Setting Players to Zero

At the end of the 1983 film Wargames, the characters outsmart the AI which is intent to destroy them by setting players in the system to the number 0. Forcing the computer to play tic-tac-toe against itself, resulting in a long string of draws, thus forcing the computer to learn the concept of futility and no-win scenarios. This is a brilliant metaphor for thinking outside the box and not being part of a garbage situation which has no good options. Such as military occupations of Afghanistan. Setting players to zero basically means not doing things that are crap. In today's world of fake machine childish asleep robot culture, many "people" do things they don't need to be doing. This can be countered by doing anything as basic as a spring cleaning of a house to as complex as disavowing your corporate fiction straw man name which you are the primary security interest holder for. One example of setting players to zero I've been personally doing as of late is purging social networks.

Less is more. Every additional social network you're a part of takes time and time is your most valuable commodity. No one is going to be in the nursing home saying "man I rocked Facebook that month". They’re going to be on their death bed thinking about all the life-experiences they had, what they personally created, and who they became. A major part of human happiness is being creative by creating. The more time you're promoting, the less time you can create but more on that later. Social networks are like high school yearbook signings. Popularity contests. Most muggle people just use them to try and gain numbers, likes, and followers. They friend you or add you not because they want to re-connect or get to know you fresh, but because they want to +1 a number on their profile. They would be much more mature if they didn't show any numbers and kept those private. The social networks prop this up by always showing the size of someone's network in their profile. Which is totally unnecessary. This is one of the childish aspects of childish asleep robots. Those numbers are void regardless because if one wants to turn to the dark side they can always buy followers which is about as low as you get. Some massive percentage of politicians Twitter followers are fake bots for example. Since all fake things are mirrored back to front, social networks are not social. They're anti-social. Meaning they have little to no connection with real authentic social behaviors of fellowship, friendships, and relationships. These things always happen in the flesh face to face. That's why a social network is best used if it get's you to real meet ups, hence www.meetup.com is the best social network. 

A negative part of externalized hardware technology such as cell phones is this artificial smokescreen on what we’re meant to naturally get in local and small communities. My wife is on zero social networks but has a large network of real people she interacts with due to her patient population in real personal social circles. That is very healthy human behavior. You can be a selfish dumbass and still have quite a few horizontal fair-weather friends though because you like to go out a lot. Since your level of consciousness is mirrored by those who you attract, those types of folks will be surrounded by other wankers such as themselves. In the flesh wearing sunglasses indoors or at night in bars and clubs. This ultimately leads to shorter term shallowness that's wide and broad but at least they've left the keyboard. What's even less healthy is spending all your time at the keyboard and never really leaving the house. Or if you do leave the house you're a coffee shop troll who's still at the keyboard not socializing with other folks in the room. So why even be there in the first place?

I recently went to a street photography workshop at the Leica store in San Francisco in an attempt to meet some more local street photographers in the Bay Area. In the flesh. The majority of photographers had some kind of high-end rangefinder camera. Rangefinders are great to see, regardless of brand. However, when it came to sharing the results of everyone's work, I came to realize that nearly everyone there was on Instagram. This is like driving around in an Austin Martin and going home to park it in a homogenized cookie cutter suburban town home neighbored across the street from a 7-11 and gas station with bulletproof glass. Instagram is beyond fucking rubbish. Retro style is fine but the layout sucks and the tiny square aspect image frames are just terrible. Sadly, tones of youngsters are on Instagram at the moment because muggles love staring down at the app based phone world. #LookUp. On other photographic social fronts, two of the main social networks I've purged are Flickr and 500px. Flickr is dying because all things Yahoo! are luke warm at best, 500px is beautiful but I ultimately had to ask myself, "how much time am I putting into this and what am I really getting back?” It became another weight in a series of small things which all added up. So purging things digitally can be as important as purging the physical aspects of your life as well with the final goal being to live in a tiny house. With the ultimate goal being a zen samurai on the path.

On a final side note, I do totally acknowledge social networks are where all the muggles as well as some amount of B+ to A- at best humans are. Including awful Facebook and Instagram. As a human who wants to try and connect to others and reach out to larger groups of fellow excellent humans, I understand and realize social networks can be a valuable tool to help facilitate that process. If done consciously as a tool in lite moderation to meet other kindred spirits on your same wavelength in a vertical relationship or to promote your cottage industry. Everyone wants eyes on what they create. I'm no exception and realize the power of having others follow your work. Sadly, many who have "success" with large social network followers then turn around and use their social networks to make money of their followers. Which is fine if the content is worthy and that's how some independent small business owners and operators need to function in our current state of post-truth capitalism. Trying to be an independent operator in the current Gen X internet tech world means becoming your own promoter and socials are some what required to fufill this. So I set players to mostly zero and still play the game a bit on a few anti-social networks.