“Man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.” – Julian Huxley

“Transhumanism is the philosophy that we can and should develop to higher levels, physically, mentally and socially using rational methods.” – Dr. Anders Sandburg

“[Transhumanism is] a strange liberation movement” [that wants] “nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints.” – Francis Fukuyama

“Transhumanism is the idea that new technologies are likely to change the world so much in the next century or two that our descendants will in many ways no longer be ‘human’” – Dr. Robin Hanson

“Transhumanism is the doctrine that we can and should become more than human.” – Mitch Porter

“Transhumanism is a class of philosophies that seek to guide us towards a posthuman condition. Transhumanism shares many elements of humanism, including a respect for reason and science, a commitment to progress, and a valuing of human (or transhuman) existence in this life [..]. Transhumanism differs from humanism in recognizing and anticipating the radical alterations in the nature and possibilities of our lives resulting from various sciences and technologies[…]” – Dr. Max Moore

I want to share something with you – probably the most important thing I’ve told you in these pages.  It’s not quite a secret, though you probably won’t hear it this way from anyone at the Singularity Summit.  Still, it is the single most important thing you will ever learn about the “Transhumanist movement.”

There is no such thing as Transhumanism.

Don’t ignore the bulk of Transhumanist and Extropian research and writing.  Don’t ignore the  vast amount of pontificating on post-singularity existance.  Don’t ignore the ten-thousand dollar a head business day camps and the tech seminars and the religious zealots who desperately need a mind-controlling conspiracy to oppose.  All of that work and thought and effort is very real and, even if you’re just hearing about Transhumanism in the last couple of years you will see these things trickle into your life in the most unexpected places.

That’s because Transhumanism is real.

What do you think of when you think of Transhumans?  Life extension. Cyborgs.  Artificial Intelligence.  Uploading. Skynet. Nanoswarms. Uplifted octopi. Geoengineering. Sex-bots.

What if I asked you to think about examples of Transhumanism in the present?  Life extension. Athletes with prosthetics.  Prosthetic faces. RFID chips. Artificial eyes. Printable organs. Transexuals.  Rudimentary robots.  Industrial exoskeletons.  Military exoskeletons. Genetically Modified Organisms.  Artificial life. Patenting genomes. Augmented Reality. Sex-bots.

What if I asked that question in 1990?  1970? 1960?

It’s pretty easy to answer in these decades.  There’s a wealth of books and articles and essays and failing that, it’s simple to turn to fiction as the decades move backwards.   Implants hook antiheroes to computers beneath skies the colour of dead televisions while FM-2030 tries to open eyes to Transhumanity in the 80’s before his date with an Alcor storage chamber and hopeful cold resurrection.

The term “Transhuman” wasn’t coined until 1957, so before then to ask our hypothetical question, we might have to be a bit more descriptive.  Still, if you conjured an image of human and technological hybridity for the advancement of the human organism in years prior you’d get different but amazingly similar images as you traveled back to the industrial revolution and beyond.

There would be repeating themes as you traveled back – immortality, health, flight, a desire to be smarter/faster/stronger.  After that, though, you’d be left with  - just as our technological obsessions reveal, today – the image of humanity in the interviewee’s eyes.

Transhumanism – the desire to refine the human vessel and spirit into something more via technology is not new.  As Erik Davis points out in his book TechGnosis – this drive has been there as far as we know how to look back to.  The tools are new but the aims are the same.   Yesterday’s mysticism beget yesterday’s alchemy, which brought the enlightenment, which brought industrialization, which brought futurism and today, we call the mass of thoughts surrounding this drive “Transhumanism.” (Or better still: Extropianism, which is a more specific and technically precise term but one that hasn’t permeated the popular consciousness, yet.)

Here’s the trick of it, though.  Many individuals when discussing Transhumanism, get tied up in the technology aspect of it and the miss the forest for the trees because the trees seem to be growing human tissue.  To consider Transhumanism a movement, you have to realize that it is refering to a series of events that began when Grock picked up his first rock.

Transhumanism is a name applied to a kind of thinking concerning technological hybridity.  It is a mathematics that adds human to a variable to get Human Plus, which in turn is added to a variable and a new result is produced.

This isn’t new.  We’ve been a tool-using species for a hell of a long time.  Grok plus a rock for hitting things was Grok Plus.  Grock with a rock and fire was the Grok Kurzweil of his time.   It might have been a low-bandwith exchange, but Grok was changed by his usage of tools as much as he used his tools to change his environment.

We have always been human/technology hybrids.

Throk has symbols and sounds.  Those symbols become language.  Language both changes how the brain works and jacks Throk and his descendants into the very first augmented reality.  Throck pointing at a symbol on the wall and evoking a wolf shares the same technological space as my pointing at a wolf made of prims in Second Life as a kid pointing at the wolf on an AR display in Tokyo.   Throk has the killer app and from now on everyone will have proto-Augmented Reality and someday it will be so ingrained and natural that we will be unable to uninstall it.

