Who is User Zero?
Chapter 1: Welcome to the Anti-Apocalypse
Dear friends,
Today I am delivering chapter 1 of my book, User Zero. This one is called “Anti-Apocalypse” which is weirdly more inspirational than the old-fashioned word “utopia.” The illustration I drew for this chapter shows a dummy in a self-driving car, which has struck another dummy, and is about to hit another one. No this isn’t a critique of AI, although that works, too. No, seen from another perspective, there are three stages of mental evolution in this drawing. First, we effortlessly let technology control us. Eventually, this blind acceptance of the tech injures us. Assuming we survive this mental collision we stand up, find our footing and walk forward into the unknown under our own power, no longer a dummy.
But before we get into that, I want to share a couple things:
My Infestation art is included in an art show in Boulder, Colorado called Little Creatures. If you are in Colorado between August 12 – September 28 consider seeing the show at the Boulder Public Library Canyon Gallery.
If you haven’t visited my website (adrian3.com) in a while, maybe check it out. I just added a bunch of art projects and videos.
Stay creative. Your friend,
Ade
Chapter 1: Welcome to the Anti-Apocalypse
When there is a disease outbreak, as is often the case in apocalyptic movies, the first person infected is referred to as patient zero. One moment you are minding your own business cleaning the cage of a genetically modified monkey, the next you are a zombie infecting humanity with your sickness as armageddon ensues. So it goes.
What would be the utopian equivalent of patient zero? If one person can trigger an epidemic, could a single person also transform the world for the better? Someone like that would have to see the world differently, to think differently, and behave in ways that would surprise us. I call this person user zero.
To become user zero requires a mental reset, a clean slate where the bonds that constrain us disappear and anything is possible, where the fabric of reality itself can be effortlessly disassembled and rebuilt. The anti-apocalypse begins as a single potent thought, a microscopic mutation birthed within the mind of single human. Unlike patient zero, the infestation you cause will be constructive. As user zero you have the power to undent the universe.
Inside your skull a movie is playing. You, obviously, are the hero in this movie. You narrate as a cast of characters play the supporting roles of friends and family, misfits, and villains. You call this movie reality.
Your movie is different from mine. No better or worse, you just have a different director calling the shots. Everyone’s movies interact with each other oblivious to the existence of what is playing on the screens next door.
The plot of most people’s mental movie plays out like this. If we survive childhood, graduation shoots us into the world like corks from a bottle, eager to make our dent in the universe. For years we bounce around the workplace, losing a little speed with each wall we hit.
As our momentum is depleted we start looking for answers. The self-help books fail. The seminars, webinars, night school, online tutorials, graduate courses, boot camps — none of the shortcuts have helped. Eventually our energy fizzles and we resign to roles as background actors. We are extras on standby awaiting our turn to appear slightly out of focus, fake smiling in the background of someone else’s movie. So it goes.
But not you. You don’t give up that easily. You have seen too many slivers of hope, moments of inspiration, tiny miracles that keep your flame lit. Once in a while the universe changes right in front of you, a crack opens, and you step out of your movie and into a new reality. Success. Breakthrough. Movie script endings. These brief interludes make us wonder, “Who actually runs this show?”
But most of the time we limp along until we inevitably reach a point where we want to change the script, break character, and abandon the supporting role. Maybe it hit you in school, you sensed that the routine of memorization and recitation was a sham. Perhaps a mentor clued you in to the fact that the system was rigged. Maybe you spent years, decades even, trusting that you would be rewarded for following the rules. Was it only after getting repeatedly burned, consistently let down, routinely taken advantage of, that you began to sense that you were expendable ammunition in somebody else’s gun? And while everyone else is making dents, your universe tends to be the sphere that absorbs the abuse. Nobody would blame you for abandoning your heroic universe-denting movie. The world is plenty dented already, so why bother? Before you give up, let’s imagine an alternate reality.
What if there was a set of controls for your reality, a hidden user interface just waiting for you to command? This idea sounds crazy because we have become accustomed to seeing our situations as static, that circumstances beyond our control left us in the predicament where we find ourselves. It is harder to believe that our situation is dynamic, that there are options that we can use to shape our reality. This book describes those hidden options, the knobs and switches that control us, and our dormant ability to alter our world. The first step is to make an edit to your mental movie. As the hero in your movie you now have a new super power. Starting today, you control your reality. You are user zero.
User zero is the first person to encounter a world-changing idea. It may be tiny, the small shift in thinking that is imperceptible, the flap of a butterfly wing on the distant shores of your mind. It may be as simple as a tiny moment of clarity or it may be the birth of the idea virus that saves humanity. Big or small, the challenge is the same. How do we get our heads cleared and prepped for the moment of fertilization. Then, if we are lucky enough to be touched by the muse, we need to be ready to act on the idea. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
First, let’s talk about one of the most primitive, yet effective levers of the mind, reading and writing, since that is the format of our time together. To write a book in 2020 is both old-fashioned and modern. Stephen King describes books as time machines, allowing voices from a different time and place to be heard. You probably don’t know me, and yet our minds are connected right now through the power of words.
