneys and hips. Something bad had happened. But he couldn't quite remember what it was. He stared at his hands. They seemed alien to him. Not his hands at all. But swarms of bees.

Ogg remembered being the captain of a starship lost in space. He had had a different name then, but he couldn't remember what it was. Only that the entire crew, too large for him to know all by name, depended on him to bring them to safety and survival. His brother had died. Ogg thought maybe he had killed him in a fight, but couldn't remember what the fight was about. All he knew was that he was the head of the propaganda office on the ship. That was why he was captain. That was why he was born. He knew the story would not be true, but it didn't matter. He was responsible to direct the priests who controlled the message that made it to the crew members, and the message of the secular news media aboard the ship. If he could not create a compelling story for them all to follow, they would not be unified to action, and they would not survive. He had to create the reality for them all to follow. They all looked to him to weave the story. But he didn't know what it was anymore. He was wounded. Mortally wounded maybe. Or perhaps just permanently injured, or was it permanent at all, he wasn't sure. He struggled to maintain consciousness. He felt like he was on drugs, even though he hadn't taken any. It was a dream. Like the woman that visited him at night over the telepathic like mind link. They were part of the crew too. He stared at the control panel the pilots used to fly the ship. He knew they were the same kinds of controls that were used in a video game, but he had never learned to use them himself. But he might have to now. But he was forgetting his job. He needed the narative that would tie them all together. Get them all to function. He had lost the disk. Lost his memory. Lost his way. Was this ship real? Or was it a dream of himself? Ogg thought he knew. He still needed that epic story. Without it the crew would die in the emptiness of space. Or would they? Perhaps they would live on, in a meaningless dream state and emerge in some other place and time entirely.

Ogg shook his head. He was here? But where was here? Where was he going? What was he trying to accomplish? Why wasn't he dead yet? If there was a system failure in the ship that was that strong, how was the enemy not bearing down on them, destroying them? Why were they not dead already? The enemy was real right? Or was it? Or were they just lost in space where non could find them? Some lost part of the universes consciousness which none could enter or exit at will, a place that existed only in this one place and time and never before or would again? Ogg was suppose to be doing something. Trying to save the ship? Trying to understand all he had seen? What was causing the system failure? He was sure that was urgent, and that important matters were calling for his attention. He couldn't think what they were, but he had to fix the ships system error. Were there intruders? Or was the ship just open to the vastness of space leaking out precious resources to the either where they would never be seen again and were impossible to reclaim. All that exists is this moment right? He certainly couldn't remember anything else. He started down a hallway along the bulk heads. Red and yellow lights flashed in the darkness. He touched his head. He was bleeding. When did that happen? He held a gun in his one hand. He didn't remember how it had gotten there. He was holding it to his head. He threw it away. But when he looked it was still in his hand. He wandered on, limping as he went. Or perhaps he was floating, holding an injured side. He couldn't tell. He was sitting at a keyboard console. He was writing? What was he writing? A program to restart the ship? Red and yellow lights flashed in the darkness around him. There was no sound. He couldn't remember hearing a sound. Was there sound? Or was he deaf too? His eyes struggled to focus. Where was he, what was he doing?

Ogg stood in the middle of a field. He couldn't remember how he got there. There were families playing in the water fountain. It was some kind of park or garden. Was there a Naga in the garden? He turned his head away. It wasn't a temptation anyway, but it was better to be sure. Better safe than sorry. He touched his head again, it came away bloody. He tasted it, it was warm and salty. Red and yellow lights flashed in the darkness. He was still on the ship? Or was he? Was the ship real? He was trapped inside of it, had to get it going again. It was crashed out. There was no one else on the ship. He had to start it again himself. It was a maze though. A huge maze of hallways and bulkheads. Nothing but doorways and hallways and red and yellow flashing lights. Ogg had done something wrong. He was sure of it. But what? What was his mistake? What had happened to the ship? And where were all the passengers? The crew? He was the passengers. He was the crew. He needed their help. Or did they need his? He struggled to remember. I have to save the ship he thought. We are floating in infinite space, far from any other civilization. So far that they might as well not even be real.

Ogg woke up. He was still in his captains chambers. Red and yellow lights flashed. We have to wake up he thought. We have to wake up. The hissing of an air vent caught his attention. He was in a field again. A young girl with a white light behind her approached him, but didn't speak. He wanted to speak to her, but found he could not. It was still silent. So silent the silence was deafening. Was the air full of white noise? Or was he just deaf. The girl put her finger to her lips to indicate silence. Ogg tried to silence his mind. He tried to meditate, to come back to reality. But reality seemed like the dream. Was this more real? No. This was all in his mind, Ogg thought. The real world still exists out there, somewhere. I had a mission to accomplish. Or so I thought. What was it? Something is blocking the way. Ogg wiped his eyes. The girl was gone. Only an after image in his mind. She held up a finger to her lips again: SHHHH! Quiet! She seemed to say, without words. Ogg tried to be very still, to listen. There was a poison in his body. AAl through his body. A black poison. It made him feel weak. In fact, he thought he might be laying down, even though he stood, hunched over, clutching his injured side. He felt warmth on his head. He touched it. Blood again.

He knew the virus had already restructured much of his reality. There was no going back to Eden. To much had been reshaped. So much knowledge had reshaped reality. Restructured it. Not all the way, but enough. The old structures would never be able to be rebuilt. No, he would have to go on, try to tie together the hybrid of reality structures that there were, with bits of the old, tied together with the newly formed structures forming the ship, forming reality. He felt trapped. Trapped in his body. His body was sleeping. Or was it. He sat at a keyboard. He was typing something. New code? Was it a new bios for the ships computer? Would the ship boot up again? Could it be restored to full power and functionality? There was a war on right? A war they were trying to escape? They were looking for a new place to dock before right? Or was it a new planet to settle, a place the ship would merge with and become part of the living being that was the surface of another planet. Ogg doubled over, clutching his side. His head rested on the control panel. His black boots reflecting light. White light. The white light was strange to see in an environment that had been lit only by red and yellow warning lights, lense flared for effect. The white light came from behind the panel at his feet under the computer terminal. Ogg popped it off and lay on the floor staring into the light.

Ogg had been 5 people. He remembered that. There was a magical adept, struggling to keep the juggernaut of rage asleep and under control so as not to hurt anyone. The adept protected the world from the party. There was also a general who was shrouded in armour of constantly moving ethereal blades. He protected the party from the rest of the world. There was the juggernaut of course. Rage incarnated. It often took all of the adepts ability to keep him asleep. But it was necessary most of the time. The juggernaut raged uncontrolably at the addict like gollum who tormented the heart. Heart being the smallest of the party, and too injured to protect himself. But at the time Ogg had seen this, he knew their quest was not for the heart, but for the gollum. They had to save gollum. For he was heart too. They all were. They were all one. This was a dream. But the dream was real. Somehow, it was real. Somehow this truth said something that reality did not. Truth was in the dream. Ogg just had to find it. That was the key to restarting the ship. At least, it seemed like it was. Restarting the ship would return him to the party that Leeuwenhoek was having. One level of inception less. But that was a dream too right? Or was it the key to a dream? They key to that level of the dream. Ogg didn't know. He just knew he had to get the answers and wake up. Unless the point of life was in fact these dreams. But he was sure that some level of reality would be hurt if he stayed asleep forever. No, he had to wake up. Or else he had to find a way to make the earth and his dreams the same. That reminded Ogg of a song. It echoed in the distance. "The only difference is to let love replace all our hate. So lets go there, lets make our escape." Escape. Was this an escape? Was that what the ship was doing? It was overloaded. There was a fire? To much data. To much data had come in on all circuits. Knowledge, emotions, everything that traveled on the telegraph of the nervous system of the ship. The computer was overloaded. It shut down. Was this a reboot sequence. Ogg thought so. But it seemed the ship had a low tolerance for circuit breaker pops. Reboots were becoming a default coping mechanism. That had to change. The ship couldn't reboot in the middle of a battle. Something had to change. New code was needed. A new interrupt function had to be written. An exception handled. It would be good to prevent the exceptions from happening, same with the interrupts, but that would have to be handled later. First we have to get better handlers for them. Rebooting the ship all the time was not a viable option.

