Tempo, by Venkatesh Rao, is a truly transformational book, but first you got to know: a moment of inertia, a Time/Space Continuum, acceleration, distance, mass, force, energy, power, the difference between an OODA loop and a Double Freytag Triangle (as The Double Freytag Triangle is described in Tempo), and the “quantum” in quantum physics, or what the Native Americans must have known before the white-man got here, i.e., that it is all about connections.
After reading Tempo, I guess one could make the case that the White-man, or anyone from the “outside” world, because of “Cheap Tricks”, would be a corrupted version of the Native America!
However, I am just not sure how the “outside” world would react, as the Native Americans may not have had a dimension of time, only distance. In other words, they may have been connected with their ancestors by distance, how close they felt to them.
In the book, Empire of the Summer Moon, Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, the author S.C Gwynne talks about how the Native Americans were connected.
The Native Americans were connected by bands called quantum rings (my term), with the Comanches connected in the center. The only difference between the “rings” was distance, not time.
It was about how they felt about each other at the “moment” that mattered. If a “Cheap Trick” was used, it depended on the distance that they felt from each other, not time in where they want to be in a few years, decades, past millenniums, ….
What’s great about reading these two books is that together these books creates a level of understanding on how those “rings” were put together, and that is an important difference in these two books. Tempo is about structure, while Empire of the Summer Moon is about content.
Together these two books explains that connection, but it takes a real master mind, such as these two authors, to put it all together.
Then it comes down to just asking the question: because you can change structure with some “Cheap Trick” (cheap in the sense of time), as Tempo explains, does it mean that the “Cheap Trick”, in the content without a sense of time, as the book Empire of the Summer Moon describes, has changed either Space or Time ?
In other words, do we have a world with Time, or one with Space?
Perhaps that is a question for Quora.
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