Technology and language are constantly in motion and these days that motion feels set on hyperspeed. But more than velocity is at play in this time of maxxed out actions. In a world where we are at the post-everything level, the "xx" of maxxing, any maxxing at all, tells us about more than small trends. These are in fact tiny, micro trends that populate the landscape of an entirely new epoch. Let's divve into it.

Language is a system and it's the system that helps us relate. Language helps us relate to people and to machines. In this particular age we are in the remix language era. We remix as hybrid ethnic groups, such as those of us who speak Spanglish or Hinglish. We remix as those who code or vibe code everything from family vacation spreadsheets to personalized ear bud controls. We literally switch language upon language and remix them along cultural and technological weaves. We are our linguistic tapestries. How we use these remixing capabilities alone and as trending groups gives us a sense of controlling our desire to control our unique slivers of the world.

Ground control to avatar — Planetary Cognixxion

In the Design Science Studio we hosted visionary Bruce Clarke. Bruce, aka Bruno Clarke, once played at Woodstock, as a member of a beloved and intentionally hokey band, Sha Na Na before he went on to earn a PhD. Bruce is now a leader at Gaian Systems, a transdisciplinary research project dedicated to cultivating new forms and practices of planetary cognition.

There's nothing like observing as one person's life arcs along with history, its travels illustrating for us the profound capacities of human fluidity.

From hard wired coding and punch cards to vibe coding, one lifetime illustrates the Woodstock generation and its dissolution into the post-everything era. From the height of physicality to the first flush of virtual, ephemeral landscapes, Bruce Clarke asks us to think like a living planet, to think outward and outward until we get to the bios in the sphere, deep into the atmos that is part of our DNA. Basically Bruce's work asks us to go go into the Gaian model. GGaia!

Maybe what I am saying is too freeform. So go think like a mountain.

The first steps and babbles of cybernetics was in relationship to Gaian theory. Bruce Clarke has now authored a few books on this using his academic training. In Zoom, this unassuming academic doesn't give away much of his leather-jacket wearing days. What he does give away, thankfully, at least in this post, is the story behind Gaia theory; how it came together and spread — through connections, relationships. The counter-culture is alive!

We are at an interesting time in history where our computers, our machines, might be the last ones to point us to how incredible our lives are in the context of biological systems.

As we move towards synthetic intelligence and synthetic landscapes we are at a particularly sensitive moment, one that has lots of potential. We can forget our biological for our technological OR we can seek to integrate these two parts of our new, post-everything beings.

We might even be at an intersection of maxx culture, a place in time where this technology and the culture that came with it, begin to become one. This might be evolution in open, expressed by remixes and recuts times xx.

The old and the new, the directly related and the personally relevant, the logically integral to the seemingly tangential are intersecting into actual structures, into novel scaffolds.

Bruce is part of that novel scaffold, a shape-shifter who went from the heights of pop culture participation to discernment refined through academic method. Bruce is another example, and a fine one, of living bridges. As individual stories these are illustrations of where we are, and potential signposts of what history might notice.

Bruce is another code switch patch in a world where paths are less linear than they were. Part of that loss in the linear is troubling but some of it is exciting. Does something in your own life or family encompass that arc?

Yea Dear, you're part of this too, xx. ?? !!

Over ten years ago I noticed that our slang was going faster. I noticed it and some of you did too. Aunties and cool teenagers might language maxx differently but the movement, the flexibility of language and technology arc that brings us closer together than we realize, that pops in our own lives.

I noticed it in New York City and in the way my nieces in the suburbs were using our old slang but better, or shorter. I liked that linguistic remix and I still do. I like that we are building the new world together, that you and me and all of us are part of an emergence. We are the living experiences, the quick smiles and looks of recognition as we touch virtual grass and biological grass together. We are the first generations that can hold them both at the same time. We are mixed media humans.

Remix in music, as we know it today, started around the time of Woodstock, just after during and around it, because the technology of remix was ready. The tape machines and the mixers, the actual machines were easy enough to splice and dice sounds. It was slow by our standards today but it was fast as compared to all that history before it.

The recording, the sampling all of it was about to get going. The message boards between university computers, that was also emergent back in the day. From a time where the Apollo rocket guidance system was the leading edge to a time when AI bots can send your emails for you, the age is linked by computing.

On the streets, the young were alive with remix, with leftover vinyl and with turntables that would soon go from luxury to hackable machine. People, and their technology were ready and so remix emerged in the laboratories of real life, of youth and music and creativity.

Remix also started by the copy and paste of code. Together they led us to the maxxed out time. We are post-human, post-perfect. We are the digital moment when even remix material is a mix of a mix. It makes sense we are in a maxx moment. X might mark the spot, but a double marks relationship. Foodmaxxing means more than eating food, it means your are hacking that food, double-dutying that nutrition source, and that is already a lingo your ancestors from not too long ago would not understand. Termination of a system is no fun, patching it to the next system is how we go past this time.

Peak language, Meet Peak times? Wait, are you related?

We are post all the marks of the past limitations and so in sneaky places we double a letter to give emphasis. It's a mark of global cultural cohesion amidst every unique and individually hybrid amalgam of identities, expressions and ways of being. Can I get an Amen (break)?

We are maxx human at the edge of transhuman dawning. We are performing command and control with language and with settings inside existing systems. We are doing it naturally as digital natives, from the arc of today's grandparents to our babies.

The longer we stay on this horizon, the one that arcs these eras together, the more post-everything this game gets and the more intense our personal responsibility is.

If you feel it like me, that your privacy and your efficacy in the world is hitting cyborg levels, like you manage a self and a device-self, and that you need better systems to be your best self, then you might be in the land of the maxx, and maxx self care.

This is the horizon where your central command decides on the value of every single major relationship. Earth is the system, and the question is, are you connected? And how are you maintaining connection? What is your formula?

I'm working on that today. I'll be vibe coding something new to share with you all.

LINKS? Yess.

WATCH — Bruce and Donna Haraway in conversation! It's above and here — Let me know if you watch this and let's pick up the conversation and take it somewhere new!

AND PS — send me your grandmas or sign up yourselves (ladies only sorry!). If you come to my Conscious Computing Basics — Presentations class as a Medium reader I will be sure to set aside time for us to discuss whatever cyber topic you would like, but you have to do the exercises and help everyone else make slides, too :) deal? deal!

Thanks to Roxi Shohadaee for curating visionaries for our Design Science Decade, and thanks to Bruce. Visit his website to learn more about the unfolding horizzon of cybernetics.

Buy me coffee? Thank you.