Throk begat a species of Transhumans who will always have self-upgrading versions of Language installed.  Even if for some freak reason the app doesn’t get installed, the wetware will still be optimized to use it.

Language and tools gave us discernible culture – a whole series of interlocking technologies that are designed to propagate and spread and protect the clients who have it installed.  Culture becomes agriculture and suddenly everything changes all over again.  The technologies of agriculture make humans change their lives around them.

Transhumanism is concerned with events that began before the dawn of recorded history.  Transhumanism – as most people will present it to you – does not exist because the core concern of Transhumanity is the Human condition itself.

Human history is Transhuman history.  We have always been a species using technology to transform ourselves, make ourselves better or even just figure out what “better” means.

In fact I’ll go out on a limb here and lay out my most tightly held belief - I’m not a big believer in “human nature” but if there is one facet of human nature that I believe in it’s this:

The nature of mankind is to transcend itself.

The urge for technological transcendence and refinement – and the follow-through upon it is not new.  What changes is the scale and complexity involved.  Things become more complex, which creates change at a faster and faster rate however; while the shells may be moving faster and there may be more of them – the game remains the same.

William Godwin tells his daughter Mary Shelley about the link between liberty and human immortality as elsewhen Thomas Aquinas St. Ambrose performs the nearly miraculous act of reading silently without moving his lips.  Agriculture causes a vast population boom, but also creates the conditions that will one day develop into global war, ecological disaster, patriarchy, and genocide.

Fukuyama who has devoted his life to Capitalism and Democracy proclaims that Transhumanism is a threat even though Capitalism in and of itself is a technology designed to propagate and maneuver goods, services and currency which are all in and of themselves technologies designed to enhance or expand the human condition.  Francis Fukuyama is a Transhumanist, too.

Transhuman technologies heal your diseases, bind your wounds, purify and pollute your air.   Memory palaces made the mind bigger, psychedelics make the ego membrane more permeable.   The internet makes us smarter or maybe it just makes us faster at being shallow.

Transhumanism does not exist, because it is an illusion.   It is a construct that allows the examination of Humanity through a lens that makes the implicit hybridization of the human organism and technology explicit.   It is a trick of the eye to try and help us not suffer ontological shock when the future comes and it is both different from the one we expected and filled with changes to ourselves.   Each generation takes technologies and normalizes them – moving them from the realm of the strange and the Other into their accepted schema of how the world works.  Glass eyes move on to artificial hearts, to personal internet  to sex changes to better-than-human prosthetics.

This is how it works, because this is how it has always worked.

There is no such thing as Transhumanism. And that is why it is such an important and vital concept at its core when stripped of the commercial baggage.

Transhumanism is a story we tell ourselves in order to recover from the culturally-stagnating and dangerous idea that we as humans are separate from and somehow not responsible for our technologies.  And in that way, while it is a fiction, it is a useful fiction – a minor trick of mental prestidigitation that people of all types can use to contextualize themselves in the ever more complex and constantly transforming narratives of history.

It’s the eternal romance that even though the dancers may change – somewhere out there, humanity will still be dancing.

I was trying to ignore this one, but it seems to be the story of the day.

Thankfully, the reaction far and wide seems to be one of incredulity, or else I’d have to have a long slow cry over a glass of scotch regarding the state of the internet.  As it is, I’ll stick to the scotch.

Ryan Singel over at Wired’s Threat Level broke the story* regarding the latest horror to target our kids in the US – of course I’m talking about iDosing.

That’s right, your standard binaural beats are being packaged by at least one clueless Oklahoma school district and ratings-starved, journalist-devoid local CW affiliate as the newest cyber-danger to cyber-come from cyber-space to cyber-molest your cyber-children under your very own cyber-nose.

Which is to say, that if you live in Oklahoma, your tax dollars are paying for someone at the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics to actually be worried that kids are “getting high” off of music and noise and that it will lead them to harder non-cyber-drugs.

ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS?

I normally try and restrain myself on here, but I’m out of ways to wittily articulate the tax-dollar supported stupidity on display here, so I’ll try and make this brief.

If you are a school board member/Oklahoma narcotics officer/journalist/parent concerned that there are now cyber-drugs going in the ears of innocent children, I’d encourage you to do one of two things:

Step 1: Get on the internet and make a vague attempt to educate yourself.  Yes, we all know that Chris Hanson has told you that the internet is a living meat-pyramid of pedophiles, but really, it’s not that bad.  If you don’t at least have a clue regarding cyber-anything, how are you supposed to know a cyber-drug if you see it?   And if you’re on the official drug enforcement end of things you have no right to enforce cyber-jack-all without knowing what the hell you’re actually cyber-doing.

And if you can’t be bothered to do the 5 minutes of looking to realize this has been around for ages, and is a technique on CDs, in music, and in movies and not just on shady ripoff websites designed to make a quick buck off of the fact that you won’t let your kids have the good shit, then we move on to the next option:

Step 2: Go fuck yourself. Seriously, if you’re actually, really concerned about iDosing, then you are in fact not tall enough to ride this ride and are a contributing factor to why we can’t have nice things. Stop letting waxen-faced local news personalities fill your head with fear – which might be hard since it is the drug they’re peddling and it’s probably your drug of choice – and check yourself…

…before you wiggity-wreck yourself, or make a goddamn ass out of yourself in front of your kids and the rest of the world.