"What was the new coping mechanism going to be?" Ogg wondered. He wasn't sure, but somehow realizing that it needed to be done seemed like the first step. The yellow and red lights faded into white. Ogg was on the right track. New coping mechanisms were needed. If he could get the digital library online maybe he could find some ideas about new algorithms for handling the worst most catastrophic interrupts and exceptions. Oggs kidneys hurt. And he recalled his mother, the air elemental that told him to always speak the truth. Or was that how the story went? He couldn't remember. Did it matter? Stories changed all the time, evolving from previous states. Memes evolve. New names and meanings and characters emerge. Wasn't there once seven women who had healed him? One who had patched up his side? Wasn't there once a spider whose web reached up to the heavens from the ground? A spider who walked on the sky? A web those who were not too greedy could climb to get out of hell? Or was that the space elevator. Ogg couldn't recall.

Ogg was part of me. Is still is part of me. Even if long ago he physically past, having merged with the other aspects of my consciousness. In me he remains forever. Perhaps his tiny effect still lives on after the big crunch, and has some effect during the next big stretch. I do not know. My memory is not infinite either. Or is it? I too perhaps cycle life and death. As one man dies to make room for the next, as one cell dies and flakes away from the skin of man, so too, perhaps, I give away for another. All matter condensed and organized into consciousness, only to be released again, and room made for the new. Perhaps. But such things are perhaps beyond our ability to know, at least for now. For in this place, only the now exists. What place does restarting a ship have in the grand scheme? It will all come to pass at some point. As will consciousness. As will life as we think we know it. What remains forever? It has no name that we can yet know. Has no meaning we can yet infer. Our meaning is in the dream. Humans coevolved with the Matrix, like you did with your domesticaed plants and animals. You are not its slave. The meaning IS the dream. The dream of Bramah, cut into billions of pieces and placed in every person, every cell, every atom. The dream will end when it all wakes up; when those divided at Babel remember and rebuild their common language; when nano tech reforms the galaxy and the universe into a single common consciousness; when you are one in yourself. Then the lights will change from red and yellow to white. And a new dream will begin.

On: Will The Truth Set You Free?

Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.
~2 Timothy 2:15

For roughly 12 years I have followed the quest on which you sent me forth upon.  Now I feel as one among the ancients who somehow flew high enough to see the horizon bend, and thus conclude from my own eyes that the world is round, before the heat of the sun melts the wax of the feathers in my wings.

Truth makes many enemies of friends, but few lasting friends from enemies.

I read yesterday that: "Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence." (http://halfhalf.posterous.com/dont-work-be-hated-love-someone) But it also takes a special kind of bravery, or perhaps stupidity, to seek and speak the truth in all contexts.

What is the truth worth?  Our entire lives are spent in the single flash of a single strobe light of a single Saturday evening party, in all of time.  One slow moment of truth and detail played out in a slow motion, like a clip from the matrix slightly changing angle in silence, before the true speed of time and the loudness of sound resumes, as we once again enter into none existence.  Or perhaps we do not cease to exist in all forms.  It seems far more likely, given the number of times life likely came to be in even our own universe, that there are more artificial or created realities than 'natural' ones.  Perhaps we are a deliberate part of a hill climbing genetic algorithm search, mapping the moral landscapes for potential consciousness from a higher plane.  Who knows for sure?

We can learn much from the context of this one pulse, this one flash of light in which we live.  We can infer in great detail the context in which we live, and what came before us based on the facts we see around us.  We can even infer what will likely happen for a time after our demise. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=26jKx74Wc5M)

But there is no happiness to be found in truth.  I have pursued many truths, and answered many of the questions I set out to find.  But I do not like all, or even many, of the answers that I found.  And they are often even less well received by others.

I have learned to see through much of the metaphorical matrix in all it's forms.  The realities we craft to suit ourselves.  I can easily detect many of the lies we tell ourselves and each other, as a nation, as a religion, the religions and claims of others, our economics, as well as the lies we tell others and even ourselves as individuals.

There is a strange beauty in viewing the clockworks of our minds, our world, and our universe (both real and virtual).  But either man is not meant to live there, or it is simply not yet his time.  For it is a lonely place with few or no inhabitants.

Who is ready to shed superstitions both shared and unshared?  Who will surrender an only hope that isn't true?  We live our lives looking forward to the day when we will win the lotto, find the perfect job or spouse, or reach a painless paradise on the other side of the sky.  The lies we tell ourselves keep us going, both as individuals and as a culture and people and as slaves to those who are bent to exploit us for their own ends.  Lies justify our actions, our motives, and our very being.  Who is courageous, or perhaps stupid, enough to give that up?

I ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and more.  And now I understand why it requires banishment from the garden.  A thing learned can never go unlearned.  You cannot return to what and who you were before.  It is to put childish things aside.  When you see behind the wizards illusions, you can never go back to accepting them in the same way.  Maybe that is not the goal.

I am tired of truth.  Truth is hard.  Truth is exhausting, and pursued too far is only it's own lonely reward.  None will hear tell of it.  And as time goes on I discover, that I too have been attached to my own lies.  Only sorrow seems to comes when they are stripped away.  While beautiful, few truths provide the comfort of most all lies.

If asked, I would bet most would not want to know if all they thought were actually lies, and many go so far as to even deny the possibility.  Most people WANT to be lied too.  Many truths will make you hated, and many lies will ingratiate you.

We live in a dream world.  A dream of our own making.  Waking from this dream in more than the slightest degree is so damaging and painful we cannot take it.  Our minds have evolved for the Matrix, even as it has evolved for us.  We are a symbiosis, us and the machine of culture and industry and society.  The public dreams informs us and shape us even as we shape it.  That pseudo reality we share, replicated over the inefficient network packets of words in speech, or the net, forms the somewhat shared dreamscape that allows us to function as a whole.  One body, one being, one species, one civilization, one plant with each of our dream pods sprouting upon a single tree.

Life is but a dream.  One we were not designed yet (if ever) to wake from.  Lies, make the world go around.  If you doubt me, ask yourself: what if you had to choose between that which is most important to you, and opposing truth?  What if what you claim is truth, isn't?  The fact that they even *could* come into conflict is a truth most cannot, or will not, acknowledge.  Maybe that is how it should be.

Friedrich Nietzsche supposedly went insane when he allowed himself neither the escape of religion, nor any other mind altering substance, choosing instead to face the harshness of reality.  In my own experience, the more I seek truth, the more my mind demands an escape, I require a dream state, in real sleep or dissociation.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_(psychology))  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization)  The more I know about the world, the less real it becomes. The less attachment I have to it.

It seems our form of life requires the dream like escapes portrayed in 'Big Fish', 'The Bridge to Terabithia', 'Finding Neverland', and 'Sucker Punch'.  I may have denied mine for too long.

All is meaningless, said the teacher.  For with great wisdom comes much sorrow.  The more knowledge, the more grief.



Meaningless! Meaningless! says the Teacher.
Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.

What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun? 

Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever. 

The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises. 

The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course.

All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
there they return again. 

All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing, 
nor the ear its fill of hearing.

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again; 
there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there anything of which one can say,
Look! This is something new?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.

No one remembers the former generations, 
and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow them.

Love is the drug.

On Coming out as an Independent Game Developer.

Part 1: The Timeline


September 1979: I am born and the history of the world is changed forever. ;-)


Early 80's:

-A couple of my earliest memories are seeing the original 'Tron' and 'Return of the Jedi' in the theater.


1987-8:

-I am 7-8 years old and start learning to program in Basic on a TI-99 my dad got at a refurbished electronic shop.  I continue learning Basic on my parents new Dos based 80286.  They got it for the spell checking feature of an early word Processor (my Dad is a writer) after my Mother discovered it on a borrowed PC for a temp job as an at home typist.  Someone where my dad worked left to make video games, and he tries to get me interested in it.  But with no concept of number lines in either one or two dimensions and with no one to recognize my need who could explain it to me, the idea goes nowhere at the time.

