Aliens have taken the place of angels

We want wisdom. We want hope. We want to be good. Therefore we sometimes tell ourselves warning stories that deal with the darker side of some of our other wants. As William Blake noted long ago, the human imagination drives the world. At first it drove only the human world, which was once very small in comparison to the huge and powerful natural world around it. Now we're close to being in control of everything except earthquakes and the weather. But it is still the human imagination, in all its diversity, that directs what we do with our tools. Literature is an uttering, or outering, of the human imagination.

'Aliens have taken the place of angels'

Margaret Atwood on why we need science fiction

Margaret Atwood
Friday June 17, 2005

Guardian

Before the term "science fiction" appeared, in America in the 1930s, during the golden age of bug-eyed monsters and girls in brass brassieres, stories such as HG Wells' The War of the Worlds were called "scientific romances". In both terms - scientific romance and science fiction - the science element is a qualifier. The nouns are "romance" and "fiction", and the word fiction covers a lot of ground.

If you're writing about the future and you aren't doing forecast journalism, you'll probably be writing something people will call either science fiction or speculative fiction. I like to make a distinction between science fiction proper and speculative fiction. For me, the science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can't yet do, such as going through a wormhole in space to another universe; and speculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand, such as DNA identification and credit cards, and that takes place on Planet Earth. But the terms are fluid. Some use speculative fiction as an umbrella covering science fiction and all its hyphenated forms - science fiction fantasy, and so forth - and others choose the reverse.

I have written two works of science fiction or, if you prefer, speculative fiction: The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake. Here are some of the things these kinds of narratives can do that socially realistic novels cannot do.

· They can explore the consequences of new and proposed technologies in graphic ways, by showing them as fully operational. We've always been good at letting cats out of bags and genies out of bottles, we just haven't been very good at putting them back in again. These stories in their darker modes are all versions of The Sorcerer's Apprentice: the apprentice finds out how to make the magic salt-grinder produce salt, but he can't turn it off.

· They can explore the nature and limits of what it means to be human in graphic ways, by pushing the envelope as far as it will go.

· They can explore the relationship of man to the universe, an exploration that often takes us in the direction of religion and can meld easily with mythology - an exploration that can happen within the conventions of realism only through conversations and soliloquies.

· They can explore proposed changes in social organisation, by showing what they might actually be like for those living within them. Thus, the utopia and the dystopia, which have proved over and over again that we have a better idea about how to make hell on earth than we do about how to make heaven. The history of the 20th century, where a couple of societies took a crack at utopia on a large scale and ended up with the inferno, would bear this out. Think of Cambodia under Pol Pot.

· They can explore the realms of the imagination by taking us boldly where no man has gone before. Thus the space ship, thus the inner space of the hilarious film Fantastic Voyage, the one where Raquel Welch gets miniaturised and shot through the blood stream in a submarine. Thus also the cyberspace trips of William Gibson; and thus The Matrix, Part 1 - this last, by the way, an adventure romance with strong overtones of Christian allegory, and therefore more closely related to The Pilgrim's Progress than to Pride and Prejudice.

More than one commentator has mentioned that science fiction as a form is where theological narrative went after Paradise Lost, and this is undoubtedly true. Supernatural creatures with wings, and burning bushes that speak, are unlikely to be encountered in a novel about stockbrokers, unless the stockbrokers have been taking a few mind-altering substances, but they are not out of place on Planet X. The form is often used as a way of acting out the consequences of a theological doctrine. The theological resonances in films such as Star Wars are more than obvious. Extraterrestrials have taken the place of angels, demons, fairies and saints, though it must be said that this last group is now making a comeback.

We want wisdom. We want hope. We want to be good. Therefore we sometimes tell ourselves warning stories that deal with the darker side of some of our other wants. As William Blake noted long ago, the human imagination drives the world. At first it drove only the human world, which was once very small in comparison to the huge and powerful natural world around it. Now we're close to being in control of everything except earthquakes and the weather.

But it is still the human imagination, in all its diversity, that directs what we do with our tools. Literature is an uttering, or outering, of the human imagination. It lets the shadowy forms of thought and feeling - heaven, hell, monsters, angels and all - out into the light, where we can take a good look at them and perhaps come to a better understanding of who we are and what we want, and what the limits to those wants may be. Understanding the imagination is no longer a pastime, but a necessity; because increasingly, if we can imagine it, we'll be able to do it.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

California Dreaming

May 7, 2005

California Dreaming: A True Story of Computers, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

By ANDREW LEONARD

WHAT THE DORMOUSE SAID
How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.
By John Markoff.
Illustrated. 310 pp. Viking. $25.95.