Merciful Vishnu, wait till they get a load of the the Brown Note.

[*Actually the first time I ever saw it was over on Technoccult, but every panic on the internet makes everything new again.]

[Via Wired: Threat Level, Technoccult]

Then one morning, you log into Facebook and see insurance companies asking questions about organ harvesting and sales.  And as videos of fire vortexes and environmental disaster play in the background, you can’t help but wonder if you took that wrong turn into the Grim Cyberpunk Future. (Or the Alphaverse.)

I recently came to the chilling conclusion that we are watching the battle for the human species play out today, and not on the eve of the Grim Meathook Future or the Singularity as I’d hoped.  Something with stakes that big, you’d think would involve at least a few lasers or robot gladiators battling it out for the survival of the future.   Instead, what I found myself watching was the P2P downloads scene.

And, if my initial realization held any water – it wasn’t looking good for Team Humans.

I don’t think it’d surprise or offend anyone if I suggested that we’re enmeshed in many systems that trade off long term survivability for short term prosperity.  It’s pretty clear that if non-renewable resources are continually stripped and burnt through and the rate of consumption of renewable resources  surpasses the renewal rate that we’re kind of screwed in a long-term scenario.    Capitalism (as it is currently expressed) and religious faith in market forces have brought us to a point where if there are not drastic changes in resource management, alternative fuels and materials and distribution of wealth soon (the sooner the better) then the long-term future is looking pretty grim.

(I say “as it is currently expressed” because honestly I don’t have any better, workable ideas than Capitalism.  As far as I’m concerned, Capitalism is that trashy bar right across the county line in a dry county in the US.  It may not be where I’d like to be; the drinks are watered down, and sometimes there are fights, but they’re the only game in town.  Until it stops being a dry county, at least.)

And, as I often point out, its not a good sign that we haven’t figured out how to distribute water, food and shelter in anything resembling an efficient or civilized fashion.

Like a lot of wannabe utopianists or futurists, the hope that I’ve always held out for in the hopes that factors would change and make civilization not just profitable and expansive but sustainable and workable in the human long-game is the creation of a post-scarcity economy.

It could be a by-product of the Singularity or perhaps the Singularity itself, a by-product of a shift up in humanity’s Kardashev level, or just a result of people deciding that this long term survival thing is actually pretty important; but the post-scarcity economy has been my holy grail for a long time now. My thinking has always been that while post-scarcity won’t be a panacea by any means, it would certainly give people ample chances to solve the problems of this world, get out to new worlds, and fall prey to a lot less of the petty squabbling that leads to  continued cycles of human on human violence in the here and now.   I’m by far not the first or last person to think that way; even Marxisim’s endgame was arguably the creation of a post-scarcity environment.

Except, I look at the extant examples of post-scarcity in action and… well…  that’s not going too well, is it?  I’m talking about P2P technology of course.  (I’ll make this quick, without turning this into a rant about piracy.)

Way back when, a Thing was a Thing;  an object occupying physical space, requiring resources to produce and distribute.  It was limited.  To take one Thing and make another of it required equal amounts of resources.  But digital Things (or Things that could be digitally reconstructed) require only a minute fraction of resources of the original to reproduce and distribute.  The question becomes, not “What is the worth of an item factoring in factoring in the limitations of resources?” but “What is the worth of an item that can be copied near-infinitely with minimal expense?”

The answer to that question isn’t clear cut – nor should it be.  It’s probably somewhere between “absolutely nothing!” and the $382 trillion in losses the Pirate Bay is supposedly responsible for, alone.   Instead of lawsuits, you’d think the logical thing to do would be to really sit down and look at the questions P2P and digital media raises about the nature of Things.  And there are some people doing that, but they tend to not be the ones with the giant legal teams.  In fact, let’s look at the resistance the emergence of a post-scarcity economy in the middle of a Capitalist scarcity economy generates:

• Corporate agencies like the MPAA and the RIAA attempt to censor the ability to search for common words on some parts of the internet, because it might match a product they claim to represent – and succeed.
• In the UK, the recently passed Digital Economy Act essentially makes it punishable to even be accused of accessing copyrighted data and includes provisions for website screening and banning publicly accessed wi-fi.
• The US, the EU, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea and Singapore are currently in honest-to-god secret talks to develop the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that would “profoundly restrict the fundamental rights and freedoms of European citizens, most notably the freedom of expression and communication privacy.”
• P2P service LimeWire gets fined $1 billion for copyright infirngement wheras BP gets fined $75 million for the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

And that’s all from just a very quick glance at my RSS feed.  There is a lot more demonizing of “non-infringing” p2p for the sake of stopping piracy or pedophiles, companies turning to draconian DRM (DRM itself being a form of artificial scarcity) and it is only going to get worse.   But this isn’t just about piracy.