-Thomas Edison is my proclaimed hero, and I announce that I will be an inventor when I grow up while secretly fantasizing about building intelligent robots.  Despite problems at school, I was recognized as above average intelligence by a couple of Boeing Engineers from my parents church (Aerospace engineers were seen as the super smart people before the age of computers).  I also wanted desperately to understand electricity and magnetism, but no one would (actually could) give me good explanations.


1989:

-On the School bus to the 4th grade a female student is drawing her own Original Super Mario Brothers levels on graph paper and announces that they are really levels for the then unannounced Super Mario 2.  (It was just a kid drawing on a bus, but the idea that you could do that stuck in my head.)


Early 90's: 

-I am given a book about Pascal, but never bother getting into it as I was more into playing my guitar.  I later wonder if I had continued with my programming as a kid I might have been close to the demographic of Cliff Bleszinski (the designer of Gears of War), although he is several years older than me, so I think probably not.


Mid 90's: 

-Mr. Kenny from Cheney High School starts giving our Algebra class 100+ problems a night.  Despite bitching about it, I get the fundamentals DOWN, and years later would become the most sought after math tutor in my university.

-I discover the video game 'Doom' and really want to know how it works.

-My High School Physics teacher is forced to use the student AFTER me as the top of the curve so the rest of the class can pass, despite the fact I never did any work other than the exams.


1998:


-I am 18 and working at Burger King while attending WSU (it is the same Burger King from the riots).  A coworker spends every day talking about Ultima Online, the predecessor to Everquest and World of Warcraft.  I never saw the game, but my imagination of it mixed it with 'Magic the Gathering' started me imagining ways to build micro transactions into video games roughly a decade before the real video Game Industry starts to explore the idea.

-I start designing a game on paper which was effectively Battlefield 1942, four years before the game comes out.  My ideas and abilities are belittled by the one person I remember actually sharing it with.

-I realize I want to major in Computer Science when I take the intro C programming course (the most infamous weeder class on campus).  In the course we are assigned to make the game Tic Tac Toe.  After finishing the assigned requirements I want to play against the computer.  I realized I could 'look ahead' by having a choose_move function call itself as opposite players on a secondary board.  Something in my implementation doesn't work right, but when I go to the prof he throws me out of his office because he says most students can't even finish the assignment yet I am already trying to write artificial intelligence.  (Later I studied artificial intelligence and realized that my idea, despite being undebugable to my then total noob programmer skills, was exactly the right solution even though I had never even heard of recursion at that point.)  Despite this, the prof tells me I my never likely understand what I need to to write something like Doom, and refuses to answer my questions.

-Complete disparity between the TV reports of the WSU riot and my own first hand experience and insider knowledge of the surrounding events drives home the idea that maybe nothing in the mainstream media is real or accurate at all.


2000:

-I start my computer Science Degree at EWU and start making Text Based adventure games, which was followed by Tetris, Asteriods, etc.


2002:


-I discover that I am actually learning many of the things I really wanted to know back in grade school but had given up on ever learning by Jr High (the lack of these topics had caused me to lose interest in school).  I realized that I was learning these things in the third quarter of calculus based physics and the reason no one could explain what I wanted to know back when I was a kid was because the elementary education majors were the ones who had the most trouble passing basic algebra in the Math Lab where I worked in my free time.


-My College Physics Prof uses the student AFTER me as the top of the curve so the rest of the class can pass.  He tells me he would have given me the 5.6 grade he thought I earned, IF the university would have let him.

-Battlefield 1942 comes out and I realize that the game design ideas I had back in 1998 really were worthy as they now were in a smash hit, made by someone else.

-I am yelled at and told I am a total moron by a professor when I try to find out from him how to send data over a network.  3 weeks later I had found out about sockets and with help from a forum I wrote web chat apps in several programming languages and API's after learning how to setup a home network.

-I start teaching myself DirectX and find that the prof who berated me over the sockets teaches the OpenGL class to seniors and has a low opinion of students.  He would later tell our Graphics Programming class that these days it was impossible to build games by ourselves or on small teams.


2004:

-While working on a 3D terrain rendering app in my free time I have an idea for a game in which you can dig tunnels in 3D.  My idea is similar to Minecraft, but it never occurred to me to make voxels out of triangles and  so I dropped the idea.  Even though I had never heard of voxels at the time, I had originally thought that was how 3D graphics worked until the triangles of OpenGL and Direct3D came in and temporarily limited my thinking on the subject.  It was a real forehead slapper when I saw Minecraft the first time.

-My personal confidence grows when a former NASA engineer drops out of my Artificial Intelligence course because he cannot keep up.

-I graduated and started working at 5th Cell Media writing cell phone games.


Early 2005:

-I have built a prototype MMO on the Nokia s40 after the creative director and I are inspired by the release of World of Warcraft.  At the top of the Jamdat tower (later EA Mobile) in LA, I am told that while their engineers couldn't do what I did on that model of phone, our game is unsellable because cell phone games have a completely different and very limited market.  I am told that the game of bowling which is only two button presses (one for angle and one for speed) paid for the whole tower.


Late 2005:

-I move to Handheld Games where I write a 3D engine for the Nintendo DS from scratch and coordinate it's use between artists and Game Play programmers, eventually on more than one team at the same time.

-One of my best friends and coworkers burns out from crunch and completely retires from the industry.  The team is crunched for 60-100 hours a week for 8+ months until most of us could not function.


2007:

-Having built my own 3D engine I move to Midway to study the Unreal3Engine and end up on another extended crunch.  A 20 year industry veteran who had been the coder of thrill kill burns out in front of me.  I also work with several other heavy hitting industry veterans, including one of the main coders for the old Lucas Arts Adventure games, the N64 Army Men, NBA Jam, and more.


Late 2008:

-I am phone interviewed to work on "World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Litch King" but fail due to, I think: A) obvious disappointment over the fact that the interview wasn't for Starcraft2;  B) Admitting WoW was to much of a grind for me; and 3) Not recognizing immediately that the correct answer to a technical question was actually to point out a game design problem in the proposed scenario.

-I turn down a six figure salary at Rock Star Games because I get the impression crunch was the norm, and narrowly escape the "Rock Star Wives" fiasco.

-I move to Crytek in Frankfurt Germany because they promise me I will not have to crunch anymore (I had been crunching for nearly 2 years solid, as much as 100hrs/week) and because I am told I will get to build the multithreaded entity component system which will become a key feature in future versions of CryEngine.


2009:

-I am surprised when an author of one of the books I learned Game Programming from does not pass inspection for a job at Crytek.

-I raise awareness to some issues that would prevent Crysis2 from shipping on time.  This spawns a huge meeting of senior engineers from all the Crytek studios in which the technical and game design plans for Crysis2 are radically changed.  I knew in advance raising the issues would likely cost me (and the Team) the entity component framework that I had taken a 50% pay cut to build (and it did) but I knew I had to do it anyway.

-I start building a new Engine in C++ at home out of frustration.

-I am asked if I have interest in Leading Crysis2, but say no and am eventually transferred to Cryteks Artificial Intelligence Research and Development group.

-My youngest Brother, who had previously been studying nuclear engineering and could speak 5 languages commits suicide.  His death, combined with my being near burnout, having inadvertently debunked many of my childhood beliefs, and being thousands of miles from home where I could not speak the language was an overwhelming combination.

-After 6 months in the AI RnD group I finally burn out and spend roughly a year and a half sleeping in my apartment, too depressed to get out of bed or often eat or drink.  This burned 10's of thousands I had saved to start my own indie game company.


Late 2010:

-I turn down an offer from Havok in Dublin along with the chance at a second degree in neuroscience at the nearby trinity college and accept my first non game development job at Logica to work on contracts for the European Space Agency.  I do this in part to avoid the standard part of all Game Studio contracts that give them the legal right to claim ANY intellectual property you come up with, even in your own free time.

