Sekhmet Hypothesis

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"A study of the solar cycles at NASA's Spaceweather web site gives us the following correlation of youth culture to the cycles:

May 1967 - Hippie culture took off one year before solar maximum. January 1977 - Punk culture took off two and a half years before solar maximum. May 1988 - Rave culture took off one and a half years before solar maximum. ''1999 - playful hostile strength culture surfaces (via late gabber, The Matrix, flowering of Lee MacQueen, etc), prior to maximum. But interestingly no actual massive youth archetype takes off."'' - http://website.lineone.net/~iainsp/introd.html

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I've been thinking about the Sekhmet hypothesis a fair amount as of late and had some inclnation to share these thoughts on the subject. Firstly, I fail to see a lack of a "Stormer" generation post-1999 - there is a militant mentality undeniably installed in the collective around this point. No it's not just the Matrix or the rise of first person shooters to a new height in popularity, but shit - who wasn't a space marine ninja starship pilot in their fantasy entertainment lives in in this decade? The rise in popularity of anime and the it's decline in quality saw to that. Ghost in the Shell became strictly about police work and counter-terrorism. Even comics found Superheros working for the government and visiting the president in a shallow pandering to battle children's apathy and disdain with their government.

In fact, I want to believe Doom (1993) and even Aliens (Released 1986, near the end of a Punk cycle) heralded the ever-present archetype of the solar cycle which began in 1999 in the form of the Space Marine - Halo's (2001) popularity surely points in this direction as does Gears of War (2006). Multiple American wars result in a co-opting of all forms of media, espically video games, which are first | published by the army overtly and | then covertly to further their agenda to mask virtual training as entertainment. Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) is the end of this trend's pinnacle in game form alongside the end of the decade. In the 00's the internet proceeds to lose it's 90's luster of a free network in favor of cyberwarfare agenda. It's clear the military contractors pull the strings here. Even reactionary politics and counter-culture take on their militant "Stormer" training - a dark, one-man-army sort of slant.

Just look at the rise in right-wing conspiracy doomsday culture and belief systems as they are re-contextualized into pop-culture. America is set on a paranoid edge between 1999 and 2010 starting with Y2K bug paranoia. Citizens are resentful of their deceitful and underhanded government - distrust is the only consensus. Australia and Britain struggle with their emerging police states: a total surveillance panopticon. The seeds were planted for this here too after 9/11 and have steadily flowered into our current oppressive regime which turns a blind eye to their international violence, imperialism and corporate dominance - domestic monitoring efforts are the only place left to go. The governments of the world obviously eye us with equal suspicion. The only reactionary move left to take here maybe a retreat to pacifism. The "Stormer" military ethic finally takes off in the form of Anonymous and Lulzsec as the decade dies though. Certainly this is a self-militarizing reaction to such obviously oppressive forms of government. During the decade underground music trends give rise to a nu-violence: IDM becomes Breakcore and we see a resurgence of Noise unparalleled since the 80's. Eventually we find ourselves with the remnants of Goth and industrial dance music being reborn in the form of Witchhouse. The Emo and Hipster crowd have co-opted a thrift store form of punk style, stealing a sort of lazy carelessness and love of flannel inherited from their predecessors in Grunge. The rise of pharmaceuticals and methamphetamine during this decade seems on par with the "Stormers" generation. Even popular sedative drugs had fallen under the control of the corporate masters. Everything was a delusion-ridden and fearful game of control, stealth, paranoia. Mostly uncreative television and movies dominated the decade - an abundance of media the result of a handful of corporate interest will usually turn out that way, much of these on-screen abortions are written by companies in direct contact with covert military Psy-ops post 9/11. | The Army insist on participation in it's depictions in Hollywood and has more than likely extended this self-invite into most forms of media. The protest in Egypt were fueled by an internet clamp down and resulted in removal their local tyrant. The London riots and BART ops were fueled by social media. The previous riots in Oakland were a spectacle across the internet. The occupation of wall street and BART point anonymous toward a non-violent direction, possibly showing the attitude of the coming decade, while the London riots exemplify the Stormer influence. We were definitely stormers by the end of the decade, if only out of necessity: our protest had been squashed by countless new "non-violent" crowd controls means which continue to blur the line between the police and army, reality and sci-fi.