This is about what happens next.

A friend of mine who collects action figures shows me a custom mod of an Optimus Prime Transformer figure.  I asked him how much it bugged him to dismantle a classic figure and he smiles and tells me he just scanned the parts he needed of his old one with a 3D scanner and built most of the new one with a 3D Printer.   And that’s just one example of how 3D printing is slipping into my everyday life.  We’re rapidly approaching the point where duplicating Things for a fraction of the original resources is easy - and by “rapidly approaching” I mean people you know are rapid prototyping and cloning items as we speak.   It’s not too much of a jump to think we’re not that far from something resembling nano-assembling – rendering ideas like “original” meaningless.  We’re exceedingly close the age where “remix culture” can remix Things with nearly the ease it can remix digital media.

But how will we react?   Will we put DRM on food so it can’t be mass produced?  Will we attempt to limit access to production engines?  Will we allow “market forces” to keep the poor needy while the top 1% don’t even have a concept of need?  Will we rush out to buy iMakers that scan the net to ensure anything you’re producing isn’t a component of a copyrighted product or recipe – or that only produce “family safe” products?

The P2P scene and the legal and legislative battles around it worldwide is not just about Piracy.  Piracy is part of it of course, but this is also where the post-scarcity future is being test-bedded.  What should be a conversation about the nature of Things and how we assign value to them becomes a war to ensure the new technologies become all but illegal, even for “non-infringing uses.”

There is a story about Nikola Tesla and J.P. Morgan.   The story claims that Tesla – who was being backed by Morgan at the time – went to Morgan and demonstrated that he had figured out how to generate free electricity on a large scale.  Tesla, the story says, had discovered how to eliminate scarcity from power distribution.  Morgan pulled his backing immediately, because, as we can easily imagine, his fortune and his vision of a future with himself and his ilk at the top of the food chain required only one thing in abundance: scarcity.  True or not, the tale is a good mirror of how things stand now.  Those systems and people and companies and governments that rely on scarcity to maintain wealth and power want the promise of P2P technologies to die on the vine – and that doesn’t bode well for what’s next.  (And let’s stop for a moment and consider how many institutions rely on people not having enough of what they need to maintain their existence.  Would it be going too far to suggest that any institution that relies on scarcity for its income and power is in fact an Enemy of the Future?)

Now I hope this is just what change looks like when you’re immersed in it, and that on the other side of this is a real post-scarcity economy so humanity can get to work on being better instead of keeping everyone in the mud.  But when, like me, you’re preaching the gospel of better living through technology and you watch the technology that could help make that life better continually get burnt down by people anxious to protect their wealth, it makes you worry just a bit.  And the whole mess is just another reminder that the Future isn’t a place further up the timeline, it is the thing we are building right now.

I’ll make this quick, because honestly?  It’s about Facebook and we all have better things to be doing with our time than talking about Facebook – that’s what the rest of the internet is for.

Here’s the deal: Facebook – after the incredible success of their Facebook Connect program from a few years back – is now launching their Open Graph program.  They’re exposing pretty much all of their user information to third parties and making a lot of formerly “private” information “outward facing” by default. Why?  Well, the Open Graph system allows all sorts of sites to connect and interact with each other via Facebook.  It’s Facebook Connect on steroids.   Pandora will know via Yelp via Facebook (and Facebook Presence) what clubs you like to hang out at and will deliver content based on that.   Facebook kind-of already works like that, with you being able to use your FB login to access a wide range of websites and link a lot of content back to FB.  The Open Graph is like that, only a great deal more pervasive, and some say invasive.

Now, as a Facebook user, you’ve already agreed to all of this.  As they were keen to repeat at the recent f8: Hacking the Graph conference:

“So we’re absolutely clear: nothing we’re announcing today changes any of the existing privacy settings.”

If you use their service, then its Facebook’s world, you’re just posting in it.

Let’s be clear here, I’m not endorsing Facebook, their activities, or their business model.  This is a company that gladly rolled around in bed with Zynga – the wildly popular social game developer and admitted scammer and purveyor of viruses and malware.  This is also the company that tried to change its TOS to allow them to keep any of your information, be it personal or user generated content, even if you stopped using their service.

The current Facebook Terms of Service allow them to move your information around in the way that they’re currently implementing.  Just because years ago they said that they would never do it – but here, sign this thing we’ll never use that gives us the right to do it “just in case” – doesn’t make their turning around and finding new ways to use your digital footprint to generate revenue a surprise.

Privacy concerns for Facebook users aside, what does this all mean?

Well, as some of you may recall, back in 2009 the White House released the “Cyberspace Policy Review.” It was a strange little document that outlined the results of a 60-day review meant to “assess U.S. policies and structures for cybersecurity.”  The full text of the document can be found here. [PDF]

Without turning this into a long rant or a conspiracy-theory laden diatribe, let me hop to the point.  The policy review calls for:

…a cybersecurity-based identity management vision and strategy that addresses privacy and civil liberties interests, leveraging privacy-enhancing technologies for the Nation.