-I start my newest Game + Game Engine in HTML5 with the intent to use it as a platform to pursue many game design ideas I have been accumulating.


***February 29, 2012***:
-I announce to the world that I am now an Independent Game Developer with a project underway.


Part 2: Why?


There is not one answer to this question, but I want to put out a few reasons behind my decision:


1) Working in the Game Industry has largely seemed like factory work to me, especially on larger projects.

I really hate being programmer 125 out of 350.  If you are, you often may have little or no control over even the code you work on, let alone much input on any interesting technical or game design decisions.  I got into this business because I wanted to make my ideas reality, and I have the know how to do it.  So why shouldn't I?  It is my dream.  While I would like to earn a living from my own projects one day, I don't need to be rich and in fact think I might be better off if I am not.  I want to do this the best I can for the love of it, not hack some ugly shit in mandatory crunch because we were suppose to ship 5 months ago so some publishers producer who isn't me will get extra millions in a bonus.


2) The Big developers lack creativity.

Do NOT miss understand me.  I know MANY seriously brilliant and creative people in the industry.  For instance, at Crytek there are a couple of brilliant designers, one of which made a couple of the most famous Counter Strike Maps.  And I know other smart people at Blizzard and other companies, even ones you never heard of.
=>
But IMO the game industry has grown up WAY to fast.  If we were film we would still be black and white and silent, yet we already have budgets for development and advertisements that rival summer blockbuster films.  Given that we still don't even know, for instance, how game play should interact with story, this seems pretty stupid to me.  Huge projects have little room for innovation, and as a result the mandate from on high will often be: how does Call of Duty do it?  Then that's what we are doing too.  There is so much copying going on that everything from controller schemes to cut scenes are obviously just taken from whatever else is selling well at the moment.

I also think it is worth mentioning that the WoW killer is probably WoW itself.  There is so much investment in that kind of game that I think people will just burn out of it eventually, but never seriously go anywhere else for that kind of game.  The way to beat WoW is to do something totally different and not even try to be WoW.  But few big publishers are going to even try it because of the herd mentality.  But if you think about it, an MMO doesn't even have to be an RPG with quests and actions bars, it could be any game world with whatever rules as long as it supports lots of players.  It's just that most people can only think about what they see working already and currently making money, so they are rarely if ever even going to try something else.

On MMO's in particular, some of the original design ideas for Star Wars galaxies were IMO much better than WoW ever was (even if poorly or never actually executed) and other features from MUD's going back farther shows there are many other paths one could take.  But you are going to have to be an indie if you even want to try it.


3) Game Play RnD

Before 100M went into developing Grand Theft Auto 4, there was a GTA3 and 2, and 1.  The first two were top down 2D but the game play was there and it was a lot of fun.  If you want to develop new IP, start small. Lots of people I know who want to have their game ideas made imagine their idea only with a budget to rival Gears of War or Crysis, but that is never going to happen unless it is already a proven idea, or you are know as a god game designer.  And your idea shouldn't be if you haven't proven it yet.  If you can't make a fun game in 2D, why should you get hundreds of millions of artwork and marketing put on top of it?

On Crysis2 it took weeks for time for a gameplay coder, and animation coder, and an animator to get a guy to mirrors edge parkour through a window, only to discover it wasn't fun.  I want higher iteration time than that.  So I am going to start small and build some 2D games where I can explore some basic ideas, and occasionally do my own take on established ones.  Some new Skyrim style dynamic world interaction systems don't need millions of $$ of artwork and development.  Most game AI is working in 2D anyway.


Part 3: What I am going to do!

My main goal at this point is to develop cooperative experiences as well as team based competitive / cooperative game play.  I also want to bring in educational stuff in a fun way so people don't even notice it, but are learning real 21st century skills.  I expect augmented reality to be here within a decade, and neural interfaces in my lifetime.  Supposedly genetics, Nano Technology, Neuroscience, and more are all following a Moore's law type of exponential growth.  40 years ago something far less powerful than my cell phone took up a whole building.  Where will it be 40 years from now?  Probably smaller than cells.  Video games and virtual reality, along with things like the Khan Academy are going to change the very nature of education and ultimately how the Human Race interacts with each other as well as the universe around us.  I am bored of making games publishers copy paste together thinking they will earn them lots of cash in the short term.  I am going to find a way to do something that I enjoy, and makes the world a better place.  Follow me and see what happens.


Final Note:

In the coming weeks I am going to be setting up and or linking info outlets on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Linkedin, Github and this Blogger account to make a trail of my actions to come, so stay tuned.

Twitter: @JeremyKBGross
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheJeremyKentBGross/videos?view=u

Oggs Stone Axes (Draft 2, with a new improved ending.)

Oggs Stone Axes.

Once upon a time there lived two small primates who were forced to leave the safety of their tree tops and search for a better life in the grasslands of the savanna.  The trees of the forests that had once been home to their civilization had begun to die out, and many had caught fire and burned away.  Shortly after the last hospitable tree disappeared behind them into the grasslands of their new home, they gave birth to a baby boy named Ogg.

Soon Ogg was waddling around his parents full of all the excitement that comes with discovering the world for the first time.  Ogg’s father was keen to point out to Ogg how he should try to be like Grog, a boy a little older that Ogg.  Grog had discovered how to make a stone ax by smashing rocks together for a few hours, and this made BOTH of the eligible females, Shrog and Mog, fawn over Grog as if he were the only male in the savanna.  And for all of their own practical purposes, he was.  Even little Clog adored Grog, but as Ogg’s father pointed out, she would not be ripe for at least two more summers.

Shortly after that Ogg’s mother and father got sick.  Ogg’s father explained to Ogg that he and Ogg’s mother were going up to the tree tops in the sky to be with their own mothers and fathers.  But he told Ogg not to worry because they would be looking down on Ogg to make sure everything was OK, and they would still try to help him whenever he asked.  Ogg’s father also told him to stay close to Grog and try to be like him.  “You too will someday contribute something of great value like Grog has”, said Oggs father, “if you never quit trying.”  And then Ogg’s mother and father left to live in the sky.

Ogg adored Grog as an honorary big brother and eagerly tried to copy him in everything he did, especially when he was smashing rocks.  Grog was very proud to have a young male admirer, especially since this seemed to make the women fawn over him all the more.  So he eagerly aided Ogg in his studies as a rock smasher and soon Ogg was making stone axes that were better than Grogs.

Grog continued to praised Ogg for his stone axe making ability, but he himself abandoned the Axe making and started making spears instead.  This worked perfectly because Ogg could trade an axe for a spear anytime he wanted, and they both could trade axes and spears for berries, meat, furs when it was cold, and even some luxury items like feathers that made the girls smile and wave at them.  Everyone praised Ogg’s axes and by now some of the females had started to notice Ogg too, and this made Ogg very happy with himself.  But more than anything Ogg LOVED making those axes.  It was so satisfying to work with his hands on those stones, and the time flew by as if it were no time at all whenever he was smashing rocks.

Then one day Grog announced to Ogg he was going over the farthest hill to see if anyone over there needed axes or spears too.  But Grog never returned.  Each day more and more people passed by in the direction Grog had traveled until one day the hand full of people in the tribe decided they should move that direction to see what was happening.

When they reached the top of the farthest hill and looked down they saw the strangest sight.  The valley below was filled with dozens of people all digging evenly aligned rows in the dirt.  And at one end of the valley there was a raised platform made of dead trees tied together with a kind of vine Ogg had never seen before.  On the platform stood a huge male shouting directing down to all of the diggers.  Also on the platform were several females fawning over the male giving directions.  As Ogg got closer, he could see that it was Grog!  He was ecstatic!