Engineers can be so cute. In the early 1960's, Myron Stolaroff, an employee of the tape recorder manufacturer Ampex, decided to prove the value of consuming LSD. So he set up the International Foundation for Advanced Study and went about his project in classic methodical fashion.

Test subjects - almost all engineers - were given a series of doses under constant observation and expected to take careful notes on their own experience. A survey of the first 153 volunteers revealed that "83 percent of those who had taken LSD found that they had lasting benefits from the experience." (Other results: increase in ability to love, 78 percent; increased self-esteem, 71 percent.)Such precision might seem antithetical to the fuzzy let-it-all-hang-outness of the psychedelic experience. But John Markoff, a senior writer for The New York Times who covers technology, makes a convincing case that for the swarming ubergeeks assembling in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960's, approaching drugs as they might any other potentially helpful tool or device - from a soldering iron to a computer chip - was only natural. The goals were broad in the 60's: the world would be remade, the natural order of things reconfigured, human potential amplified to infinity. Anything that could help was to be cherished, studied and improved.

It is no accident, then, that the same patch of land on the peninsula south of San Francisco that gave birth to the Grateful Dead was also the site of groundbreaking research leading the way to the personal computer. That the two cultural impulses were linked - positively - is a provocative thesis.

Revisionist histories of the 60's often make an attempt to separate the "excess" of the era from the politics. In this view, all those acid-gobbling, pot-smoking, tie-dyed renegades were a distraction from the real work of stopping the Vietnam War and achieving social justice. But Mr. Markoff makes a surprisingly sympathetic case that it was all of a piece: the drugs, the antiauthoritarianism, the messianic belief that computing power should be spread throughout the land.

"It is not a coincidence," he writes, "that, during the 60's and early 70's, at the height of the protest against the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement and widespread experimentation with psychedelic drugs, personal computing emerged from a handful of government- and corporate-funded laboratories, as well as from the work of a small group of hobbyists who were desperate to get their hands on computers they could personally control and decide to what uses they should be put."

Judging by the record presented in "What the Dormouse Said," it is indisputable that many of the engineers and programmers who contributed to the birth of personal computing were fans of LSD, draft resisters, commune sympathizers and, to put it bluntly, long-haired hippie freaks.

This makes entertaining reading. Many accounts of the birth of personal computing have been written, but this is the first close look at the drug habits of the earliest pioneers. "What the Dormouse Said" may not reach the level of the classics of computing history, Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine" and Steven Levy's "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution." But there is still plenty of fun between its covers.

A central character - and one of the early volunteers at Stolaroff's foundation - is Douglas Engelbart, a man worthy of his own book. His team at the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute was the first to demonstrate the potential of the computing future. The research demonstration that he conducted for a packed auditorium in San Francisco in 1968 is still talked about in Silicon Valley with the reverence of those who might have witnessed Jehovah handing Moses the Ten Commandments. The mouse, man! Engelbart gave us the mouse! But Mr. Engelbart's story is not a happy one. He saw further ahead than most, but had a difficult time articulating his vision. He became heavily involved with Werner Erhard's human potential movement, EST, and his laboratory ultimately ended up losing both its way and its government financing. Many of his researchers went on to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where the first personal computer, the famous Alto, was invented, while he lapsed into semi-obscurity. As a metaphor for the 60's, which exploded with promise and ended in disarray, he's just about perfect.

Looking back at the 60's from the jaundiced perspective of the early 21st century, it's easy to wonder what was really accomplished, outside of the enduring split of the nation into two irreconcilable ideological camps. Sure, there was the civil rights campaign, women's liberation, environmentalism and a movement that eventually brought a war to heel, but the era is as likely to be ridiculed in modern memory as to be revered. But what happens if we add the birth of personal computing to the counterculture's list of achievements? Does that change the equation?

The answer depends on how one rates the personal computer as consciousness-enhancing device. Remember, after all, what the dormouse did say, in the stentorian full-throttle voice of Jefferson Airplane's Grace Slick: "Feed your head!"

By choosing that as his title, Mr. Markoff makes clear his belief that computers, like psychedelic drugs, are tools for mind expansion, for revelation and personal discovery. And to anyone who has experienced a drug-induced epiphany, there may indeed be a cosmic hyperlink there: fire up your laptop, connect wirelessly to the Internet, search for your dreams with Google: the power and the glory of the computing universe that exists now was a sci-fi fantasy not very long ago, and yes, it does pulsate with a destabilizing, revelatory psychic power. Cool!

But wasn't the goal of those 60's experimenters to make the world a better place? One has to wonder - and this is a question Mr. Markoff doesn't really address - whether the personal computer achieved that goal. Or has it only allowed all of us, heroes and villains alike, to be more productive as the world stays exactly the same?