From here, rather than repeating myself, I’ll let io9’s Annalee Newitz do the talking:

Here is what a “cyber-security identity management vision” really is: A plan for how the government will establish and track your identity online.

…

And here’s where my not-so-wild speculation about Facebook identities comes in. Many companies have turned to Facebook as an “identity management” system (including Gawker Media), allowing people to log into their services using their Facebook identity. The reason is simple: Most people only have one Facebook identity, and they stick with it. There’s a general notion that your Facebook identity is your authentic identity, or at least an identity that you keep over time, and that its characteristics can be traced back to who you are in real life. Therefore, having you log into every web service, from io9 comments to Digg to (possibly in the future) Paypal, is a way of managing your identities. Instead of having a separate identity for each of those services, you have one. Easy to manage, easy to trace.

Why shouldn’t Obama’s cyberczar just cut a deal with Facebook (and maybe a few other social networks like LinkedIn) and turn those profiles into your authentic identities? So you can send mail and buy things using your Facebook ID, and that’s how you’ll be tracked. Hey, you’re already on Facebook right? And you can set your profile to “private.” So it’s easy and “privacy enhancing.” (Never mind how easy it is to get around those privacy settings – pay no attention to that black hat behind the curtain.)

You can read the rest of her breakdown of how pre-existing services can be used to impliment an identity management solution here @ io9.  Fast forward to now, almost a year later and Facebook has begun rolling out features that seem tailor made for use as an identity-verification scheme.  It’s easier than ever for your Facebook profile to be your default profile on a host of websites as well as for all sorts of fiscal transactions. The Open Graph, while still not providing a full-proof method for identity management does make it far easier to track the movements of your Facebook profile through the net and – as more and more features go live over the summer – through the embedded world as well.

The sky isn’t falling.  The mark of the beast isn’t being injected into you when you log into Facebook – well, unless you’re playing FarmVille, then your soul is pretty much forfeit.  It’s just that Facebook is taking advantage of the information you gave them in their quest to continue to monetize your personal information. However, even if these recent privacy concerns and their possible implications have you jumping ship, Facebook will still hold onto all of your information for data-mining anyway.

Is Facebook changing because they “decided that these would be the social norms now” or is it simply because they want to continue to answer the question that has plagued the social networking giant since it opened:  How do we make money off of this?   Obviously, I’d say that the money is, as always, the key –  and there are few better ways to monetize personal information than to use that personal information to provide a useful service to both the corporate world and the government.

My two cents?  Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care about social norms of privacy, the participatory panopticon or the post-privacy world he’s helping to facilitate (for better or worse) – he just wants the kind of sustainable revenue stream that being a government sanctioned identity management solution could bring.

[See also: "What Does Obama's Identity Management Vision Mean" @ Grinding and "President Obama Welcomes the Cyber State" @ io9.]

Know Your Meme has a handy guide to fighting YouTube takedown requests for content – this time focused on the downfall of the Downfall videos.  While admitting that DMCA challenges are more complicated than YouTube’s own internal system for taking down content at the copyright holder’s request – it is always fascinating to see how people fight back when copyright holders try to trample on Fair Use.

[Via Everybody]

It’s not quite atomic dogs (that damn dog makes me cry every time) or car-harpoons, but a Doctor in South Africa is now producing an insertable dentata.

The Rape-aXe has actually been around since 2007, but its inventor, Dr Sonette Ehlers wants to distribute 30,000 of the devices to women in South Africa prior to the World Cup.  All joking about Snow Crash aside, statistics show that a woman is raped every 26 seconds in South Africa.  In fact, South Africa has the highest incidence of reported rapes in the world.  According to a recent survey, 1 in 4 men admitted to having raped someone at least once and 1 in 10 men reported having been raped.   This is also in a country where AIDS or HIV infection has reached as high as 11%.

How does it work?  Well, according to the Rape-aXe website:

The Rape-aXe system consists of a latex sheath, which contains razor-sharp barbs. The device is worn in her vagina like a tampon. When the attacker attempts vaginal penetration the barbs attach themselves to the penis, causing great discomfort. The device must be surgically removed, which will result in the positive identification of the attacker and subsequent arrest.

There is a video that goes with that:

While the device is controversial, to say the least; the idea of anyone having to live in an environment of violence that might make lining your vagina with spikes a logical course of action is nauseating.

[Via Jezebel.]

If you’re like me, you really wish there were more ways for a guy to pull off looking sexy in a saree.  But also, you’ve probably already gotten a little blasé about Augmented Reality. However, this video-billboard in the Netherlands really caught my eye.

An interactive billboard placed above crowded Amsterdam and Rotterdam thoroughfares displays, in real time, a view of the street below. Passers-by can see themselves live on the massive screen, but though the curb space in front of them is empty, on the screen there’s a tense confrontation unfolding as they stand there and gawk.