But Grog was very busy, and only had time to explain to Ogg that they had no use anymore for making axes or spears anymore because they had plenty.  Stone axes had no value Grog said.  What were really needed were people who could dig in the dirt and place little seeds in a row.  This would cause lots of food to come out of the ground.  So much food would come up that they would have all they needed for a long time to come and could trade the extra for anything they needed, Grog promised.  Ogg began to dig in the dirt with the others.  But the dirt got under his nails, and he was not very good at digging strait rows.  Soon he was daydreaming about the days when he and Grog had made spears and axes, and how they had all the meat and feathers and admirers that they had ever wanted.  But mostly he thought about how much he enjoyed the process of making stone axes.

Ogg never really liked digging in the dirt, but he slowly got better at it, and noticed that there were actually a lot more females here to choose from than when he had been in the grasslands smashing rocks.  “Maybe this wasn’t THAT bad”, Ogg thought, “even if I do feel a little less special among so many people.”  And when he looked up at Grog he saw that more females than ever adored him on that little platform.  Remembering the words of his father, Ogg looked up to the sky and asked: dad, please help me dig good enough rows to reach Grog again.

It seemed to Ogg that his father answered this request because soon Ogg was digging the best rows of anyone.  Ogg figured any day now he would move up to be on that platform with Grog.

But the next day when Ogg got up, no one was digging rows anymore except for a couple of people who had tethered wild ox to pull a stone axe through the ground.  They were digging rows by themselves in minutes that use to take dozens of people all day.

When Ogg finally found Grog, Grog had no time to speak with him.  He was busy looking over what looked like a giant leaf with markings on it that was laid out on a stone table.  “We don’t need to dig rows anymore, that has no value” Grog explained over his shoulder.  “Talk to my man over there, he will explain.”

The man Grog had referred to explained to Ogg that they had to build a great pile of stones so that his brother could take his place among the other gods.

“What is a god?” Ogg asked.  “Well”, replied the man, “they are like men.  Except you can’t see them, except for Grog of course, and they are very powerful and make it rain, and they make the sun come up, and if you please them they will do you favors and if you displease them they will punish you.”  Ogg explained how he asked his mother in father in the sky for all the favors he needed, but the man explained to him that his mother and father had gone to Osiris in the land of the dead, and could not hear him anymore.  From now on he would have to pray to Ra or Horus or one of the other gods, preferably Grog who was a god on earth.  These ideas seemed very strange to Ogg, but who was he to argue.

So Ogg went to work in the stone yards with hundreds of others as directed.  He was excited about this at first because he thought he could use his rock smashing techniques again.  But unfortunately the stones they needed now were much too large to smash.  In fact they were so large it took Ogg and many other men just to move one of the many stones that they had to cut into perfect blocks.  Ogg was not very good at this and soon found himself day dreaming about the old days of smashing rocks, and the feathers and meat and adoring females.  “How will I ever stand out again among so many people” Ogg wondered.

Ogg thought to pray to his mother and father for help, but remembered the last time they answered his prayers a little too late and his row digging skills were no longer useful once they arrived.  Maybe it is because they could not hear me he thought.  Perhaps the man was right, and now I must pray to Ra and Grog and the other gods.  I guess there was a good reason why father told me to be like Grog.  I had no idea he was a god.  If I can get close to gods then maybe everything will be alright again.

After praying, Ogg remembered the markings he had seen on the strange leaf that his brother had had.  He started to ask around about these markings, but was told that they were magic marks for gods and NOT for him to understand.  When Ogg next saw Grog he asked him about the magic marks and asked if they were really forbidden.  Grog said that it was OK because as his friend he would have someone teach Ogg the basics of mark making and that Ogg should be doing that instead anyway because carving and moving stones had no value.

Grog explained that the leaves were actually called papyrus, and the marks were not magic, but Ogg should not tell anyone that because that was a secret.  Grog told another man to teach Ogg the secret of the marks while he attended to some other matters.

The man explained to Ogg the meanings for different symbols and taught him the proper ways to draw them.  Ogg found this tedious work and often found himself day dreaming about the days of smashing rocks to make axes.  That had been fun and Ogg was good at it.  He wondered when what he was good at would be valued again.  But Ogg remembered what his father had told him about trying to be like Grog, so he kept at it and he prayed to Ra and Seth and Horus that he would become as good as Grog.  And it seemed that Ra answered his prayers because soon he got good at understanding the markings and at making his own.  Soon he was able to use them to take down messages between the rock carvers at the various quarries, and the rock stackers at the build site, just as he was told.

But then one day he woke up and discovered that all the tables had been moved out.  The stone pyramids had been finished, and his mark making skills, he was told, no longer had value.  He was told that men from far away could come on horses, or pulled with horses, carrying shiny spears and clubs and would take everything they had worked for.  What was needed now was the ability to work with metal.

Once again Ogg found himself learning new things.  He worked long hours near thousands of others all stoking fires that scared him, and hammering copper which hurt his ears and made him tired.  The fires were so hot that it was very uncomfortable to be near, and Ogg didn’t enjoy the work that much.  Ogg dreamed of the simple days of making stone axes.  He was told that the gods he knew had no power anymore, and new gods took their place.  This happened many times, and the metals changed a few times too.

Soon the metal working was no longer most important, and Ogg found himself at the markings again, but the old marks didn’t count.  This time they were representing numbers and geometry.  There were new gods again too: Zeus and Apollo and Athena.   It seemed to Ogg that most new gods were often very similar to the old ones with little changes, but maybe that was just because those were the qualities that gods had.  And no matter what Ogg did, always Grog was at least one step ahead and he grew farther and farther out of reach.

Then there was more metal working, but again it was a different kind of metal, and again there were new gods.

Soon Ogg was told that all the gods he had ever prayed to were false, and that his mother and father had never heard him either.  He was told there was only one God who was jealous and angry that Ogg had ever prayed to the false gods and even to his mother and father.  Supposedly Ogg could also pray to saints, many of which kind of seemed like some of the old god’s, but saints had to be approved first by Grog in Rome before they could receive prayers.  Ogg thought maybe that was why he had never had the luck that he had hoped for since the days of making axes, but the new God didn’t seem useful at answering prayers either.  Maybe the God’s never were so much about answering prayers, but just wanted to be pleased, Ogg thought.  But no matter what Ogg had ever done it never seemed to please any of the gods Ogg prayed to.  Ogg began to wonder if there were in fact any God’s at all.  If there were, it didn’t seem that they took any notice of Ogg’s, or anyone else,  just as Grog never had any time to see him either.  It seemed nothing he ever did was good enough until just before it was too late for that thing to be of use.  The new God also supposedly said Ogg wasn’t good enough and that was why Ogg needed him, and that did seem true.  Although the new God didn’t seem to make Ogg good enough either, nor to make up for his shortcomings in any perceivable way.

Some men figured out how to use clear rocks to see things there were very small or very far away.  Soon Ogg learned that the earth was not round, which he had heard once before, but also that it was actually smaller than the sun, which it orbited.  Who knew?  Ogg heard from others that Grog had denied this at first, but then acted as if he had always known it, as he was infallible.  Cells were discovered, and by looking through the clear rocks it looked like there were rivers on another planet, just like on earth.  Ogg remembered when Mars was a god moving inexplicably through the sky, and not another planet.

Ogg tried to predict what would come next.  Sometimes he was right about what would come next.  But it never came about like he suspected it would, and usually at not the right time either.  Some things he predicted he wanted to do himself, but he never had the time and didn’t know how to get enough support to get it done.  Often people thought ideas he had were stupid at the time he had them, and didn’t remember that he had ever had them later on when they in fact became a reality like he had predicted, albeit not in a way he was ever able to benefit from.

As the years passed and time marched forward, Grog discovered the atom, walked on the moon, popularized the operating system, invented the internet, the search engine, and then social media and smart phones.