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon.

ECOPSYCHOLOGY

ECOPSYCHOLOGY: EIGHT PRINCIPLES Theodore Roszak

In The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology, Theodore Roszak sought to formulate some general principles that might guide both environmentalists and therapists in their common project of defining a sane relationship to the world around us. The essay that follows has been adapted from the version that appears in the book.

As we approach the end of the twentieth century, there are scientists who believe we may be within sight of a Grand Unified Theory that will embrace all things, all forces, all time and matter. But will such a theory of everything, if we find it, do justice to the very act of seeking for that theory in the first place? Will it explain how a supposedly once dead universe gave rise to this single, burning point of conscious curiosity called the human mind? Certainly no scientific theory we inherit from the past has yet found a place for scientists themselves, let alone for artists, visionaries, clowns, myth-makers -- for all those who have built this second nature we call "culture" on at least one planet in the cosmos. Only within the past generation, as we have grasped the historic and evolutionary character of the cosmos, have we begun to give the questing mind a significant status in scientific theory. What unity ultimately requires is closure. The circle of theory must come round like the alchemical snake to bite its tail. What is must at last be known. Perhaps that is what underlies the eager unfolding of the natural hierarchy from the Big Bang to the human frontier: substance reaching out hungrily toward sentience. That is the simple but mighty insight that the physicist John Wheeler sought to capture in this schematic image of a universe that makes a u-turn in time to study itself through the human eye.

Oddly, this unity of the knower and the known seems to have been better appreciated by pre-scientific humans who worked from myth, image, ritual. If ecopsychology has anything to add to the Socratic-Freudian project of self-knowledge, it is to remind us of what our ancestors took to be common knowledge: there is more to know about the self, or rather more self to know, than our personal history reveals. Making a personality, the task that Jung called "individuation," may be the adventure of a lifetime. But every person's lifetime is anchored within a greater, universal lifetime. Each of us shares the whole of life's time on Earth. Salt remnants of ancient oceans flow through our veins, ashes of expired stars rekindle in our genetic chemistry. The oldest of the atoms, hydrogen whose primacy among the elements should have gained it a more poetically resonant name is a cosmic theme; mysteriously elaborated billions-fold, it has created from Nothing the Everything that includes us. When we look out into the night sky, the stars we see in the chill, receding distance may seem crushingly vast in size and number. How many times have despairing philosophers and common cynics reminded us of how small we are in comparison to the great void of space? It is the great clich‚ of modern times that we are "lost in the stars," a minuscule planet wheeling around a minor star at the outer edge of a galaxy that is only one among billions. But in truth there is no principle in science that can logically judge value by size. Neither big nor small any longer have any limit or meaning in the universe. Wonders and amazements come in all sizes. Is the universe "too big" to provide human meaning? Not at all. It is, in fact, exactly the right size. Modern cosmology teaches us that the swelling emptiness that contains us is, precisely by virtue of its magnitude, the physical matrix that makes living intelligence possible. Only a universe of this size and this temperature and this age could have produced life anywhere. Those who once believed we were cradled in the hands of God were not so very wrong after all -- at least metaphorically speaking. All this, the new place of life in the cosmos, belongs to the principles of ecopsychology, but not in any doctrinaire or purely clinical way. Psychotherapy is best played by ear. It is after all a matter of listening to the whole person, all that is submerged, unborn, in hiding: the infant, the shadow, the savage, the outcast. The list of principles we offer here is merely a guide, suggesting how deep that listening must go to hear the Self that speaks through the self. 1. The core of the mind is the ecological unconscious. For ecopsychology, repression of the ecological unconscious is the deepest root of collusive madness in industrial society. Open access to the ecological unconscious is the path to sanity. 2. The contents of the ecological unconscious represent, in some degree, at some level of mentality, the living record of cosmic evolution, tracing back to distant initial conditions in the history of time. Contemporary studies in the ordered complexity of nature tell us that life and mind emerge from this evolutionary tale as culminating natural systems within the unfolding sequence of physical, biological, mental, and cultural systems we know as "the universe." Ecopsychology draws upon these findings of the new cosmology, striving to make them real to experience. 3. Just as it has been the goal of previous therapies to recover the repressed contents of the unconscious, so the goal of ecopsychology is to awaken the inherent sense of environmental reciprocity that lies within the ecological unconscious. Other therapies seek to heal the alienation between person and person, person and family, person and society. Ecopsychology seeks to heal the more fundamental alienation between the recently created urban psyche and the age-old natural environment. 4. For ecopsychology as for other therapies, the crucial stage of development is the life of the child. The ecological unconscious is regenerated, as if it were a gift, in the newborn's enchanted sense of the world. Ecopsychology seeks to recover the child's innately animistic quality of experience in functionally "sane" adults. To do this, it turns to many sources, among them traditional healing techniques of primary people, nature mysticism as expressed in religion and art, the experience of wilderness, the insights of Deep Ecology. Thus, for example, Wordsworth's hymns to the child's love of nature are basic texts for developmental ecopsychology, a first step toward creating the ecological ego. 5. The ecological ego matures toward a sense of ethical responsibility to the planet that is as vividly experienced as our ethical responsibility to other people. It seeks to weave that responsibility into the fabric of social relations and political decisions. 6. Among the therapeutic projects most important to ecopsychology is the re-evaluation of certain compulsively "masculine" character traits that permeate our structures of political power and which drive us to dominate nature as if it were an alien and rightless realm. In this regard, ecopsychology draws significantly on the insights of ecofeminism with a view to demystifying the sexual stereotypes. 7. Whatever contributes to small scale social forms and personal empowerment nourishes the ecological ego. Whatever strives for large-scale domination and the suppression of personhood undermines the ecological ego. Ecopsychology therefore deeply questions the essential sanity of our gargantuan urban-industrial culture, whether capitalistic or collectivistic in its organization. But it does so without necessarily rejecting the technological genius of our species or some life-enhancing measure of the industrial power we have assembled. Ecopsychology is postindustrial not anti-industrial in its social orientation. 8. Ecopsychology holds that there is a synergistic interplay between planetary and personal well-being. The term "synergy" is chosen deliberately for its traditional theological connotation, which once taught that the human and divine are cooperatively linked in the quest for salvation. The contemporary ecological translation of the term might be: the needs of the planet are the needs of the person, the rights of the person are the rights of the planet. Theodore Roszak is Professor of History and Director of the Ecopsychology Institute at California State University, Hayward. His most recent books are The Voice of the Earth (Touchstone Books), and The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (Random House and Bantam Books), an ecofeminist parable based on the famous Mary Shelley story. He is the senior editor of Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind (Sierra Club Books). http://ecopsychology.athabascau.ca/Final/intro.htm