Two points must be made here. Firstly, there is no clean cut separation when studying trends, they move in sinewave gradients across temporality, not on/off switches, the influence of one cycle feeds into another. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly these trends are not limited to pop culture - this is a merely an indicator of the rhythm and a partial picture of the tone for each stage. This being said, there may be a technological map that falls in line with these cultural shifts. Let's think of it in these terms, during the softer, "Hippy" polarity of these changes in the Sekhmet cycle we innovate new technologies, during the Punk-esque eras, we refine them.

Let's start with 1944 - we innovate for war on a massive scale, industry and R&D rule the American way of life to fuel our fall from national sovereignty. During the next 11 years we invent the atom bomb, Roswell fuels our sci-fi speculation, new airplanes, guns, radars and better submarines. IBM designed their IBM card format in 1928 (another age of refinement, the concept of the punchcard stems from sometime around 1725) but in this decade it sells both sides of the war the punch card computer, | Nazis proceed to use it to index their interment camps. This is all rather dreary and almost stormer like, but there's a unity and one-ness reminiscent of the hippy's behind the scenes. United in a war, even women goto the factories for the first time to do their part and toil for the machine - we ration and conserve, we're unified against common enemies, even the "Axis of Evil" feels this way amongst themselves to some degree. Japan doesn't want to be Americanized - they are happy in their semi-rural lifestyle still coming off the harsh shift from Shogun and Samurai ages - they see the wreckage the Industrial Age is bringing. Weird science triumphs in this atmosphere - Borderlands sciences is founded by Meade Layne, the Philadelphia experiment occurs in 1943 to herald this age. UFOs take flight in the mind for the first time - 1938's War of the World's broadcast prepped us for Roswell. Far stretched speculative science in comics is just about every hero's origin story. The Flash gets a series again in 1959 for instance. Intelligence agencies give us the gift of the next storage medium as magnetic tape was first used to record computer data in 1951. We begin to see an optimist future, technologically augmented and dominated. LSD was first synthesized in 1938 but in 1947 it is sold as "Delysid" for various psychiatric uses. Bombs in the brain with bright flashes of the future lead us into the 50's.

Flash forward to 1955, era of technological refinement, pre-punk-esque era. James Dean's career is picking up. Somewhere toward the end of this cycle Hunter S. Thompson is riding with the Hell's Angel seeking material he can use for a book he will publish somewhere around 1965. We're being told we'll have flying cars that drive themselves and if we tire of them we can take out jetpack to work while the robot maid cleans up the house and auto-cooks the roast with one of those next gen microwaves. We still don't have the Jetson's utopic home in the sky 50+ years later. But all the while IBM leadership is stepping down in 1956 and the son seems to lead the company aimlessly until the early 60's when they receive a NASA contract. FORTRAN is invented this in era but won't really matter to most people for years to come. I want to propose the lowpoint of technology here may fall somewhere in the 1955 - 1966 range. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was formed on July 29, 1958 but it wasn't until 1965 that we had the Gemini 3 and we didn't (supposedly) land on the moon until 1969, 3 years into the next cycle and alongside the rise of the atavistic Hippy culture. Stephen Hawkings receive his BA in 1964 but it's not until 1972 that the accolades start rolling in. By this time Thompson is working on his 2nd Fear and Loathing title, a Stormer-esque re-interpretation of the dying Hippy culture alongside Nixon's re-election. His influences from the cold beatniks of a different era surely left him a punk amidst a culture of psychedelia and this gives him a unique voice in the crowd. It's a slow haul toward a new cultural expression in the first atavistic youth movement.

