EXCERPT FROM FUTURE SHOCK (1971, p. 17) TOFFLER, ALVIN.
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To understand what is happening to us as we move into the age of super-industrialism, we must analyze the processes of acceleration and confront the concept of transience. If acceleration is a new social force, transience is its psychological counterpart, and without an understanding of the role it plays in contemporary human behavior, all our theories of personality, all our psychology, must remain pre-modern. Psychology without the concept of transience cannot take account of precisely those phenomena that are peculiarly contemporary.
The concept of transience really is something my military upbringing + total number of life moves (like 50+, no joke) forces me to identify with. In a strange sort of way, a website and/or web-presence represents a new type of existence that is my current ‘being’. As long as I chose to maintain it, i can be found in the same location– It’s weird how the disembodiment offered by the internet offers a more true reality in certain ways— inner space manifest.
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…Rhizome is the skin in which we now live, the horizontal underground stem of organic rootlessness. It is a system that encourages trespass into perpetually reconfigured digital territories. Signifiers that have eroded in real life, revivify in these kinds of networks, perhaps to reconcile the erasure. In this space we have become stationary nomads, wandering a non-delineated global universe seeking not closure, but rather expanded aperture, tolerance and connectivity.
full text from Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Speech at the Rhizome Benefit (2008) available