* * *

Quantum Dots to Inject Into Living Cells

The Story

Self As Metaprogrammer

" It is difficult to discuss the profound metaphysical experiences encountered within shamanic, psychedelic, and magickal practice within the context of neurochemistry without sounding mechanistic. While we can attempt to show some of the physiological processes that underlie such experiences, we can never rely solely on chemistry to explain the depth of these visions and the bizarre synchronicities and seeming violations of physical law that so often attend mystical states of consciousness. Suffice it to say that here appears to be much more going on than we suppose and the boundaries between what we imagine to be “reality”, the mind we use to interact with it, and the individual self that guides us through it all, is likely very thin and tenuous, if real at all. At best, reality is an ever-shifting map of language, emotion, associations, and chemistry, unique to every sensory apparatus in the universe. We each look at creation through our own facet of a single infinitely vast diamond, and the world may simply be the result of this infinitude of observation, nonexistent without consciousness. The only thing that is really real to us right now is what’s going on in our own heads...."


MAYBE QUARTERLY - Vol 2 / Issue 1 - Self As Metaprogrammer

Jurassic Park Here We Come!

The remains of a T. Rex with intact blood vessels and blood cells have been recovered:



The field team used standard procedure as they excavated the bones, wrapping them in plaster jackets before transporting them..

This particular dinosaur fossil was too big to lift and they reluctantly cracked a thighbone.

Usually paleontologists put preservatives on fossils right away, but Schweitzer has been trying to find soft tissue in dinosaur fossils, so this one was left alone.

FULL MONTY

Messing with the mind

Review of:
The 21st Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind
by Steven Rose

"The modern emphasis on being the best you can be in a competitive marketplace is a great normalising force that will drive the uptake of any proffered brain fix. A drug like Ritalin is the perfect example. Some eight million US kids pop such pills so they fit better into the classroom. Rather than society adjusting to the individual, the individual is tailoring him or herself to society. So, asks Rose, what happens when some of the expected steroids for the mind come along - the drugs being developed to treat memory loss in Alzheimer's or boost blood flow in tired brains? Surely, just as in sport, they will become impossible for university students and City traders to resist even if the known side-effects are severe. As a vision of dystopia, this may not be exactly Orwellian. But the "user pays" model is unsettling none the less..."

FULL MONTY

The Fembots Are Here

"When asked if she is a robot, she says, "Y.e.s, I. a.m. a. r.o.b.o.t" in a disconnected voice and moves about clumsily. A moment later, she says "Just kidding" and starts a natural flow of movements."