[Via @GreatDismal and POPSCI.com]

So last night, I linked to the Vigilant Citizen’s hilarious Fergie/Transhumanism/Eugenics/Satanism mashup, and apparently some Grinders followed the discussion over there with less than spectacular results.  I would like to remind folks, that while our “friends” over at the Citizen sometimes do have a sharp eye for symbolism and are always good for a laugh, they are still a Christian-themed media-paranoia conspiracy site and thus are probably not really open for strenuous intellectual testing of their theories.

To you who posted over there (or tried and got deleted or locked out) in order to conter-act some of the scary or weird disinformation, I say good job.  But alas, anything you say, it seems, will be brushed off as coming from an agent of the SATANIC GLOBAL TRANSHUMANIST CONSPIRACY.   For those of you who got the brush off AND were threatened with an INTERPOL investigation or the threat of an anti-peadophile investigation or were all accused of being the same person – well give yourselves an extra 300xp and head over to Khannea Suntzu’s blog.

Suntzu takes apart the Citizen rant with a patience that borders on saintlike (or machinelike… muwhahaha…) with a rant of hir own – addressing the malicious fallacies contained in the original on a point-by-point basis.  It’s the perfect antidote to your daily dose of crazed conspiratorial nonsense.   And if you still have rage in your heart after that, remember that as a member of the SATANIC GLOBAL TRANSHUMANIST CONSPIRACY you get to go home to your house full of MK ULTRA brainwashed sex slaves and count the piles of money that your evil overlords gave you to post on the internet about H+.

Which is all to say: mea maxima culpa if I accidentally led any of you to where the internet sidewalk ends.

Oh, and as always:  Hail Satan… ROBOT SATAN.

Do yourself a favour and check out today’s COILHOUSE’s article on Kim Graham’s Weta Legs.

Even if these backwards-facing legs are not your particular cup of tea, you can at least be happy that we are entering the age of functional commercially available designer prosthetics.   If you did want to stride out into your favourite urban or rural environment upon mechano-hooves, you could do so with these for under a grand.  (Which, you know, is still a lot of money, but progress is what progress is.)

Now, you get the talented Ms. Graham to combine her new legs with PowerIzers or AirTrekkers or even Cheetahs…

…and stand back and watch while tribes of folks in prosthetic legs run along the outskirts of the city at upwards of 20 MPH, hurtling high over the heads of commuters.  Well, I mean, that’s what I see in my head at least.

[Coilhouse - Inventor/Sculptor Kim Graham’s Weta Legs]

As a part-time occultist with a love of pop culture, one of my guilty pleasures is The Vigilant Citizen.  The author of the blog in question has a keen eye for occult symbolisim and a mind that connects the dots on an not-so-invisible conspiracy within the music and other media industries in a way that sometimes rests firmly in the grey area between conspiracy theory and media studies.  Seriously, how can you not like a blog featuring the tagline: “Symbols Rule the World, Not Rules Nor Laws?”

A few weeks ago, he did a quick overview of the video for the Black Eyed Peas’ “Imma Be” which touched on transhumanism and the video’s over-all message.  Well now he’s back with a detailed breakdown of the Peas’ hidden H+ agenda, how transhumanism is eugenics in a fancy frock.  Oh, and how Lucifer is “the patron saint of transhumanism”.

***

“You know, they have a point.”

“What?  Balderdash!”

“Who was naked in the living room, tripping balls on Ayahuasca and praying for the divine light of Lucifer to pierce their soul, last weekend?”

“<mutter>”

“Right.  Which means, you are BY DEFINITION, a Lucifer Worshiping Transhumanist.”

“Whatever.  That’s totally not true.  I’m really barely a Transhumanist at all.”

***

Admittedly, I’m pretty sure the Peas are using psychological warfare in their albums – that’s the only rational explanation for why I  suffer nosebleeds and start quoting “Catcher in the Rye” compulsively after hearing only thirty-seconds of “My Humps” but our friends at the Citizen have a more nuanced theory of the Psyops that the Peas are bringing to bear in the name of a crypto-fascist, Satan-powered, H+ driven future.

[The Vigilant Citizen - Transhumanism, PsyWar and B.E.P.'s "Imma Be"]

So on our “Ask us anything” formspring.me account, someone asked the inevitable question: “Where’s my fucking jetpack?”

So where is your fucking Jetpack, anyway?

HERE’S YOUR FUCKING JETPACK.  There, boom, a commercially available Jetpack.  You strap it on, it flies and you don’t even need a license in most countries.  All you need is a little bit of disposable income and wham:  Jetpack.  What?  You can’t afford it?   Well what did you expect; that when jetpacks came around that they’d be free?  I live in a country where free flu shots are considered a government conspiracy and you expect someone to strap a communist subsidized rocket up your ass and tell you to go to town?  I don’t fucking think so.

What are you looking for in a jetpack, anyway?  I mean, sure they’re cool and all – who didn’t hide in their rooms and gently bring themselves off while watching the Rocketeer?  But what do your really want – flight?  Well there are other ways to fly then strapping a giant engine to your back.

