0: Worlding
Chapter4 Effervescent Under the Daylight
06:56 AM London October 2019
Early in the morning Ephemeral gets up. He is mysterious. He has no apparent family, he never talks about himself, and he is expert at endlessly coding. He never leaves his apartment since we went sightseeing together seven months ago. He never goes to work or school, the only thing he does is coding and ordering food delivery. He wears vintage clothing, the hipster uniform of skinny jeans and thick rimmed glasses. Nobody knows where his money comes from, whether he has any friends other than me. He's a homebody with an obscure past. “Quiet people always know more than they seem. Although very normal, their inner world is by default fronted mysterious and therefore assumed weird. Never underestimate the social awareness and sense of reality in a quiet person; they are some of the most observant, absorbent persons of all.”42
“Well, I'm going to tell you something about my life,” Ephemeral interrupted my thoughts as the door clicks shut behind him. “You were never curious about that before.”
“I value your privacy.” I looked at him roughly, replying with a casual air.
“At least let me tell you what I do. As you see I’m a coder. Five years ago, I was a geek when I was doing A Levels, and one day I got an anonymous invitation in my mailbox.” He put it up on his screen:
Hey, since you meet the Rhizome criteria,
we would love for you to join our network and community
Rhizome006
Please join our telegram!
https://t.me/joinchat/Plu-Rhizome YVBapzKMIr0mYnQ64G
Once inside our chat please familiarize yourself
with the info shared in DG google doc
follow the link in group description.
Ask any Q’s + Please do say Hi, intro yourself and enjoy!
we would love for you to join our network and community
Rhizome006
Please join our telegram!
https://t.me/joinchat/Plu-Rhizome YVBapzKMIr0mYnQ64G
Once inside our chat please familiarize yourself
with the info shared in DG google doc
follow the link in group description.
Ask any Q’s + Please do say Hi, intro yourself and enjoy!
“After I join the Telegram group, I find out that Rhizome006 is a decentralized, exclusive 24/7 international programmer collective.” He said this in a voice as innocent as mine. Deleuze and Guattari use the terms “rhizome” and “rhizomatic” to describe phenomena that allow for multiple, nonhierarchical entry and exit points in terms of representation and interpretation.43 Rhizome006 represented the concept of many online and offline communities44 where users simultaneously exist as an anarchic, digitized global brain.45
“Now you must be an alpha geek.” I said, and asked to satisfy my curiosity, “Is this what you do for a living?” “Basically, yes. People think I’m a NEET. 46
Actually I worked and became financially independent when I was seventeen. But independence is an attitude rather than a state of living alone.” He giggled as he answered. “But to be very honest, I don’t know who posts jobs in our group chat every day. The programming language we use, called Effervescent, 47 is very different – it works without grammatical rules or a unique set of keywords. It even doesn’t have a syntax for organizing program instructions. Effervescent is kind of formula translation. The most similar language is Fortran48, but Effervescent is very advanced, using a kind of a causal connecting principle, 49 I would say. It’s a long story. Anyway, I enjoy coding – it’s the meaning of my life, and I get paid well.”
“So, the logic is more synchronicity than causality50? But what kind of projects is this language used for?” I wasn’t expecting humans to have already developed a decentralized non-causal language ten years ago.
“I don’t think we have specific tasks. Rhizome006 has no leadership, no action can be attributed to the membership as a whole. The programming logic is connection and heterogeneity – ‘...any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other and must be’. 51 Our instructions are always vague. I feel like I’m communicating instructions to an intelligence instead of a machine. Plus, Effervescent is a realtime, live language that is constant circulating. But it decays across platforms through each copy and transfer. Every programmer works on different terminals and each terminal can influence the system—”
“Excuse me for interrupting, but do you mean the language is alive? A living organism interacting with terminal operators? Continuously regenerating the network of processes through interactions, like Gaia52!” I get overexcited.
“Which Gaia? You mean the Gaia hypothesis by Lovelock?” asked Ephemeral.
“Certainly! Have you ever considered the language like autopoiesis53? Even if there is no coder or terminal, it can still reproduce and maintain by itself? It’s not only a language, but also a new digital culture, ‘a space of no return54, a free-flowing system of circulation that circumscribes and influences everything. 55”
“Very interesting. I think the terminal is the trigger, not sure if it reproduces without the user. I would try to write a terminal emulator see if I can hack into the database management system. It might take years, though; they’ve got the best detection and prevention systems that I have ever seen.” He looks at the ground, and he starts mumbling, as if lost in thought, “To some extent we are similar, we don’t see the world, but we perceive it in another format.” Then, to me, “Do you think the new aesthetic of humans could be transcendental, a judgement detached from visual phenomena?”