FULL MONTY

Premodern America

"...These days, as I gleefully strip away more and more advertising from my life—by means of HBO, a digital video recorder, and satellite radio—state-of-the-art early-21st-century media thus begins to look still more mid-nineteenth.



The configuration and mind-set of the mainstream media in the last half of the last century aren’t the only givens in our recent past that now appear somewhat historically anomalous. Everywhere I look, the nineteenth century is creeping back. The swinging mix-and-match cultural hodgepodge of the past 25 years, marked by the blurring and erasure of easy distinctions between high culture and pop, is called postmodern, but in fact it’s a very premodern circumstance, more 1850 (when a single night at the theater might encompass Shakespeare and vaudeville) than 1950..."

FULL MONTY

Miyazaki and Oshii: Anime's clashing titans

"Oshii is the godfather of a futuristic anime style called cyberpunk, and the synapses of anime fans are still quivering from his 'Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence,' released last year to great fanfare in Japan and a more cautious critical endorsement in the United States.



The film resumes the plot of his 1995 cult hit 'Ghost in the Shell,' praised by the Wachowski brothers as their inspiration for 'The Matrix.' The sequel trails Batou, a Descartes-spouting lug of an anti-terrorist cop as he wends through the morally weary world of 2032. He is trying to find out why gynoids, robots custom-built in female form for sexual company, have gone on a murderous rampage. But Batou is a human spirit living in a mechanized body. And he lives in a time when the bad guys can hack into your brain and download phony ideas and memories just to mess with you."

MORE

View From the Blogsphere

Andy Warhol might have seen it all coming when he uttered the phrase, "Someday, everybody will be famous for 15 minutes." What we now know, fame or not, our ability to express ourselves to the outside world is a 24/7 possibility. We have the blog.

The rapid rise of the Blogosphere has caught virtually everyone by surprise. Bloggers have already proven the keyboard is mightier than not only the sword, but also an entire office full of keyboards. Just ask Dan Rather and CBS.

What we are witnessing is no less than an entire revolution in the world of free expression, not seen since 1436 when Gutenberg invented the printing press. For the first time in history, one person could transmit a single idea to the masses. Now the masses can transmit their ideas to the masses. With over 4 million of your neighbors and friends now blogging, the revolution has begun. So what is the future of blogs? Will they become more than mere online journals with bad spelling and mangled grammar?

For a clue, think television. The first direction a new form of media usually delivers is a repackaging of all that came before it. The first round of television programming was essentially taken from radio: quiz shows, serial dramas, and news. The Internet is in a similar stage of development, repackaging television programming and print news, streaming numerous radio stations and movie trailers, and now blogging.

As the competition in the marketplace of ideas becomes more intense, blogs must evolve. They must become sexier, using media-rich content such as video, photos, and audio. Some blogs will resemble magazines; others, 24-hour cable news . Serious bloggers will want all the tools the networks have, such as satellite feeds, and they will become a filter of news for the rest of us who do not have the time to sift through mountains of information. Text-only sites will be viewed as dinosaurs as the MTV generation matures into middle age. And as media and audiences become more sophisticated, quality of content must keep pace.

Everyone will have the ability to broadcast. What will drive traffic and generate an audience will not only be the publishers' commitment to ideas, but also a seamless delivery of content in real time. The recent tsunami coverage shows how the democracy of information works. Within hours, we were all connected to the most hard-hit areas. A digital camera and a laptop with a broadband connection are all that is required for entry into this new dynamic and decentralized media landscape.

This decentralization of information will also greatly change the revenue models of media. Today, audience size translates directly into dollars. Web sites with the most users charge the highest rates. In the coming world of Sexy Blog, political and societal change will also be important benchmarks. The number of eyeballs will be far less important than the behavior attached to those eyeballs.

For example the Parents Television Council, a family values group, generates indecency complaints through its web site - 99.8% of all indecency complaints about content on the Internet in 2003, according to the FCC. The number of visitors to this site is irrelevant. They have already shown the power to change public policy. As outgoing FCC commissioner Michael Powell said, "Hey, it doesn't matter where these complaints came from. These are still Americans being outraged."

On the left, sites such as MoveOn.org have showed a tremendous ability to organize their users in a way that was unthinkable just a few years ago. They not only delivered 500 people in the middle of a cornfield during the 2004 Iowa Caucus, they also influenced major corporations as evidenced during their organized boycott of Sinclair Broadcasting. Pepsi is just one sponsor that pulled ads due to broadcasts that seemed biased.

