FringeWare Review (20)12

Scrytch - The Idea is Simple

by free agent .rez
"11101010000111100101010the story goes like this: Earth is captured by technocapital singularlty asrenalssance rationalization and ocear,lc navigation take-off. ... As markets learn to manufactureintellisence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranola, and tries to get a grip. ... The body count climbs thlough a serles of $10bewars. ... By the time soft-englneering slithers out of its box and into yours, humansecurity is lurching into crlsis. Cloning, lateral $enodata transfer, transver6alrepliclcatlon, ~nd cyberotlcs flood ln amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex. Neochina arrlves from the future. hypersynthetlc drugs click into digital voodoo.

[t ]] Beyond the judgement of God. Meltdown: planetary China-syndrome, dissolutionof the biosphere into the technosphere, terminal speculative bubble crisis,ultravlrus, and revolution stripped of all christian-sociallst e6chatolo~y u[downuto its burn-core of crashed security]. It ls poised to eat your TV, lnfect yourbank account, and hack xenodata from your mitochondria." - o[rphan] d[rift>]

shit. guess we'd best be learning how to code.

scrytch, then, can be considered "What creation would be like if all results were covered under the GNU General Public License." it is, after all, software for our wetware; the leap isn't so great.

scrytch -- the idea is simple: appropriate as appropriate. insert the signifier "scrytch" into a chunk of prose [or a graphic or a sample], and watch it live well beyond your years. any scrytchlet can be drawn from, added to, re-drafted, altered in any form and combination, so long as it remains attributed scrytch forevermore. indeed, how can it not? locate a piece of scrytch which has been ill-attributed to a solitary author, and experience the freedom to re-appropriate the entirety of that author's would-be missive into the larger body of scrytch!

scrytch is a way to keep ourselves from spending another slim dime on what has been called Entertainment, so that we can pool those resources towards the acquisition of the tools to create, the engines of innovation.

scrytch is also a strategy for making certain that no word is ever final; that we have as many chances as possible to create a future we want to inhabit, rather than a living prison, through our ability to change "The Last Word on CyberCulture" to something that gives us a fighting fucking chance.

from the start, cyberpunk was a style without a content. however, conTEXT can readily fill in for content, and indeed, with a context like the late 20th century, the idea of content itself began to seem quaint at best. however, certain risks attend the writing of "a future so close it connects;" mainly, the line between prediction and self-fulfilling prophecy becomes lazor-thin. call it projection, if you will. whatever its name, it has resulted in a blind march into the maws of "Beyond Blade Runner." i will not live in that world. nor, unless i miss my guess, will the information architects with whom i intend to spend my energies, creating of this dross a tight and tidy bubble of self-organizing seed-culture which can pass underneath and through the very other side of this event and all of its horizons.

the key: only a freely-flowing and adaptive mythos or legacy can provide the ideodiversity necessary for survival of the human species millennia hence. my own personal aesthetic criteria has changed, of late: if it's not something which is compelling enough to burn its content into my synapses, yet simple enough at root to survive the re-translation and compression of a human race compacted from, say, 10 billion to 10,000... then it's not worth my energy.

that's right: if i can carry it on my person easily and lightly, in any form, then it's a candidate for my spiritual or artistic work. if not, then i'll have to let it go... sooner or later.

the fruit of this stew, then, is scrytch. to join the project, donate scrytch [in any medium or format] to the scrytch archive, and APPROPRIATE AS APPROPRIATE