Binary Bird

K..,

Yet some more night musings that I wanted to share with you.

I am not just merely but also definitely a system.
If you choose or I choose to call me a Chinese person or a Singaporean or an artist or anything else, I will be judged, viewed as that, and succeed or fail according to those criteria.
If I told someone that I was a computer, they might ask me on a populist level if I was Windows or Mac or, perhaps rather dubiously if I was Linux or something that the Chinese were now secretly working on.
Others more current, or techy might ask if I was like 99.9999% of all the other computers, binary.
Well, that would raise no alarm bells.
I would be functioning in a way that has become accepted technical thought.
Things inside me, the whole way I worked would either be a 0 or a 1.
So far so good.
But if I told them no.
I was one of those things that don’t fit in.
That I was a quantum computer, well, they would get rather less happy.
If they were slightly knowledgeable they would be hoping for some special quality to appear rather quickly in front of them, or a set of distinguishing features that might set me apart, rapid use of energy, inability to function in certain situations, super speed in computing certain questions, and easy breakdown.

All these things sound vaguely familiar to me (and perhaps to those of you who don’t quite fit in and never have and never will – god bless your souls).
This is, however, not the main nub of this present thought.
The scary thing for us and, worse, for others looking in on us, quantum creatures is that at a basic core level the building blocks on which we are built are inherently suspicious.
They are heretical.
In us, if we are truly quantum, zeros and ones, 0s and 1s, can switch meanings, existences.
At any time, if we are fast enough, we can be more than one thing.

What repercussions this might have in greater society is at this point not important to me.

What I do know is that now, if someone said to me, you are a binary bird, I would feel quite pleased and defined, that notion having lived long enough in our modern world to rest thankfully on.

Factor in the possibility of being a quantum bird/man and I am immediately lost.
Graced by the possibility of being one or the other I feel cast off, lost at sea or floating anchorless in the sky.
And if I slow down enough I either become neither or if I speed up enough
I am both.
Bird and man.
Or am I something else.

It’s okay to be called a Bird.
Even a Jade Bird or a Man.
Just make sure they know that perhaps they are dealing with a slightly different system of computer and that the lies of naming may not totally apply in your case.

Marko

2011

 

 

 

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