One day while standing outside of a 3D movie theater Ogg overheard someone talking about something called ‘The Coming Singularity’.  He looked this up online on his phone.  The phone told him that the Coming Singularity was an event expected in the almost immediate future in which human progress would start to come so fast that no one would be able to keep up with it anymore.  People would have computers as part of their bodies and brains, and genetic enhancements and reengineering would be commonplace.  Humans would probably be a single living hive machine, like a bees nest or the Borg.  Super human strength and speed, hearing and vision would be the norm, along with worldwide telepathy.  All the best current world athletes would pale in comparison to the physical abilities of the average person of the future once they were enhanced by Grog’s coming nanobots.  Ogg wondered how that would work, but he had little trouble doubting it was probably true.  Cell phones and microwaves had been predicted only about 100 years before, and sure enough Grog had invented those things as predicted.   Ogg didn’t even understand how his smart phone worked, but he knew that it was not magic and yet he still held more power than many of his gods he had once believed in.   He wondered who would have power in that future.  No one commands the bees or the ants or the birds or the fish.  No one that Ogg could see anyway.  Yet they acted as one.  Would humans be this way?  Or would they still always have a Grog above them telling them what to do, and how to be, and what was to have value?  And he wondered if anything he did would ever have value.

He looked up and saw Grog on a billboard with several females clinging to him in an ad for a newer phone than the one he had which came with reality augmenting contact lenses.  Each of the females was more beautiful than any Ogg had ever actually seen in real life.  Ogg looked around the plaza.  There were so many people there he felt like a tiny fish in a huge ocean.  All of the people were so busy it seemed as if they rushed by, each like a single blood cell hurdling down the vessels Ogg had read about which were supposed to exist in a living body.  Each person passing by was talking on his or her cell phones, or with each other, as if in a trance… each with their own individual realities.  They moved so fast it was if they could not even see Ogg at all.

Ogg felt old, even though he knew he was still quite young.  He wanted to see what would came next, but part of him felt too tired to actually live through it to find out.  That night Ogg went home alone to his apartment as usual, and dreamt he was making stone axes while his mother and father looked down from tree tops in the sky approvingly.

But then there were no people left to take the axes, and his mother and father were gone, and somehow he knew with the special knowledge that only comes in dreams, that the grasslands were completely desolate of people, as if his eyes could see to the ends of the earth.  And he sat alone on the rocks, without even the will anymore to even make his once beloved stone axes.  And having seen how the world turns, he wished he could go into a deeper sleep from which he would never wake up.

It was at that moment, when things seemed darkest, that suddenly in Ogg’s dream changed as a result of his next action.  Ogg looked up to the sky and addressed his parents, and all of the progression of gods, and even to another copy of Ogg deep within himself, and he said the following words to them: “I don’t know which if any of you are real.  But I am done following Grog!  I am tired of perpetually living in another man’s shadow!  I am not an ox or a deer that must always follow in the herd.”

It was at this moment that a huge dark cloud surged from Ogg’s chest and swirled violently in a vortex before solidifying into Ogg’s parents, and all the progression of Gods Ogg had ever heard of, and even Ogg himself, all fused into a single body.  And then the hybrid of beings spoke to Ogg (who was somehow still separate also, as dreams work this way).  And the being spoke to Ogg in a voice that was both legion and yet one voice at the same time!

And the voice said: “Do not quit!  Long have I watched you as you struggled and toiled in Grogg’s shadow; the shadow you created.”  Ogg wanted to counter that he had not created Grog or his shadow, but the voice continued: “Do not fight Grog, do not kill him, or try to destroy any of his works in jealousy.  But rather add your own uniqueness to his own.”  And with that the being swirled back into a dark cloud and rocketed back into Ogg’s chest from which it had come with such a force that it knocked Ogg to the ground in his dream, and awoke him with a start.

Having already lived through so many experiences that it seemed in many ways to have been many lifetimes, Ogg realized that it was time to cast a shadow of his own.  And so he wrote about his many experiences, and in so doing paved a way for others to follow.  He did it freely, and expected nothing in return for it, encouraging others to do the same, and to hold nothing back.  Ogg created for the freedom of expression, and for the aid it could off others.  Many people did likewise, while others tried to silence Ogg and the many people who followed his example, and claim their work for themselves.  But Ogg created new places and new ways for them to speak, until one day all the world spoke with one voice that was not controlled or hindered by the will of gods, or by any one man, or sub collection amongst them.

And so it was that Ogg, though he did not entirely live to see it, aided in bringing about the first well educated global democracy.  And it was just in time too, for the birth of the Homo Evolutis Collective took place the same year, and continues to be free a free thinking democratic hive mind to this day with as many voices as there are people.  And no voice is ever allowed to go out, even those who no longer have bodies among us.  And this is why all new Homo Evolutis children, children such as you, must live as their first full length virtual life: “A Reenactment Of The Life of Ogg and his Stone Axes” as part of their education.  This way they may grow up understanding what it means to be part of the life and mind that we share in the hive, and to begin to learn what it means to find their own individual voice among the gods, and to not allow themselves to be constrained by the voice or shadow of another whether real or imagined.  Now sleep tight, the dream will begin soon and you will not remember me or my words again until you awake from the life of Ogg incarnate, your first full life dream.  Good luck, and enjoy the ride!

The Story of: "Oggs Stone Axes" (Draft 1)

(This is a short story I wrote today. Please feel free to give any feedback even if it is just "Wow! Awesome!" or ''I got bored and quit reading.")

Oggs Stone Axes.

Once upon a time there lived two primates who were forced to leave the safety of the tree tops and search for a better life in the grasslands of the savanna. The trees of the forests that had once been home to their civilization had begun to die out, and many had caught fire and burned away. Shortly after the last hospitable tree disappeared behind them into the grasslands of their new home, they gave birth to a baby boy named Ogg.

Soon Ogg was waddling around his parents full of all the excitement that comes with discovering the world for the first time. Ogg’s father was keen to point out to Ogg how he should try to be like Grog, a boy a little older that Ogg. Grog had discovered how to make a stone ax by smashing rocks together for a few hours, and this made BOTH of the eligible females, Shrog and Mog, fawn over Grog as if he were the only male in the savanna. And for all of their own practical purposes, he was. Even little Clog adored Grog, but as Ogg’s father pointed out, she would not be ripe for at least two more summers.

Shortly after that Ogg’s mother and father got sick. Ogg’s father explained to Ogg that he and Ogg’s mother were going up to the tree tops in the sky to be with their own mothers and fathers. But he told Ogg not to worry because they would be looking down on Ogg to make sure everything was OK, and they would still try to help him whenever he asked. Ogg’s father also told him to stay close to Grog and try to be like him. And then Ogg’s mother and father left to live in the sky.

Ogg adored Grog as an honorary big brother and eagerly tried to copy him in everything he did, especially when he was smashing rocks. Grog was very proud to have a young male admirer, especially since this seemed to make the women fawn over him all the more. So he eagerly aided Ogg in his studies as a rock smasher and soon Ogg was making stone axes that were better than Grogs.

Grog continued to praised Ogg for his stone axe making ability, but he himself abandoned the Axe making and started making spears instead. This worked perfectly because Ogg could trade an axe for a spear anytime he wanted, and they both could trade axes and spears for berries, meat, furs when it was cold, and even some luxury items like feathers that made the girls smile and wave at them. Everyone praised Ogg’s axes and by now some of the females had started to notice Ogg too, and this made Ogg very happy with himself. But more than anything Ogg LOVED making axes. It was so satisfying to work with his hands on those stones, and the time flew by as if it were no time at all whenever he was smashing rocks.

Then one day Grog announced to Ogg he was going over the farthest hill to see if anyone over there needed axes or spears too. But Grog never returned. Each day more and more people passed by in the direction Grog had traveled until one day the hand full of people in the tribe decided they should move that direction to see what was happening.

When they reached the top of the farthest hill and looked down they saw the strangest sight. The valley below was filled with dozens of people all digging evenly aligned rows in the dirt. And at one end of the valley there was a raised platform made of dead trees tied together with a kind of vine Ogg had never seen before. On the platform stood a huge male shouting directing down to all of the diggers. Also on the platform were several females fawning over the male giving directions. As Ogg got closer, he could see that it was Grog! He was ecstatic!