Oh yeah, speaking of flight, here’s your flying car, too:

It’s called a “helicopter”.  Yes, you need a special license and metric shit-tonnes of money to own and operate one making it prohibitively expensive and unrealistic for many reasons – but hey, don’t feel bad - NINETY-ODD PERCENT OF THE HUMAN SPECIES feels the same way about cars.   To break that down into more manageable numbers, if the world was a colony of 1000 people, by some accounts only 70 lucky bastards would own cars.  Everyone else?  Hoofing it, biking it, using public transportation or being stuck in a geographic area the size of a postage stamp by environmental factors.

So does the fact you can’t afford a flying car make you sad?  Congratulations!  Now you’ve woken up on the same side of the bed as the rest of the human race.

Okay.  Fair enough, you don’t mean flying car in a loose sort of way that could include a helicopter.  You want an honest-to-God Nick Fury agent of S.H.I.E.L.D “where we’re going we don’t need roads” Delorian with rockets strapped to its ass.

What is it with you people wanting to strap rockets to everything’s ass, anyway?  Remind me never to look at your porn collection.    (Well, I mean… if it has tastefully done ass-rockets, send it on.)

Flying cars are neat, too.  But let me direct your attention to this window.  Look out there… now assuming you’re in a part of the world where car ownership is the norm, then you’re looking at a place where there need to be laws in place to stop people from doing stupid shit while operating several tonnes of dangerous machinery at high speeds.  It is somehow not common sense to not down a beer, smoke a joint, text your boyfriend, pierce your nipples and skullfuck a Peruvian trout when driving a two-ton death machine.

But people who weren’t gifted with a basic survival instinct aren’t the only downer about motor vehicles.   You see, the people making cars are under no pressure to make safe cars.  Do you really want the same companies that have to be sued, threatened and cajoled by private citizens and governments to not make cars that blow up when hit by a stiff breeze to be the ones responsible for shooting you and your car into the sky?   That bit from Fight Club, about auto companies weighing the liability for death vs defects in their vehicles?  That’s a true story.

So where is your flying car?  Perhaps it is waiting somewhere behind the car that is not responsible for approximately 2% of all the death in the world, annually?  (For ex.  1.4 million worldwide in 2004.)   How in the hell is anyone supposed to level up to super awesome flying cars when we can’t even get cars-that-don’t-kill-people-all-the-fucking-time down?

Okay, that’s enough yelling; the shouty old man routine gets old – fast.

But that said, the “where’s my fucking jetpack” meme pisses me the fuck off.

First of all, why the obsession over a future made in the 1910-1930’s?  Flying cars and jetpacks were the fantasy fetish objects of a different time.  Not a simpler time, because the phrase “simpler time” is like “military intelligence” – it’s a contradiction – we only think times were simpler thanks to temporal and cultural distancing.   Still, is that your future?  Really?  Or is your grandparents’ future?  The Jetpack future is a future born of the past.  It is a future created by people who lived in a world that had never seen the artificial suns rise over Japan, had not seen the realities of our space program, and probably couldn’t conceive of a black man in the White House or Celebrity Big Brother.

If you’re really serious about wanting the Jetpack future – and I know some of you are…

Hell, you’re listening to a man who once blew up a poster of Thomas Edison with homemade explosives while screaming “Nikola Tesla thou art revenged” at the top of his lungs and running naked through the woods.  Which is to say… I have my own hang ups about stolen futures.

If you’re serious about the Jetpack future, then don’t stop at “this is not my future” – make it your future.  Claim that vision of now that circumstances and small minds have denied you and find other like minded people and build it.

When Steampunk came back, you had people who looked at the future-of-a-different-past in some works of fiction and then started to make it real.  Not just with cute costumes and at conventions, but with building their own machines, starting real community and carving out a niche where that future made of cogs and springs and the rushing of superheated air has weight and takes up space and becomes real.  Now you’ve got people getting into D.I.Y. and sustainability and reclaiming urban spaces thanks to a subculture that in the beginning, just really liked some sci-fi books and had an unhealthy fixation with top hats.

Here’s the thing; if you stop at “this is not my future” and go no further, then someone else will make their version of the future and I can almost guarantee you’re not going to like it.   I can guarantee this because you already don’t like it.  We’re living in the future of men who saw people as commodities and human lives as disposable sources of income.  It’s not some grand conspiracy, it’s just people who have a vision of the future where the top 2% get richer and the rest of the world… well… you want to be in that 2%, right?  And the only way that is going to happen is if you buy into their future and not into the steam-sustainability-and-goggles future, the Ayahuasca-and-shamanism future, the Russian-feminist-ninja future or the Japanese-post-gender-newtype future.

