the idea of light

“I am a mirage that perceives itself.”

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/play.html?pg=3

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
  – Thomas Jefferson

I was thinking that there are 3 overt actions you perform online: 1) click on a link 2) search 3) email. Now all 3 actions have as a by-product (ideally unobtrusive) ads that invite you to become a consumer of something. This filling in of the internet with a commercial overlay that works without alienating potential customers, or I should say creating customers out of everyone, where before there were only surfers, is probably on par with the invention of goddamn electricity.
And the reason it works is the targeting: intelligent ads. In fact I think a new word is needed. An ad was something that bugged me unless I needed the product, in which case it aided my decision. There is an organic quality (jargon I know!) to these chunks of info that *probably* have some connection to me based on one of my 3 basic activities listed above.
It feels like walking through dense forest and having fruit present itself as I go. It may not all be ripe or edible but it does not obstruct my way and some of it is perfect for me, or may be when it ripens. Before there was a new jungle, interesting and overwhelming. That is still there, but now there’s sustenance too…surf-fruit? Net-fruit?

At 11 AM he is sipping red wine and smoking a cigarette. His salad comes. Of course he’s speaking French. Beer at 11 is Australian. Red wine before noon is French.

We invited our buddy R to stop by our place any time. But he mentioned to Dian how awkward he’d feel explaining to the ‘guards’ at the Jayakarta front gate that his friends lived at Jayakarta and that he’d like to pop by. That really, he’s not a terrorist and really, even though he owns next-to-nothing, that he won’t go snooping around and violate the sacred space of the people with white skin.
I thought for about a second that maybe giving him a note from me would get him ‘in’ — of course it’s crazy, how demeaning. Maybe I’ll write a note and silkscreen it on to T-shirts and give them away to all my Indonesian buddies from the beach.