By the end of the eleven year period starting in 1966 it was clear things had changed. On the technology end of things, Apple was established on April 1, 1976 - they would help usher in the era of personal computing alongside Altair and gaming consoles/computers such as Atari and Commodore 64. Prior to this we see the rise of psychedehlic drugs, civil rights, dreams of space travel and colonization, a war to unite against, a draft to dodge, novel concepts in physics which fuel the rest of the century's understanding. Change is afoot, television will be color, it's the same sort of paradigm shift from radio's audio broadcast to television's Audio visual stimulation:

''Although introduced in the U.S. in 1953, only a few years after black-and-white televisions had been standardized there, high prices and lack of broadcast material greatly slowed its acceptance in the marketplace. Although the first colorcast being the Rose Parade occurred in January of that year, it was not until the late 1960s that color sets started selling in large numbers, due in some part to the introduction of GE's Porta-Color set in the Spring of 1966 along with the first all-color primetime season beginning that fall.'' - https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Color_television

A new bandwidth is opened in terms of remote experience and meshed with it's environment of volatility and drugs, it reacts in faded neon hallucinatory fashion trends. We see a reemergence of occult titles in publication and people are actually stimulated to care, this is the innovation against our abundant 1950's repression in so many ways. I believe that possibly our magickal understanding gets retooled in the same manners as culture and technology alongside these cycles. The 1960's recaptured the works of the turn of the century breakthroughs of occult orders like the Golden Dawn, the O.T.O., The Fraternias Saturnian, and various groups claiming the Rose Cross as their legacy. The mere immortalization through preservation of these text and beliefs is key for future cycles along these lines. Kook Science turns radionics and radiaesthia into psionics, just art on paper - "Who needs a black box when you have hash, mescaline and a paper schematic?" Jack Kirby starts flipping lids with his "New Gods" title in 1971 to keep pace with the changing world. The sentiment seemed to be let's actually get some of this awesome space tech, let's colonize mars, the environment here is doomed anyways, there's a mystical narrative to science as a savior and we follow this impulse roughly as a collective during the 66-77 era.

1977 rolls around and we're post-Nixon, television should be light-hearted with sensible folk and drab, realistic colors. Culture retreats into indulgence with cocaine and disco. Reagan and Bush Sr. will find their way into office, we will love Wall Street, cigars and fast cars with loose women who have poofy hair soon. Punk emerges too, takes a bit longer to find American roots being a British native. Apple doesn't get a GUI computer out until 1983 and it's a failure when next year's model triumph's with a lower price tag and awesomely oppressive superbowl ad for the Mac II. A GUI had been in the work for several years at this point and was pieced together from some level of technology stolen off Xerox. Jobs is forced to resign in 1985. The company needs a more solid ground and they falter for quite sometime. DOS isn't invented by Gates but bought by him and released in 1981:

"Tim Paterson had developed a variant of CP/M-80, intended as an internal product for testing SCP's new 16-bit Intel 8086 CPU card for the S-100 bus. The system was initially named "QDOS" (Quick and Dirty Operating System), before being made commercially available as 86-DOS. Microsoft purchased 86-DOS, allegedly for $50,000. This became Microsoft Disk Operating System, MS-DOS, introduced in 1981." - https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/DOS

Innovation wasn't being rewarded, crafty underhanded business tactics drove industry everywhere and Reagan smiled an oblivious grin and deemed it his doctrine of corporate prosperity.

Punk thrives because we have a reason to be angry at this bummer of a dingy world. Manuel Noriega, Pablo Escabar, Oliver North, Margret Thatcher, Illegal gun trades, VX nerve Gas attacks, Hostage situations, Atomic tensions with communist. Punk it's self has ties to the Beatniks of the Late 50's early 60's period of low technology innovation and grim subcultural movements. The beatniks were the surrealist's children, grounded by circumstance and they fit right in with where the punks found themselves. William S. Burroughs' exaltation in the punk community reaffirms this. Charlie Manson grew in popularity too, and has always claimed beatnik origins, not hippy ones. Alan Moore and Frank Miller are the king of comics with their gritty tones. Goth despair rises in popularity with icons like the Sisters of Mercy and Christian Death (Neil Gaiman makes a career out of it in comics) it mixes with Punk culture and Genesis P. Orridge's industrial music takes true form for the first time in the angst of Skinny Puppy and Frontline Assembly. It spits their cyberpunk battery acid back in the face of desensitized new wave aesthetics. Cocaine yields way to crack around 1985. Skinny Puppy's core members, Cevin Key and Ogre opened for Chris & Cosey of Throbbing Gristle on that same year. The torch had been passed. Skinny Puppy also foreshadows the environmentalist comeback of the 1990's in their vegetarianism, concern for the environment, gaia theory and animal life. Grant Morrison Animal Man is perfectly timed in this equation seeing release in 1988. There's an edge of technology to industrial music though, hinting at the next decade's innovations.