The revolution will also fuel the need for tools that simplify the creation of content. Take iPod, for example. Phase two of the revolution has begun with "pod-casting." A pod-cast is like an audio magazine. Users receive regular audio programs delivered via the Internet to listen to at their leisure. Music novices can now "program" playlists and be their own disc jockeys.

The Internet is a vehicle that gives personal taste global distribution. Now that everyone can be a media guru, how will users sift through the near infinite stream of ideas and content? If a million trees fall in the forest, will there be enough ears for their crash to be heard? The anticipated answer is that virtual communities will hear.

A virtual community is no different from a real one. Both are made up of self selecting members who have similar needs and interests. Internet communities have rules and guidelines that participants must follow, and volunteer watchdogs ensure that bloggers follow these rules. Offenders are banished from the collective. And perhaps most importantly, consensus will be achieved as a byproduct of this community sharing resources.

To create the sexiness needed for this model to succeed, two opposite entities will need to merge: technologists and content creators. So far, attempts at this new synergy have been shotgun weddings with less than stellar results. Big technology companies such as Microsoft have bought smaller content companies, such as Mondo Music, seeking to assimilate these new employees and their ideas into their corporate hive. It hasn't worked. Microsoft understands very well how ones and zeros can create useful software. What it doesn't do well is create great platforms for creativity and individuality. The AOL/Time Warner merger is another example of how not to create the next killer application. The cultural clash between software engineers and creatives is just too vast to allow a win-win.

The desired synergy must be left to smaller, more nimble companies who understand how to generate and maintain an audience. The emergence of sexy blogs is, by definition, a creative process. Sophisticated bloggers will be far more interested in sharing ideas than creating video compression software. These bloggers will naturally align themselves with companies that can provide simple and easy-to-use tools. A great violinist's job is not to create and manufacture a Stradivarius. It is to use the gift of music to create emotion in others.

That opportunity awaits you right around the cyber corner.

http://WWW.SHAKEITUPBABY.COM/archives/2005/02/view_from_the_b_1.html

AUDIO Interview with Joi Ito

Christopher Lydon Interviews...

Visitor from the Next Planet: Joi Ito MP3

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ml/output.pl/35503/download/ito.mp3

Joi Ito could make you feel better about the digitized global time, space, psychology and politics that we're all, willy nilly, entering. He has been living out there all his 37 years, bobbing and weaving between Japan, the States and Canada through his school years (college never completed). He's been dancing with Internet technology since his childhood, politicking, investing, thinking hard about democracy and business, writing, making friends and taking pictures all the way. And famously blogging. It's been a "continuous identity crisis," he says, a link with Colin Powell, whom he admires. Joi Ito was a disk jockey in Chicago before he rerooted himself in Tokyo. His family heritage, through a dozen generations, is study and teaching. One of his great-grandfathers tutored the Emperor of Japan in geography. "I am trying to understand at a meta-level what we, the globe, are about," he said in our conversation this morning. "Most Japanese think I am very Japanese... Most Americans feel that I understand how they feel." He slings VC lingo and the table talk of too many Davos economic summits. But he gets invited back to those places, I conclude, for the clarity of his big vision of adhesive networks that could heal the species. Our introductory gab over coffee in his hotel room today is here in two 15-minute pieces: Part One is Joi Ito's account of this blogging tipping-point, a technological and social convergence at a moment when institutional media have become part of the world's problem. Part Two is his close observation of digital communities in real life, starting with his own round-the-clock, round-the-world chat space, which has regulars, guests, events and even a chaplain, "like MASH," he said. The Internet has become "a working anarchy" with redemptive possibilities if we "allow the interesting memes inside this diversity to emerge."

Ethics, Technology, and Posthuman Communities

Essays in Philosophy
The Philosophy of Technology
via political theory daily

Ethics, Technology, and Posthuman Communities
Steven Benko
Essays in Philosophy

What is needed if there is to be a critical theory of technology is a posthumanism that articulates the best of humanism-reason, individuality, and respect for others-without requiring belief in a shared human nature that marginalizes and alienates others. While one would think speciesism or anthropocentrism would at least bring people of different genders, races, ages, religions, and sexual orientations together, the idea of a shared human nature-no matter how broadly conceived-has the effect of being more exclusive than inclusive. Humanism, though it claims to speak for all humans, imposes limits on what characteristics and traits qualify as human.7 What is needed is a critical theory of technology that does not repeat the essentialisms of humanism and does not lead to the anarchy, solipsism and amorality that some technological posthumanisms invite. This proposal would be a reconstructive posthumanism that would be arbitrated by the possibility of solidarity among individuals who assume responsibility for the uniqueness of the other, a uniqueness announced by the practical and symbolic uses of technology that point towards new understandings of what it means to be human, the good for humans, and what defines a moral community. This reconstructive posthumanism is found in merging Levinas's ethics of responsibility for the other with the posthuman view that while subjectivity and technology are culturally determined, together they resist normalizing and essentializing views of both. Understanding that on an individual level, the practical and symbolic uses of technology make the individual other and other than human, Levinas's definition of solidarity as a quest for justice emerging from responsibility for the uniqueness of the other allows for a critical theory of technology that considers the ethicality of the technology, the individual who uses that technology, and their vision of what it means to be human and live among others. Two examples, one technophobic, the other technophilic,8 demonstrate the ways that a humanist understanding of what it means to be human either fails to articulate a sophisticated response to technology or uses ethical language to reinforce its own normativity and in doing so can be used to marginalize and exclude people.... (more)