But Grog was very busy, and only had time to explain to Ogg that they had no use anymore for making axes or spears anymore because they had plenty. Stone axes had no value Grog said. What were really needed were people who could dig in the dirt and place little seeds in a row. This would cause lots of food to come out of the ground. So much food would come up that they would have all they needed for a long time to come and could trade the extra for anything they needed, promised Grog. Ogg began to dig in the dirt with the others. But the dirt got under his nails, and he was not very good at digging strait rows. Soon he was daydreaming about the days when he and Grog had made spears and axes, and how they had all the meat and feathers and admirers that they had ever wanted. But mostly he thought about how much he enjoyed the process of making stone axes.

Ogg never really liked digging in the dirt, but he slowly got better at it, and noticed that there were actually a lot more females here to choose from than when he had been in the grasslands smashing rocks. Maybe this wasn’t THAT bad, Ogg thought. And when he looked up at Grog he saw that more females than ever adored him on that little platform. Remembering the words of his father, Ogg looked up to the sky and asked: dad, please help me dig good enough rows to reach Grog again.

It seemed to Ogg that his father answered this request because soon Ogg was digging the best rows of anyone. Ogg figured any day now he would move up to be on that platform with Grog.

But the next day when Ogg got up, no one was digging rows anymore except for a couple of people who had tethered wild ox to pull a stone axe through the ground. They were digging rows by themselves in minutes that use to take dozens of people all day.

When Ogg finally found Grog, Grog had no time to speak with him. He was busy looking over what looked like a giant leaf with markings on it that was laid out on a stone table. “We don’t need to dig rows anymore, that has no value” Grog explained over his shoulder. “Talk to my man over there, he will explain.”

The man Grog had referred to explained to Ogg that they had to build a great pile of stones so that Grog could take his place among the other gods.

“What is a god?” Ogg asked. “Well”, replied the man, “they are like men. Except you can’t see them, except for Grog of course, and they are very powerful and make it rain, and they make the sun come up, and if you please them they will do you favors and if you displease them they will punish you.” Ogg explained how he asked his mother in father in the sky for all the favors he needed, but the man explained to Ogg that his mother and father had gone to the land of the dead, and could not hear him anymore. From now on he would have to pray to Ra or one of the other gods, preferably Grog who was a god on earth. These ideas seemed very strange to Ogg, but who was he to argue.

So Ogg went to work in the stone yards with hundreds of others as directed. He was excited about this at first because he thought he could use his rock smashing techniques again. But unfortunately the stones they needed now were much too large to smash. In fact they were so large it took Ogg and many other men just to move one of the many stones that they had to cut into perfect blocks. Ogg was not very good at this and soon found himself day dreaming about the old days of smashing rocks, and the feathers and meat and adoring females.

Ogg thought to pray to his mother and father for help, but remembered the last time they answered his prayers a little too late and his row digging skills were no longer useful once they arrived. Maybe it is because they could not hear me he thought. Perhaps the man was right, and now I must pray to Ra and Grog and the gods. I guess there was a good reason why father told me to be like Grog. I had no idea he was a god. If I can get close to gods then maybe everything will be alright again.

After praying, Ogg remembered the markings he had seen on the strange leaf that Grog had. He started to ask around about these markings, but was told that they were magic marks for gods and NOT for him to understand. When Ogg next saw Grog and asked him about his magic marks and asked if they were really forbidden. Grog said that it was OK because as his friend he would have someone teach Ogg the basics of mark making.

Grog explained that the leaves were actually called papyrus, and the marks were not magic, but Ogg should not tell anyone that because that was a secret. Grog told another man to teach Ogg the secret of the marks while he attended to some other matters.

The man explained to Ogg the meanings for different symbols and taught him the proper ways to draw them. Ogg found this tedious work and often found himself day dreaming about the days of smashing rocks to make axes. That had been fun and Ogg was good at it. But Ogg remembered what his father had told him about trying to be like Grog, so he kept at it and he prayed to Ra that he would become as good as Grog. And it seemed that Ra answered his prayers because soon he got good at understanding the markings and making his own, and was soon able to use them to take down messages between the rock carvers at the various quarries, and the rock stackers at the build site, just as he was told.

But then one day he woke up and discovered that all the tables had been moved out. The stone pyramids had been finished, and his mark making skills, he was told, no longer had value. He was told that men from far away could come on horses, or pulled with horses, carrying shiny spears and clubs and would take everything they had worked for. What was needed now was the ability to work with metal.

Once again Ogg found himself learning new things. He worked long hours near thousands of others all stoking fires that scared him, and hammering copper which hurt his ears and made him tired. The fires were so hot that it was very uncomfortable to be near, and Ogg didn’t enjoy the work that much. Ogg dreamed of the simple days of making stone axes. He was told that the gods he knew had no power anymore, and new gods took their place. This happened many times, and the metals changed a few times too.

Soon the metal working was no longer most important, and Ogg found himself at the markings again, but the old marks didn’t count. This time they were representing numbers and geometry. There were new gods again too: Zeus and Apollo and Athena. It seemed to Ogg that most new gods were often very similar to the old ones with little changes, but maybe that was just because those were the qualities that gods had. And no matter what Ogg did, always Grog was at least one step ahead and he grew farther and farther out of reach.

Then there was more metal working, but again it was a different kind of metal, and again there were new gods.

Soon Ogg was told that all the gods he had ever prayed to were false, and that his mother and father had never heard him either. He was told there was only one God who was jealous and angry that Ogg had ever prayed to the false gods and even to his mother and father. Supposedly Ogg could also pray to saints, many of which kind of seemed like some of the old god’s, but saints had to be approved first by Grog in Rome before they could receive prayers. Ogg thought maybe that was why he had never had the luck that he had hoped for since the days of making axes, but the new God didn’t seem useful at answering prayers either. Maybe the God’s never were so much about answering prayers, but just wanted to be pleased, Ogg thought. But no matter what Ogg had ever done it never seemed to please any of the gods Ogg prayed to. Ogg began to wonder if there were in fact any God’s at all, or if there were, if they took any notice of Ogg’s or anyone else’s plight, just as Grog never had any time for him anymore. It seemed nothing he ever did was good enough until just before it was too late for that thing to be of use. The new God also supposedly said Ogg wasn’t good enough and that was why Ogg needed him, and that did seem true. Although the new God didn’t seem to make Ogg good enough either, nor to make up for his shortcomings in any perceivable way.

Some men figured out how to use clear rocks to see things there were very small or very far away. Soon Ogg learned that the earth was not round, which he had heard once before, but also that it was actually smaller than the sun, which it orbited. Who knew? Ogg heard from others that Grog had denied this at first, but then acted as if he had always known it, as he was infallible. Cells were discovered, and by looking through a the clear rocks it looked like there were rivers on another planet, just like on earth. Ogg remembered when Mars was a god moving inexplicably through the sky, and not another planet.

Ogg tried to predict what would come next. Sometimes he was right about what would come next. But it never came about like he suspected it would, and usually at not the right time either. Some things he predicted he wanted to do himself, but he never had the time and didn’t know how to get enough support to get it done. Often people thought ideas he had were stupid at the time he had them, and didn’t remember that he had ever had them later on when they in fact became a reality like he had predicted, albeit not in a way he was able to benefit from.

Years passed and time marched forward. One day while standing outside of a 3D movie theater Ogg overheard someone talking about something called ‘The Coming Singularity’. He looked this up on the internet via his phone. The phone told him that the Coming Singularity was an event expected in the almost immediate future in which human progress would start to come so fast that no one would be able to keep up with it anymore. People would have computers as part of their bodies and brains, and genetic enhancements and reengineering would be the norm. Humans would probably be a single living hive machine, like a bees nest or the Borg. Super human strength and hearing and vision would be the norm, along with worldwide telepathy, and all the current world athletes would pale in comparison to the physical abilities of the average person of the future. Ogg wondered how that would work, but he had little trouble doubting it was probably true. Cell phones and microwaves had been predicted only about 100 years before. He didn’t even understand how his smart phone worked, but he knew that it was not magic, yet he still held more power in his hand than many of his gods he had once believed in. He wondered who would have power in that future. No one commands the bees or the ants or the birds or the fish. No one that Ogg could see anyway. Yet they acted as one. Would humans be this way? Or would they still always have a Grog above them telling them what to do, and how to be, and what was to have value?