In 1984 Neuromancer didn't really ring a dystopian bell but we couldn't help but contextualize the future as grim so we painted it's scenery that way in our heads. Akira showed us the power these dirty cyberpunk motorcycle gangs could wield against the government given strange future technology accidents as a call to proto-"Stormers." Cyberspace was pointing towards our next "Hippy" cycle, but the future would look flowery under the influence of MDMA, house music and the booming internet, e-commerce world of electronic remote interfacing we had not foreseen. We were ready to plug-in and build what we wanted as a result of the technological death cries against a dead and stagnant solar cycle of oppression. We were ready for electronic telepathy in the form of BBS, chatrooms and IM.

Does a bomb in cyberspace make a sound? It creeps up out of nowhere, the virus installed in the background or birth of the botnet. Network attacks are always something you didn't see coming. It was like the Wide Area Network was something no one had seen coming save for sci-fi glimpses and the top tier of end users and developers of hardware and software with a handful of university folks on ARPAnet. This does fail to mention a few early computer clubs who made use of networks in awesome ways, Proto-BBS pioneers and beyond. It hit us like a ton of bricks when the internet kicked into full gear. PCs weren't everyday folk stuff still, in 1988 the GUI still wasn't fully formed. Windows 3.1 doesn't come to fruition until 1992. Concepts like those of John C. Lilly's pertaining to Dolphins and cybernetics thrive alongside Free Willy's light hearted environmentalist pandering and Tim Leary books about computers. Neil Young is cool and the grandfather of grunge, Tom Petty is releasing new albums to great reception. Heroin is a sheik, mopey sedation death hole for exorcising your teenage angst. The bleak hue remains in culture but it's somehow made vibrant, even delirious. In 1989, Twin Peaks goes into production. It's slow, drab realism with surreal happenings is very akin to the pace of this new resurgence of psychedelia capitulated in grunge. Rave culture is the anti-thesis, it gives the early 1990's a neon, blacklight lit hue that extends into clothing and rap culture.

With the GUI in place, software development begins to flourish. Sooner than later we are familiar with software suites like Norton, Word perfect, Microsoft office and games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Duke Nukem, Warcraft and Quake. Violent iterations but technological progression made in strides alongside Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. Sega even tried to introduce on-line gaming on consoles in the 90's. Dialup was a drag but the internet was novel and fun, fuck our phones anyways. They weren't cellular and filled with neat tricks. Old hat tech, voice communication was giving way to Instant Messengers. You could afford to spend all day downloading that 30 second .avi made in bad 3D software. Computer graphics in the 1990's (even up to Playstation) were powerful enough to give you an idea of what you were seeing but unrealistic enough that they were forced to be artful representations of the environment and characters. Virtual reality never really learned to swim but the internet manifested the cyberpunk dream as the ocean we all went to the beach of by 1999 when the cycle winds down. The dream's bubble is about to pop though and give way to the death of the resurgent pacifism of grunge and rave culture. Copying that floppy had given way to Warez and Napster. With Napster in particular, there was about to be a planned sacrifice of file-sharing freedom to signal the beginning of the end to the digital autonomous zone we heralded as free, open technology. Despite this hardware flourished in some ways toward the end of this cycle, better graphics cards every other month, breaking the 1ghz processor barrier, harddrives bigger than 4GB. It was pretty effin sweet and Warcraft's fantasy world gave way to Starcraft's cold environment with spiffy new graphics thanks to these advancements. Star wars is re-released and then reborn in 1999 through a cycle mirroring it's 1977 origin. The imperialist fleets had returned to tell us about our next cycle.

