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