Ek Stasis and "flow"

Weather: Cool and crisp outside today... a terrible day to be trapped inside an office. But it is 5 o'clock so I'm off to enjoy a cold beer and some appetizers with my wife.

Listening to: university students moving into their school-year homes.

20) The Law Of Conduits and Content
This law comes in the form of a commandment to divorce content from conduit. The less content a network owns the more content flows through it. If you are a content company, you want your content to travel on all networks, not just your own. If you are a conduit company, you want to carry everyone's content, not restrict yourself to your own. Companies that violate this rule (ATT, AOL Time Warner) tear themselves apart. The dumber the network the more inteilligence it can carry.

- George Gilder - _Telecosm - "The Twenty Laws Of The Telecosm"

I've dedicated a lot of writing in the past to the role of dance in the "rave" culture and how it is linked to the body and the intelligence of the body. Most of it can be found at aliensquad.com's forum or in the archives of the mwraves mailing list at hyperreal.com. But I had a new thought this afternoon...

You used to hear "ravers" talking about losing themselves in the music. Entering the ecstatic state and going numb. Letting the music control their bodies and minds. FOr a long time I thought of this phenomenon as surrendering to the music... the sounds was a message being sent to your body acoustically... physically (the intensity of the bass makes it more than an auditory experience.) I always assumed that in the ecstatic state we become receptive to the subtle information imbedded in the sounds. We stop thinking with our "human brain" and let our older brain react primally to the sound. In this way, we seem to react unconsciously to the music after 4 hours of continuous dancing.

But now, it appears that there is something more interesting going on. A reversal. Under normal listening situations music is content, a message, information. Our ears and bodies are recieving this content acting as a medium for it. We consciously channel that content, or message through our brains, to our limbs. At some point though... at the onset of the ecstatic state, the role is reversed. The music becomes the conduit and our bodies become the message.

You have to understand that the the conduit directs the message... At first we control the message within ourselves. It fills us up and eventually we are enveloped within it. We are contained by the music. Thus it directs our bodies and minds like information streaming along wires.