Oppression was going to bare it's sinister grin from the shadows on 09/11 once more and the innovations of networks would only be improved upon between 1999 and 2010. You may have an awesome tablet, but touchscreens have been around and it's taken forever for multitouch to be implemented. It's just a low-end PC anyways. You may have a smartphone but it's an iteration of a large bulky, cancer spewing joke of a prototype from the 80's. PDAs and cellphone struggled to find their market for quite sometime amidst the 90's trends of car phones and pagers. People didn't start really throwing away their land lines until 2001 or so, by which time the US government had declared all cell phones needed GPS tracking built-in to them and subsequently use this in federal and police level investigations. Robert Anton Wilson, cheery optimist of the Leary intellectual crowd leaves us on a note of "Everything is under control" - a stark analysis of wide conspiracy narratives, which find's many companions on the bookshelves, conspiracy publishing takes off in a paranoid fever. Broadband gave us more of the same at a faster speed than dialup, information moved quicker and we were more aware as a result. We improved websites' design and feel as a result of this more robust transfer. New code, new languages and scripts more capable of doing neat things like the emergence of Youtube in relatively familiar browsers and GUIs. We live like paranoid cyborg soldiers, we brush up on conspiracy narratives and they go mainstream, we train on our Playstation 2's and on-line games for military ops in the homeland and abroad. We give up security for liberty and eye our neighbors sizing them up for the inevitable food riots when we're headed to Mad Max survivalist worlds. Mad Max, Bladerunner, Jodorowsky Films, They Live and more all enjoy a resurgence in popularity as cult films during this decade, it is no surprise they all have a militaristic and/or paranoid edge to them. 2011 is set to see a remake of "They Live!" - a cyclic end of another "Punk"-esque era being the first was made in 1988. More Philip K. Dick movies are on the horizon, Bladrunner originally enjoyed success in 1982 and sets the tone for aesthetic applied to cyberpunk - it's the future and grim & dingy. New movies will tackle things like Ubik and Radio Free Albemuth and could be far more psychedelic than these previous dystopian itterations. A Scanner Darkly enjoy mild success amidst the militant culture though. The Stormers have not only been here since 99 or so, they're not going away yet. Nothing is true as our governments lie and deceive; the internet enables us to share our belief in conspiracies of all nature. The Matrix, Being John Malkovich and Truman Show sold us simulation theory. Our Video games are more and more realistic and with the wars and change back toward the familiar 80's pessimism, we're back to a bleak worldview without sparkle or shine. Since it doesn't seem to matter, might be a simulation anyways, and definitely has a series of boss battles in the form of the top 1%, politicians and corporate master pulling strings and lying, we decide to live like our one many army archetypes during the Stormer generation and we train ourselves in this direction.

Grant Morrison, Jason Louv and Iain Spence all fail to identify the musical breakthrough of 1999 or so. It was software for electronic music, things had changed since Skinny Puppy made hardware clang in the 80's. The idea of the VST would take a few years to grow but computers began fueling a new era of innovative, futuristic and complex anthems of fast breakbeats or chill downtempo grooves with heavy, nostalgic ambient influences. Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher, Cevin Key's solo work and Download, Venetian Snares, Bogdan Raczynski, Proem, Lusine Icl, U-Ziq, Nautilis, Cex's early work, Amon Tobin. The list could go on for days, this is the change in music, now anyone can write music and these concepts like glitch and circuit bending and software processing alongside midi controllers are here to stay and have altered commercial music fundamentally. Music wanted to take it's self back with the death of Napster and here we were stealing it from the studios into our bedrooms with little to no investment thanks to software sequencers, samplers and synthesizers. By 2003-2004 the VST community was huge and multiplatform, countless programs making music available to anyone willing to click around and learn. As we'll see soon, "stormers" don't let you take something without taking action to secure it's return in the future. To a lesser degree, in early 2000 we see industrial reborn as darkwave through a synthesis with house and trance, carrying the torch of rave culture meeting the goth and industrial of the end of the previous punk solar cycle.