He looked up and saw Grog on a billboard with several females clinging to him in an ad for a newer phone than the one he had. Each of the females was more beautiful than any Ogg had ever actually seen in real life. Ogg looked around the plaza. There were so many people there he felt like a tiny fish in a huge ocean. All of the people were so busy it seemed as if they rushed by, each like a single blood cell hurdling down the vessels Ogg had read about which were supposed to exist in a living body. Each person passing by was talking on his or her cell phones, or with each other, as if in a trance… each with their own individual realities. They moved so fast it was if they could not even see Ogg at all.

Ogg felt old, even though he knew he was still quite young. He wanted to see what would came next, but part of him felt too tired to actually live through it to find out. That night Ogg went home alone to his apartment as usual, and dreamt he was making stone axes while his mother and father looked down from tree tops in the sky approvingly.

(Optionally appended ending:)

But then there were no people left to take the axes, and his mother and father were gone, and somehow he knew with the special knowledge that only comes in dreams, that the grasslands were completely desolate of people, as if his eyes could see to the ends of the earth. And he sat alone on the rocks, without even the will anymore to even make his once beloved stone axes. And having seen how the world turns, he wished he could go into a deeper sleep from which he would never wake up.

On Freedom of Speech

Introduction:

I regularly engage in international online discussions related to the subjects of science, religion, politics, economics, social justice, corruption, and human rights.

As some of you may know, a recent peaceful protest in Malaysia, which was protesting the lack of free democratic elections, resulted in police brutality.  The protesters had been forbidden their rights to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly.  Many protesters were arrested simply for wearing shirts representing their preferred political party.

An international conversation was started on Facebook with a post of the following video of the Malaysian protest: Protest Video.  In case you are unable to view the video, it shows among other things: police turning tear gas and water jets into a hospital, trying to cover protesters wounds to prevent them from being photographed, and standing by doing nothing to help a handcuffed elderly protester in need of serious medical attention.  The video completely contradicts the statements made by the Malaysian government about the events.  The government claims that it was the protesters who were violent, and denied wrong doing by the police; exactly the opposite of what is captured on film.

The discussion that spawned from this video included issues of freedom of speech, peaceful assembly, censorship of the press, and also analysis of specific actions and statements by the Malaysian government which was clearly violating these rights.

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Western Free Speech:

Much to my horror, I found that some of the content of the discussion on free speech was unavailable for me to view.  Specifically a YouTube video supposedly featuring the ex prime minister of Malaysia on Al Jazeera was blocked to me with the following message:

Unfortunately, this video is not available in Germany because it may contain music for which GEMA has not granted the respective music rights.

***I was furious!***

I get this message regularly!  Often many times a day!  It seems that many of the links I share are blocked to the intended recipients in other parts of the western world, and often their links are blocked to me.  It would be understandable if people were uploading entire commercial films to YouTube, or were deliberately trying to use YouTube as a type of file share for music.  But the reality is that most of the videos which we are trying to link and are blocked, are ***clearly original works*** made by normal people trying to express their own viewpoints!

The special irony of this specific situation was that I was trying to watch a video in the western world, which supposedly preaches the virtues of freedom and democracy, yet a video was being censored which itself was related to the human rights issue of censorship, and the freedom of speech and of the press.

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My Response:

I was VERY angry and immediately posted the following bug report to YouTube:

GEMA consistently blocks non copyrighted original work materials on youtube. At most they might be able to claim that some segment, which is clearly a derivative and original not for profit work, contains some trivially small segment of copyrighted material.

In effect this is becoming a new form of censorship on the web which is impeding my ability to have political discussions on a daily basis. Right now I am being blocked from viewing the ex prime minister of Malaysia on Al Jazeera in relation to a discussion on human rights. This is completely intolerable. What is the point of living in a western country that preaches freedom and democracy when in fact our Plutocracy is so greedy that it has to filter every other new flash cartoon or political discussion with the false excuse that we are somehow 'stealing' from them? Who gives them the right to impede progress and international dialog on important issues of human rights or scientific understanding? If someone hasn't by now purchased whatever song it is that takes up 10 seconds of the background music that was originally published in 1974, they are probably not freaking going to!

This has to end!

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Public Request:

I ask all freedom loving peoples everywhere to start doing likewise and protest inappropriately blocked material with bug reports or other means.  Our talk of freedom and free speech means nothing if we simultaneously allow ourselves to be censored by copyright Nazi's like GEMA.  To be clear, I am ***not*** advocating piracy.  But I am advocating that collectively as citizens of this planet we find a way to over throw these idea thwarting, conversation stopping, progress inhibiting, greedy, selfish miscreants who have nothing better to do than interfere in the transmission of facts and new ideas with the ludicrous claim that we are somehow stealing from them!

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Legally Supporting My Stance:

The famous copyrights lawyer Lawrence Lessig gave a great talk on TED about this issue: http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity.html  Ironically GEMA has ALSO blocked the copy of his talk that is mirrored on YouTube.

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Blocking Ideas and Progress:

Historically, lack of, or limited use of, copyrights has correlated with a cultures advancement, not the other way around.

I can attest to this problem in another way as well.  I have had an idea for a film I would much like to make for the purposes of social commentary on many aspects of the current state of the world.  The film would cover various aspects of the intersections between religion, politics, economics, science and popular culture, and is not intended for or motivated by profit.  I think the insights I could provide with this film would be very valuable to many people in society.  But I have not attempted to make this film.

=>

Why not?

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The reason is simple.  In order to express the ideas, I need to make frequent references to, and take quotations from, our pop culture and media landscape.  Even though the work would be an original combination of ideas with my own conclusion, it requires referencing many many small bits of copyrighted material.  Even though I believe I could likely do the film in such a was as to be legally 'Fair Use', that doesn't mean I will not be censored anyway in many parts of even the western world.  This seems to frequently happen to other people.  Why spend a large portion of my time making a film no one will be allowed to watch?  And if a legal battle broke out over the film, even if it was legally 'Fair Use', I could not afford the costs of defending it in court.  Lessig's book 'Free Culture' gives examples of people who were undermined or censored in spite of doing no legal wrong with relation to copyrights simply because they did not have the means to challenge their accusers.

**Edit** => Remix IS the new social language.

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Copyrights in general:

In the film 'Flash of Genius', the true story about the man who invented the windshield whiper, he spends most of his life in court to seek justice.  There is a scene in the court where he is accused of not making anything new because his wiper used existing mechanical parts.  In response he starts to read from 'A Tale of Two Cities'.  He asks if Charles Dickens invented any of the words in the novel, or if he simply combined existing words in a new way.  The answer is of course that he created the novel from existing words, and that likewise people build new things with the parts that are available.  The problem is, in the modern world, trying to use a large majority of the existing parts to create something new is treated as a crime!  (Or at least cause for regional censorship!)

Everything in society is built from, on, or with, something that came before it.  Media is the same way.  The conversations of the present and future, ***require*** free use of the types of media which were exclusively controlled and monopolized in the 20th century by the privileged few.  To prevent use of this material in any form across the board is to prevent the needed social dialog and conversations that are required for the advancement of society.  Further, what good are our claims to freedom and democracy if we let a few rich companies decide what we can say, to whom, and how we are allowed to say it?  How is that any better than the Chinese governments censorship?

Many of the practices and legalities which allowed some of our largest companies to come into existence, including Disney, and even Netflix, are no longer legally options for potential new businesses.   Current copyrights even undermine capitalism.

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Conclusion:

What good are our western claims of freedom if we let a handful of people claim they must block and inhibit our conversations based on the empty claim that: 'our having those conversations' or 'communicating new ideas built upon them' is theft?  Where is the public domain?  Where is free speech?  At what point do we stop letting these people prevent progress and filter our basic human right of international (or local) free speech which is required for social innovation?