Can This Black Box See Into the Future?

DEEP in the basement of a dusty university library in Edinburgh lies a small black box, roughly the size of two cigarette packets side by side, that churns out random numbers in an endless stream.

At first glance it is an unremarkable piece of equipment. Encased in metal, it contains at its heart a microchip no more complex than the ones found in modern pocket calculators.

But, according to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events.

The machine apparently sensed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened - but in the fevered mood of conspiracy theories of the time, the claims were swiftly knocked back by sceptics. But last December, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian tsunami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic tragedy.

Now, even the doubters are acknowledging that here is a small box with apparently inexplicable powers.

THE FULL MONTY

Bruce Sterling - What's a science fiction writer doing hanging out with designers anyway?

"...Perhaps you don’t believe that the quest for the transcendental will cause you to fall into the pit of human squalor, going down with all hands like a struggling mastodon. But it is the higher truth. Consider Wernher von Braun, the European interplanetary rocket visionary. He aimed at the stars and hit London. What are those big, shiny space rockets for? Ideally, for escaping the grip of gravity and touching the face of the cosmos. But they’re also for annihilating children as they sleep in their beds.The harder you aim for that first goal, the more likely it is that you’ll hit the second. You want something closer to home? How about cyberspace. The early rhetoric was all about the Internet’s weightless, idealist, transcendent, light-speed, anonymous, virtualizing qualities. But look at the Internet 15 years later: It’s a filthy, carnal place. Almost every form of rip-off, fraud and human chicanery imaginable plays some kind of role on the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is riddled with holes, infested with viruses and bugs. It’s a seething, septic mess. Don’t be disillusioned. We’re getting a valuable message here. We need to create the kind of society that understands this on a bone-deep level...."

Full Monty

Hedonic Tantra, by Erik Davis

"Goa has become the site, both mythical and historical, for a sort of tantric hand-off between an earlier generation of Western trance dancers and today's psychedelic ravers. Whether or not Goa is the core source of rave spirituality, the freak colony has grown into a spiritual origin, a source."



Hedonic Tantra, by Erik Davis

Waking Dream, by Erik Davis

An interview with filmmaker Richard Linklater about the ultimate head flick Waking Life. " I think what these things are getting at is to point out how your brain really flows, or how thoughts follow thoughts, or how the narrative of your own thinking unfolds, or the narrative of your own life. This process is very digressive and it has no set path, and it does fold in on itself...I was trying to get closer to my feelings of how the brain worked, and how this shit kind of unfolds."

Waking Dream, by Erik Davis

TECHNOREALISM

In this heady age of rapid technological change, we all struggle to maintain our bearings. The developments that unfold each day in communications and computing can be thrilling and disorienting. One understandable reaction is to wonder: Are these changes good or bad? Should we welcome or fear them?

The answer is both. Technology is making life more convenient and enjoyable, and many of us healthier, wealthier, and wiser. But it is also affecting work, family, and the economy in unpredictable ways, introducing new forms of tension and distraction, and posing new threats to the cohesion of our physical communities.

Despite the complicated and often contradictory implications of technology, the conventional wisdom is woefully simplistic. Pundits, politicians, and self-appointed visionaries do us a disservice when they try to reduce these complexities to breathless tales of either high-tech doom or cyber-elation. Such polarized thinking leads to dashed hopes and unnecessary anxiety, and prevents us from understanding our own culture.

Over the past few years, even as the debate over technology has been dominated by the louder voices at the extremes, a new, more balanced consensus has quietly taken shape. This document seeks to articulate some of the shared beliefs behind that consensus, which we have come to call technorealism.

Technorealism demands that we think critically about the role that tools and interfaces play in human evolution and everyday life. Integral to this perspective is our understanding that the current tide of technological transformation, while important and powerful, is actually a continuation of waves of change that have taken place throughout history. Looking, for example, at the history of the automobile, television, or the telephone -- not just the devices but the institutions they became -- we see profound benefits as well as substantial costs. Similarly, we anticipate mixed blessings from today's emerging technologies, and expect to forever be on guard for unexpected consequences -- which must be addressed by thoughtful design and appropriate use.