We don’t have nice things because we let other people take them away from us.  We have these futures that seem alien to us because we let them happen.  I’m including you, me and 99% of all the humans and mutants I have ever met in that “we”, too.    We are the reason there are no jetpacks or flying cars or universal distribution of water and food.  ”We have met the enemy,” as a great man once said, “and he is us”. We contribute to a future that has no place for us in so many ways:  inaction, being convinced that we don’t have voices that count, being convinced that the only choices we have are the choices we can buy, despair, alienation… the list goes on and on.   We let the beautiful, amazing, weird, fucked-up futures we hold next to our hearts die stillborn in the face of futures so alien to most of us that they might as well be dread Cthulhu sleeping beneath the waves.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though.  If you want the jetpack future?  Find the other people who want it and make it.   If you see the people around you stand mute while the dreams of human accomplishment are ground into the dirt and they instead run over each other to embrace steaming mediocrity and you don’t think that’s a fair trade? Say something.  Contrary to slick movie quotes, the Devil never even bothered to pretend he didn’t exist – instead he made so many of us believe the lie that our voices and actions don’t matter.

Fuck the Devil.  Put on your tophat and latex gimp suit or Rocketeer jacket and carve out that future – Jetpacks and all if that’s what floats your boat – and don’t let me or anyone else get in your way.

At least we do have the alien dancing girls.

According to Alex Eichler over at io9, the New Zealand-based Martin Aircraft Company is officially producing the world’s first commercial Jetpack.  As an ultralight aircraft you don’t even need a license to fly it in the United States.  For only 90 grand you can zoom around at 60 miles an hour and get yourself about a mile high with nothing but a jet strapped to your ass.  (Provided you and your ass, as a package, weigh between 140 and 240 pounds.)

At this year’s DICE 2010 Expo, Carnegie Mellon’s Jesse Schell gave a fantastic presentation that starts with why Facebook *shouldn’t* work in the way that it does and extrapolates forward into a half-creepy and half-inspiring vision for the embodied internet, the network of things, the culture of games and the SPIMEworld to come.

In preparation for February’s Association of the US Army Winter Conference, Lockheed Martin has released a promotional video of the company’s proposed HULC (Human Universal Load Carrier) powered exoskeleton.

The HULC is a completely un-tethered, hydraulic-powered anthropomorphic exoskeleton that provides users with the ability to carry loads of up to 200 lbs for extended periods of time and over all terrains. Its flexible design allows for deep squats, crawls and upper-body lifting. There is no joystick or other control mechanism. The exoskeleton senses what users want to do and where they want to go. It augments their ability, strength and endurance. An onboard micro-computer ensures the exoskeleton moves in concert with the individual. Its modularity allows for major components to be swapped out in the field. Additionally, its unique power-saving design allows the user to operate on battery power for extended missions. The HULC’s load-carrying ability works even when power is not available.

[Via Defense Tech]

I know, you’re probably sick of AR this and AR that by now, and the technology is only in its infancy, but this?  Too awesome not to post.

In a mashup between some of my favourite sexy technologies, Qosmo and architects teradadesign have transformed  Tachikawa’s N Building into a QR-branded, augmented, fishtank of an building.

The building’s facade is imprinted with QRCodes that when scanned with a AR program allows viewers to peek inside the building and see animated versions of the movements and activities of those inside.  People inside the building are tracked via GPS and their tweets are transformed into thought balloons hovering over their heads.

N Building from Alexander Reeder on Vimeo.

[Via Creative Applications]

The Israeli Ministry of Defense recently licensed ArmyTec, an Israel-based technology development advisory firm, to mass produce what they call “the Thunder Generator” for military use.  Based on a technology developed to scare birds away from crops, the Thunder Generator uses liquefied petroleum, cooking gas and air to deliver massive sonic shocks.

Much like the wall of speakers at a Butthole Surfers show, the Thunder Generator is disruptive at long ranges (30-100 meters) but likely fatal at the sub-10 meter range.

Developed and produced for the agricultural industry by PDT Agro, a small firm based in Herzliya, Israel, the system detonates a mixture of common liquefied petroleum (LPG), cooking gas and air to generate a series of loud, stunning shock waves.

Using a patented process involving Pulse Detonation Technology (PDT), the system feeds the gas-air mixture into one or more so-called impulse chambers or cannon barrels, where the burning fuel detonates and intensifies in force as it travels through the chamber, exiting in a rapid-fire succession of high-velocity shock bursts.

A small battery-powered control system – about twice the size of a pack of cigarettes – measures fuel pressure, temperature and flow rates while monitoring the continuous intake of the air-gas mixture.

According to company data, the system generates 60 to 100 bursts per minute, each traveling at about 2,000 meters per second and lasting up to 300 milliseconds.

The resulting shocks create a double deterrent to rioters and potential intruders, developers here say, by the extreme air pressure and sonic boom effect generated once the mixture propagates and expands through the air. One standard 12-kilogram LPG gas canister (retail cost: about $25) can produce up to 5,000 shock bursts.

Being a very cheap and simple weapons platform, how long will it take for this to go from active deployment in the field to something you can build as a weekend project with stuff from Home Depot?

[Via Defense News.]

The above picture is from Ariana Osborne’s blog, where she lays down some solid ranting regarding the “opposing” disciplines of Art and Science.

Or:  Using Guitar Hero to demo a Muscle-Computer Interface.