As long as my words hold your attention, I am inhabiting the most intimate corners of your being. As I grapple with the responsibility that comes with standing at the control center of your mind, I should explain my motives. Since we are going to be spending some time together, you deserve that. I want to make a deal with you.
Since you are allowing my words to exist in your mind, I will repay that honor by writing with as much sincerity as I can. I won’t write in third person, I will avoid jargon, and the voice you hear will be mine. It’s the same voice you would hear if we met for coffee. As a self-published author, my words aren’t filtered through editors or watered down by attempts to appeal to mass audiences. I am not an academic and I don’t have an agenda other than to open my bag of stories and see if my wacky ideas have legs.
Your half of the bargain is to question every word. If this book is going to work it needs to be absorbed on your terms. Be skeptical of my ideas. Resist them. And if they land in the realm of truth by your evaluation, make them your own. Build on them, modify them, and put them to good use. When my concepts fall short, set me straight. Just because this is a book doesn’t mean you can’t push ideas in my direction. The internet makes me only a few clicks away through email (adrianhanft@gmail.com), Twitter (@ade3), or a book review. Your response to my words are just as important to my story as the words I insert in your skull.
Is it a deal? Great. So what have you gotten yourself into? I am going to hit you with some heavy topics. We don’t need to watch armageddon movies to be scared about our world. There is no shortage of preventable real-life tragedies that can be traced back to the failure of a handful of people. An actor is crushed to death by his vehicle in front of his home. A young mother's nose begins to bleed as her baby turns blue after she moves into her new mobile home. Astronauts are burned up in space. Sailors die at sea from preventable mistakes. Lung cancer. You get the idea.
There isn't a single villain hiding behind most tragedies and rarely do we find a conspiracy. That doesn't make the search less worthy. In fact, it makes the story more personal. Because each of us shares some responsibility when cultural apathy leads to tragedy. And any one of us could find ourselves unwittingly responsible for death and destruction if we get caught in the chain of infection. Ignorance isn't an excuse. Apathy doesn't absolve us. But what can we do?
It’s not an exaggeration to think of ideas as viruses. Particularly strong strains can spread through the population until everyone has seen the latest internet sensation or shared the stickiest meme. Outside of entertainment, however, the idea virus seems to spread slower. For example, it’s taken centuries for the heliocentric idea to catch on and even today there are doubters. It is not hard to forget that the sun is the center of the universe, not our cell phone. Imagine how hard the heliocentric concept must have been for humans who, hearing the blasphemy for the first time, didn’t have a computer in their pocket that they could use to fact check the zealot. Isaac Asimov said,
“It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable. It seems the height of unreason to suppose the earth was round instead of flat, or that it moved instead of the sun, or that objects required a force to stop them when in motion, instead of a force to keep them moving, and so on.”
Big ideas require an uncomfortable flip-flop from every person on the planet. And if you could trace the idea virus back to its source you don’t find heroes. You find the ashes of heretics.
Deep down we know that if we are able to originate a world-altering idea we risk being burned at the stake. Nobody wants to be labeled as a crackpot, a mad scientist, or a fool. So as a safety mechanism, our brains seem to get locked down in read-only mode some time after puberty. It’s for our own good. And yet many of us aren’t entirely satisfied using the incredible processing power of our minds to select the best soft drink to accompany our fries. We are meant for more.
In read-only mode, it is nearly impossible to switch beliefs to embrace a universe where the sun doesn’t revolve around you. But if you could muster the power to flip the switch, what would change? Planets don’t change their orbits to match your new beliefs. No, the world continues as if nothing has happened. And yet your world, your reality, has been completely altered. There is enormous power in this idea. The ability to move the center of the universe is a super power we rarely use.
Despite possessing the reality-altering ability, some of us go to our grave having never exercised this option. Oh, we make decisions, we weigh our options, we measure the data, we calculate our odds, we seek change. We think of ourselves as open-minded, tolerant people who change our mind all the time. But we rarely allow ourselves to change our mind in ways that fundamentally change who we are. Rarer still are ideas that change the world of other people.
And yet I bet you can point to a few rare moments when your mental software was successfully breached. Remember that one teacher, that one book, the song, movie, or idea that changed your life? These moments are transformational and they prove that our operating systems aren’t completely read-only. How did that happen? By what mechanism did these people and objects manage to shake the snow globes of our minds?
The first thing to understand as we become user zero is that our brains are not who we are. No, our mind is a tool, the most important tool at our disposal. We are not the tool, we are users of the tool. We are admins with write-access credentials that allow us to create new worlds where nothing previously existed.
The second thing to understand is that admin privileges come with new job responsibilities that you didn’t sign up for. We will be tempted to shirk our world-altering abilities. We need help, which is why the quest to become user zero will benefit from the voice of a mentor. Finding someone who embodies the ideals of this book requires a journey into the past to an unrecognizable time before cell phones, fake news, and social feeds.
Thanks for reading. I am releasing User Zero one chapter at a time on Substack for free to all subscribers. Physical copies are available from Amazon. Stay creative.