The powers that be consolidated during this time too. | Diversity in media companies declines, we no longer make website about stuff we have Myspace and Facebook gateways to the internet. Censorship is back in, the religious right finds new fuel. By the end of this era, Anonymous shifts into Lulzsec at the start of 2011. A strike happens against the internet shutdown modalities politicians like Jay Rockfeller adopt. We want what we want without interference and we will make it free on our own. Can you blame them for being pissed? The past decade saw Bittorrent bare the burden of MPAA and governments, Sealand Data Haven being badly damaged By fire in 2006 (effectively killing the only servers I know of that exist in international water) and countless bills of electronic surveillance legislation with suspicious wording implying a lust to get their panopticon on. Did it take the illusionary promise of a cool hip African American president being revealed for another corporate tool to trigger some anti-apathy in our overly saturated media environment of subdued compliance? Was the CIA cloned abortion of George Bush Sr. in office not enough to upset us with the system as a whole? People bought the Obama narrative at the end of the cycle. An expression of the next phase - they wanted Hope, someone capitalized upon this and turned it into a brand. The release of the third Deus Ex game in 2011 is set in a future immediately prior to achieving H+ status and it's graphics rendered with a half-steampunk/half-Bladerunner style exemplifies a final pinnacles of the stormers generation and where they are headed. It cast the hero, loner cyborg solider against the dystopian world growing to meet it's Human Plus future.

I start to think about the next Solar Cycle at this point and I can't help but go back to the name Sekhmet, Egyptian Solar Lioness godform. She is a synthesis of Old Kingdom gods: Hathor, Bast and Ma'at. It's that last one which makes me think of another similarly assigned Egyptian godform timescale: that of Crowley's procession of the Equinoxes. I first discovered the Book of the Law in the expanding 90's in my youth. It was interesting, possibly even helped to set me on a path I was already trying to peer down but in the contracting 2000's it withered and lost it's luster very quickly to the point where I lived in a period of no magick prior to my most important of initiations at within that timeframe. Despite how much I had turned my back on this book and it's author the notion of his godform procession of Equinoxes made sense: we started in a peaceful Isisian age of evolving cavemen in harmony with earth and build to an Osiris dominated patriarchal age of kings and Divine right to rule. From here Crowley suggest and declares in 1904, Cairo that we are moving into an age of Horus, the angry child of these deitys, prone to war and still growing into his proper adult form. Perhaps he does become the shade-born adult, Harpocrates. But regardless the narrative which carries on the lifespan of my interest in this topic stems from a former student of Crowley and Mentor to Meade Lane of BSFR - Frater Achad. Achad suggest there's a short-circuit of sorts. The New Aeon will not be governed by the child god Horus growing into the blind god of silence after years of wars, it will instead be dominated by Ma'at, Goddess of Truth and Justice. It's the possibility that it can be true either way, that it's not set in stone, that this Aeon hasn't been assigned it's proper godform yet that keeps me intriguing. I'm not going to spring "This is the Aeon of Sekhmet" just to throw in a third possibility so bare with me here. The Age of Horus makes sense in terms of being a synthesis of the previous two male and female archetypes, it is gender holistic in this way. Even the hawk form implies freedom to fly. Ma'at personifies this aspect to some degree. She is dual natured, truthful and just, wed to Thoth, god of knowledge, she is surely the opposite of a child in her level of being informed. This last decade was filled with literal storms and natural disaster disarray alongside the long-war agenda. Horus was thriving. I think we may wake up sometime before 2021 and realize this Aeon may in fact belong to Ma'at. The late Kenneth Grant may offer further insights into Achad's thoughts on the subject (alongside much inserted narrative) in "Outside the Circle of Time."