As technorealists, we seek to expand the fertile middle ground between techno-utopianism and neo-Luddism. We are technology "critics" in the same way, and for the same reasons, that others are food critics, art critics, or literary critics. We can be passionately optimistic about some technologies, skeptical and disdainful of others. Still, our goal is neither to champion nor dismiss technology, but rather to understand it and apply it in a manner more consistent with basic human values.

Below are some evolving basic principles that help explain technorealism.

PRINCIPLES OF TECHNOREALISM

1. Technologies are not neutral.

A great misconception of our time is the idea that technologies are completely free of bias -- that because they are inanimate artifacts, they don't promote certain kinds of behaviors over others. In truth, technologies come loaded with both intended and unintended social, political, and economic leanings. Every tool provides its users with a particular manner of seeing the world and specific ways of interacting with others. It is important for each of us to consider the biases of various technologies and to seek out those that reflect our values and aspirations.

2. The Internet is revolutionary, but not Utopian.

The Net is an extraordinary communications tool that provides a range of new opportunities for people, communities, businesses, and government. Yet as cyberspace becomes more populated, it increasingly resembles society at large, in all its complexity. For every empowering or enlightening aspect of the wired life, there will also be dimensions that are malicious, perverse, or rather ordinary.

3. Government has an important role to play on the electronic frontier.

Contrary to some claims, cyberspace is not formally a place or jurisdiction separate from Earth. While governments should respect the rules and customs that have arisen in cyberspace, and should not stifle this new world with inefficient regulation or censorship, it is foolish to say that the public has no sovereignty over what an errant citizen or fraudulent corporation does online. As the representative of the people and the guardian of democratic values, the state has the right and responsibility to help integrate cyberspace and conventional society.

Technology standards and privacy issues, for example, are too important to be entrusted to the marketplace alone. Competing software firms have little interest in preserving the open standards that are essential to a fully functioning interactive network. Markets encourage innovation, but they do not necessarily insure the public interest.

4. Information is not knowledge.

All around us, information is moving faster and becoming cheaper to acquire, and the benefits are manifest. That said, the proliferation of data is also a serious challenge, requiring new measures of human discipline and skepticism. We must not confuse the thrill of acquiring or distributing information quickly with the more daunting task of converting it into knowledge and wisdom. Regardless of how advanced our computers become, we should never use them as a substitute for our own basic cognitive skills of awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment.

5. Wiring the schools will not save them.

The problems with America's public schools -- disparate funding, social promotion, bloated class size, crumbling infrastructure, lack of standards -- have almost nothing to do with technology. Consequently, no amount of technology will lead to the educational revolution prophesied by President Clinton and others. The art of teaching cannot be replicated by computers, the Net, or by "distance learning." These tools can, of course, augment an already high-quality educational experience. But to rely on them as any sort of panacea would be a costly mistake.

6. Information wants to be protected.

It's true that cyberspace and other recent developments are challenging our copyright laws and frameworks for protecting intellectual property. The answer, though, is not to scrap existing statutes and principles. Instead, we must update old laws and interpretations so that information receives roughly the same protection it did in the context of old media. The goal is the same: to give authors sufficient control over their work so that they have an incentive to create, while maintaining the right of the public to make fair use of that information. In neither context does information want "to be free." Rather, it needs to be protected.

7. The public owns the airwaves; the public should benefit from their use.

The recent digital spectrum giveaway to broadcasters underscores the corrupt and inefficient misuse of public resources in the arena of technology. The citizenry should benefit and profit from the use of public frequencies, and should retain a portion of the spectrum for educational, cultural, and public access uses. We should demand more for private use of public property.

8. Understanding technology should be an essential component of global citizenship.

In a world driven by the flow of information, the interfaces -- and the underlying code -- that make information visible are becoming enormously powerful social forces. Understanding their strengths and limitations, and even participating in the creation of better tools, should be an important part of being an involved citizen. These tools affect our lives as much as laws do, and we should subject them to a similar democratic scrutiny.

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Since March 12, 1998, over 2500 people have signed their names to these principles. Here's the current list of names, and here's how you can add your own.

Contact the drafters of the document.

http://www.technorealism.org
TECHNOREALISM

Chapel of Sacred Mirrors

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Alex Grey's Sacred Mirrors gallery is on view in impressive Flash and non-Flash form. Whatever you may think of his calling the exhibition a "chapel", the imagery is undeniably psychedelic in the best sense...

Chapel of Sacred Mirrors