“We live in the present,” I answered. “Let the leap adapt to environment.”
42 Quote from Criss Jami, Healology, internet source from goodreads
43 Rhizome as a philosophical concept was developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972–1980) project. It is what Deleuze calls an "image of thought", based on the botanical rhizome, that apprehends multiplicities.
44 Landers, Chris (April 2, 2008). "Serious Business: Anonymous Takes On Scientology (and Doesn't Afraid of Anything)". Baltimore City Paper. Archived from the original on June 8, 2008. Retrieved July 3, 2008
45 Oltsik, Jon (December 3, 2013). "Edward Snowden Beyond Data Security". Network World. Retrieved December 4, 2013
46 NEET, an acronym for "Not in Education, Employment, or Training", refers to a person who is unemployed and not receiving an education or vocational training. The classification originated in the United Kingdom in the late 1990s.
47 The name of the programming language ephemeral use. According to Collins dictionary, effervescent in British English means 1. (of a liquid) giving off bubbles of gas; bubbling 2. high-spirited; vivacious.
48 Fortran (/ˈfɔːrtræn/; formerly FORTRAN, derived from Formula Translation) is a general-purpose, compiled imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing, originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, FORTRAN came to subsequently dominate scientific computing.
49 meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved. Jung, Carl G. [1951] 2005. "Synchronicity." Pp. 91–98 in Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal, edited by R. Main. London: Taylor & Francis
50 referred to as causation, or cause and effect
51 Deleuze and Guattari introduce A Thousand Plateaus by outlining the concept of the rhizome (quoted from A Thousand Plateaus): 1 and 2. Principles of connection and heterogeneity. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1980. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 2 vols. 1972-1980. Trans. of Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ISBN 0-8264-7694-5.
52 The Gaia Paradigm or hypothesis was formulated by the chemist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. Lovelock named the idea after Gaia, the primordial goddess who personified the Earth in Greek mythology. This hypothesis proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and selfregulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet
53 Autopoiesis is a Greek term refers to a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself. The original definition can be found in the 1972 publication Autopoiesis and Cognition.
54 Aikens & Fletcher 2014, p. 8
55 Originally from Too much world: A Hito Steyerl retrospective, June 12, 2015:[We] have long since entered into a new paradigm – a space of no return – a free-flowing system of ‘circulation’ that circumscribes and influences everything from the government to love.
43 Rhizome as a philosophical concept was developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972–1980) project. It is what Deleuze calls an "image of thought", based on the botanical rhizome, that apprehends multiplicities.
44 Landers, Chris (April 2, 2008). "Serious Business: Anonymous Takes On Scientology (and Doesn't Afraid of Anything)". Baltimore City Paper. Archived from the original on June 8, 2008. Retrieved July 3, 2008
45 Oltsik, Jon (December 3, 2013). "Edward Snowden Beyond Data Security". Network World. Retrieved December 4, 2013
46 NEET, an acronym for "Not in Education, Employment, or Training", refers to a person who is unemployed and not receiving an education or vocational training. The classification originated in the United Kingdom in the late 1990s.
47 The name of the programming language ephemeral use. According to Collins dictionary, effervescent in British English means 1. (of a liquid) giving off bubbles of gas; bubbling 2. high-spirited; vivacious.
48 Fortran (/ˈfɔːrtræn/; formerly FORTRAN, derived from Formula Translation) is a general-purpose, compiled imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing, originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, FORTRAN came to subsequently dominate scientific computing.
49 meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved. Jung, Carl G. [1951] 2005. "Synchronicity." Pp. 91–98 in Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal, edited by R. Main. London: Taylor & Francis
50 referred to as causation, or cause and effect
51 Deleuze and Guattari introduce A Thousand Plateaus by outlining the concept of the rhizome (quoted from A Thousand Plateaus): 1 and 2. Principles of connection and heterogeneity. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1980. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 2 vols. 1972-1980. Trans. of Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ISBN 0-8264-7694-5.
52 The Gaia Paradigm or hypothesis was formulated by the chemist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. Lovelock named the idea after Gaia, the primordial goddess who personified the Earth in Greek mythology. This hypothesis proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and selfregulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet
53 Autopoiesis is a Greek term refers to a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself. The original definition can be found in the 1972 publication Autopoiesis and Cognition.
54 Aikens & Fletcher 2014, p. 8
55 Originally from Too much world: A Hito Steyerl retrospective, June 12, 2015:[We] have long since entered into a new paradigm – a space of no return – a free-flowing system of ‘circulation’ that circumscribes and influences everything from the government to love.