Cultural trends over the course of the next ten years will be hard to predict. Iain Spence didn't quite see the Stormers he expected. After the not so secretive overthrow of media in the 90's and it's being forced to stand the light of internet scrutiny, counter culture was scattered not united. It didn't need an avatar to have a pattern though. Even William Gibson's new books commented on the rise in popularity of military fashion. It's likely the next decade will only continue this fractal degradation into smaller niches but overarching patterns will remain there too. Research chemicals are the wave of the future. LSD, Pscilocybin and even MDMA have run their legal course, you used to be able to order 5-MEO-nDMT legally, but the U.S. banned it, Canada is still cool. Deeper recesses of TiHKAL and PiHKAL will be mined. Even 80's horror rapper Esham sings about DMT now, it's common place alongside an interest in quality medicinal marijuana and hash. The stakes are raised, with a future influence like this finding conjunction with nanotechnologies and the emergence of other singulatarian dreams we are bound to see a very odd, photomorphic future. Metallic shifting holograms we can touch and feel, immersive forms of entertainment - environmental projection software, the huge non-local clusters of cloud computing, mitochondrial life augmentations, everything the military industrial complex has invested in over the past decade will hopefully be moving public sector as we continue to build our 3D printers, DIY bio labs, and hackable EEG headsets. Some things in public sector now would have cost small fortunes if even possible via 1980's technology. Strong AI may be one of this biggest accelerators of our nervous system since language. Think about how much a learning computer can put together tirelessly running on a system with amazing specs and hardware tricks we haven't pondered yet. Rabbit holes aren't good enough now, we need paradigm shifts. Overly informed by the Stormer mentality of surveillance and spectator culture, we're waking up to how bad the guys running the earthship are really fucking it up in the process. Japan on the brink of meltdown, fraking induced earthquakes in the Northeast, Hurricanes like Katrina, Rita, and Irene, Massive oil spills off the Coast, at Yellowstone and oil pipelines in Alaska. I see another hippy similarity. "The future is organic" read an advertisement bump sticker for a particular brand of organic foods on the back of a car as I pondered this. I've always believed technology would eventually evolve to integrate more plantlife. Nokia's future concept cellphone with nanograss made me smile. I suspect we evolve technology further from there to source the next stage of biosphere: insects. Maybe this is where AI turns evil and takes us over. I hope if it happens it's around this innovation, because then atleast the robots would look like badass metal robot insectoids. Until then though we will probably see more organic forms of technology begin to develop. We are already sourcing novel materials for computers, largely thanks to nanotechnology revealing new properties to them and uses for them. Synthesis and unity like this may be key to the changing environment, without the hippy rose glasses and more of an edge of scientific reason, the kind Thoth would remind his wife to bring to the people.

If trends do hold out, music may get less punchy and aggressive. It may develop a softer edge while evolving in intricacy and tonality. I can already foresee something akin to ambient dubstep, bass drowned out with reverb environments. My beloved genre of IDM has come full circle away from it's aggro breakcore scene back into ambient soundscapes. Lusine Icl's "Language Barrier" (2007) and Proem's "Enough Conflict" are both relatively beatless and lovely in spaciality, the latter being slightly grimmer.

As best I can tell, the lack of a unifying avatar in the post-1999 cycle from Iain Spences perspective may be due to a weaker solar index in this timeframe. It's also not a steady flow, for instance in the 2000's the solar annual dips at it's maximum forming a two part crescendo. It's fluctuation could account the cyclic breaking models, how Alex Grey makes a comeback in a Stormer decade or Thompson finds an audience amidst a gentle drug enthusiast intellectual crowd despite his rough edged exterior. Things find their proper times in these cycles. Somewhere in the early 2000's say, 2003 or so, when the solar spots dipped I recalled being very optimistic about the future in an almost hippy like naivety, perhaps it was age and the atmosphere or perhaps our weakly shielded bodies are more susceptible to the sun's radiation than we would like to admit. I can't say but maybe the solar variations chart below has a it's own input on the narrative.