Riding Your ONTOition

When we create things, they have impact. For the most part, that impact is immediate and local. But when we can foresee what the culture needs to experience before it demands it, we are innovators. David Milch, a very curious ONTO, broke many fans hearts when he seemed to stand by and let his last HBO creation, Deadwood, fade into reruns after three of four promised seasons. Now he's back and just as he did with NYPD Blue and Deadwood Milch takes us into an unknown world. This time, he had the unenviable challenge of following the final episode of The Sopranos, written by another mysterian, David Chase. With John From Cincinnati, Milch confronts the culture's existential angst through the struggles of three generations of surfing prodigies and the dysfunctional world within and around them. Milch's innovation? He inserts a stranger, "John" into the mix, to serve as a pebble in the pond of this collection of misfits, has beens, addicts and vultures. The show is not about claiming the moral high ground or wallowing in it's valley. It's about riding the waves inbetween. Milch writes John From Cincinnati from inside the ONTO perspective of each of the characters and creates a tapestry that allows all the other domains to surfaces and join in; like life.

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Our PHYLO-IQ

Maybe the Caveman on the Geiko commercial is right to be upset. After all, when pop culture gets to call you dumb, that's a bold statement to absorb. After all, this is a country that has an Easy Button for Christ's sake!!! We have reached the point where mocking our own desire for "The Simple Life" has gotten out of control. We celebrate being 'smarter than a 5th grader' and continue to paint anything intellectual as elitist and disconnected from the mainstream. It's more important to have street cred than real cred. More people know about Rosie, Paris, Britney, Lindsay and Nicole than any five 2008 Presidential candidates. We just televised the National Spelling Bee, but the interest was more about being voyeurs into the freakish world of the gifted and talented. It's not like we're trading in our spell checker (you'll have to kill me).

More and more we want the Tom-Tom to tell us where to go, rather than learning the streets of a new town. As this generation of PHYLO's rise to power, leadership has been challenged by the group think of the reality show video diary. We all get dissed, flamed, fronted and checked by the 'posse mentality'. Borat and Jackass get laughs because they put our primal instincts on a pedestal. News flash, that stuff will be funny 2000 years from now. If I'm back in flesh, I'll laugh then too. But if we're going to develop our potential as human beings, we need to understand that the PHYLO-IQ is more about cultivating social intelligence. To graduate from egocentric to enthocentric to a more worldcentric view we need to start seeing smart, creative and innovative behavior away from the classroom.

We've continued to connect cognitive development to it's literal core even when the culture went from stressing a lexicoded approach to a more opticoded one. It's been a bait and switch on ourselves and the first casuality on that conflicted position has been our natural affinities. In that sense, we're all somatic savants. The key thing to do from here is not waste all this shared intelligence waiting those elusive five minutes for Wapner. Then, as now, K-Mart still sucks!

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For more on the movie, Idiocracy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

EXO-Podding

For EXO's, the novelty wears off almost on contact. The luster of the material world is fleeting for most of us, but EXO's draws their support from the objects they use. So a shiny new object is a prized and valued member of that community. But unlike the sentimental PHYLO, who will instill the most obscure object with value because of the significance they assign it, or the possessive ONTO who will leverage the value others assign something to determine what it's worth is to them, an EXO is more utilitarian about what they own, new or old. It's the fickle ECO that will open a birthday or holiday gift with glee, and a few hours later will feel no juice at all from the now digested experience. EXO's like the next-best thing simply because it's next-best thing. So when you see how short and intense product cycles are in technology for software storage, security systems and other more 'staple' stuff like that, it's not a market driven thing, we have a functional idea already.

No, all this new and improved frenzy is the work of EXO's who have jumped from surfing to blogging to texting, to bluetoothing and now to this podding world that the i-phone is advancing. We've gone from dot com to wireless in less than 10 years. What kind of cell phone did you have in 1997? Now we've seen the rapid merging of cable TV, telephone, music, internet, and entertainment. Combine all that with GPS navigation and cameras and we have created the ultimate cultural Swiss Army knife. So who goes first when this thing debuts later this month for ~$600 or so? It'll be the EXO's, closely followed by the joyrushed ECO's, who will blab to the social mirroring PHYLO's, who will then pay the ONTO's to get it off eBay by Christmas time, just about when the 'upgraded version' hits the street.

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If you can't wait to be an i-Phone hater, take a look at the flaws people are predicting it'll have:


What Will Suck about the i-Phone?
http://letters.salon.com/tech/machinist/blog/2007/06/08/iphone_problems/view/?show=all

ECO Stillness

The emerging moment that exists when we link stimulus and response becomes meaningful or meaningless. While the other domains focus on the meaningful ones for a variety of reasons,ECO's tend to sort for the spaces between the notes, the breaks in the action, the pregnantpauses, the so-called awkward moments. It's there that irony, contrast and depth make their presence known, which then allows the next moment to mean more than if we had to carry the meaning of the previous forward without that discontinuity. When people tell you to literally, 'give them a break', they are craving that 'ECOspace' where life can swing away from humanity and return to nature, to the context it takes place in. It's in that emptying void that the empathic ECO tunes into the unseen, unspoken vibrations, which helps them build up a tremendous amount of emotional intelligence as they develop. It's what used to be known as 'paraconscious' awareness, a so-called peripheral inner vision, that cued the ECO to step back and let their body sense what their mind filters out. Everyone else stays with what's perceived.

You could call it a disbelief system or just chalk it up to a healthy bs meter, either way, the ECO knows that a vacation happens every time we relax, exhale and release our hold on the world. That melting process, which Thomas Hanna called accommodation, is oddly when we let the sensory input register in us as a gut reaction or visceral experience. ECO's seek that limbo in order to 'invite', or let life in, so they can merge with their surroundings more accurately. It's a very noisy process to give up our entrained tendency to control our environment, exert our will, let the world come to us, so most ECO's function in a realm of self-reflection where the mirror can be quite turbulent. So while the ECO may have invented the concept of chillaxing, which the Urban Dictionary defines as a fusion, in equal parts, of chilling and relaxing. So the key to tuning into the ECO domain is not about the act of doing nothing so much as it's feeling the impulse to do less. As our friend Tony struggled with depression, panic attacks, and bouts of restlessness throughout the arc of the series, it was the delay between perception and action that plagued him most. That's when too much or too little meaning can make life rough. It's in finding that dynamic stillness between that builds coherence.

For Tony, that rhythmic and relentless message meant going deeper into the darkness than any light could follow him. ECO's are guided by pathos, which brings a mixed bag of emotions with it that most of us would sooner avoid experiencing, even if it meant we'd be closer to the truth.

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For a quick Soprano's tutorial, this clip covers seasons 1-6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz_Ees_-kE4

As we approach the final episode, this article turns the self-reflection to us: http://tinyurl.com/2mytuu