Hark! OMNI Reboots

There are those bits of writing or media that stick in your brain, that you read again and again, that simmer in your imagination far longer than seems reasonable.

Originally written in 2014
OMNI Reboot is shut down, unfortunately, so most links are dead.


I missed the original OMNI magazine, way back when. I've heard of its legend, though, on blogs and podcasts, its name spoken only in the humbled tones of the privileged devout.

It was a thrill to encounter the Reboot one recent day, along one of my regularly-scheduled frenetic consumptive media opiatic crawls, skittering from one hyperlinked fix to the next.

Upon landing, I first encounter some reviews that think, their authors anchoring thought experiments onto the benchmarks of sci-fi movies or existential TV episodes about nothing or perception in art installations. These are standard-bearers of decent pop culture writing on the Internet: solid review pieces infused with the author's tangents, the freedom to explore ideas outside of the word counts of print. In the spirit of that mentality, I offer no direct evidence of this phenomenon, only having been able to suss this idea out of the consumed heaps. But for evidence's sake, how many times have you read a blog with "musings on..." in its description? If the Internet is a chorus of voices, then 'the rambling review' is surely its alto section.

Not as often does it happen that I encounter something...else, some piece of wow that goes beyond ordinary material enjoyment. There are those bits of writing or media that stick in your brain, that you read again and again, that simmer in your imagination far longer than seems reasonable. It's just a simple passage, a few paragraphs of text, but it somehow takes on its own life, becomes a piece of world to which you can return, explore, and build.

In recent memory two instance come to mind:

  1. The first appearance of Takashi in Akira drew shocked breath from me as I read into the first pages of the 2009 Kodansha volumes, already awestruck by that full-color WWIII prologue.
  2. More fittingly, a story I had reblogged from spectology on an evolving future towards grey-goo AI (tumblr deleted, link broken) still sends my imagination whirling on any revisit.

"Our Knuckles Drenched Dionysian", a short narrative from Ken Baumann, has more in common for me with the latter piece, but I felt, in mentioning my recent appreciation for Akira, it doesn't hurt to qualify any apparent naivete in my writing here with explicit acknowledgement of my neophytic sci-fi status. With Baumann's story especially, I feel tuned in to prose I hope to find more of -- maybe in OMNI, probably elsewhere. There's tremendous impact in what's left unsaid, open, unresolved. "Dionysian" opens the doors to nearly a whole world of possibility not yet imagined. It's a fruitful world, also, in that - much like Spike Jonze's Her - as science fiction of the very near future, I feel more viscerally the troubling approach of its predictive power. The world is almost entirely familiar, just a couple steps forward from our lives now, and getting closer every day.

Not all words to be found on OMNI Reboot are similar flashes of brilliance, though. There's the half-formed dream of Helga, or the shotgun pop (social-)science/fiction of imagined futures in feedback on present reality from conceptual entrepreneur Martine Syms. These read quickly for me, their scattered thoughts flowing easily into the discord of my brain. But they don't stick.

There's another strain of OMNI Reboot's product to explore, one that recognizes its position in the here and now and, with that perspective, looks seriously both at from where we've come and to where we are heading. Technology, throughout time, changes places, alters the landscapes of biology, culture, and economy. We make, unmake , and remake the world, and will continue to do so, for as long as we are here. You can start to watch that all happen at OMNI Reboot.

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