Previously on Grinding I posted a video of Bruce talking about Gothic High-Tech and Favella Chic in his Reboot 11 closing speech. In it, he mentions he was trying to make concrete his notion of what this next decade might be, something he was calling Atemporality (”it’s steampunk with metaphysics”, he said).

At the recent Transmediale Festival, he’s back to report that all the historical narratives are broken, multi-temporality is the new multi-culturalism and network culture is the new dominant force.

Strap your brains in, take your smart drugs and drink deeply from the fount of knowledge that is Sterling’s mind:

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

I was going to call this 50mins of pure mind candy, but that doesn’t quite capture it.  Mind superfood might be a better description.  Matt Webb’s opening keynote for Wedirections South is an mp3 superfood capsule for your brain.  You just can’t unhear his ideas, it is true synapse rewiring material;  this description barely does it justice:

The 21st century is a participatory culture, not a consumerist one. What does it mean when small teams can be responsible for world-size effects, on the same playing field as major corporations and government? We can look at the Web - breaking down publishing and consuming from day zero - for where we might be heading in a world bigger than we can really see, and we can look at design - playful and rational all at once - to help us figure out what to do when we get there.

So grab the mp3 and load it onto your prefered player, or just hit play on this embed:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Bonus Content!

As Matt says on his blog, this was an extension of his Reboot 11 presentation:

You should watch this too.

I remember reading a scan of an old real print comic once.  The character in it was railing against the imaginary people of his imaginary world, taking them to task about their dissatisfaction with the future they lived in.  But it was really aimed at the stupid people who wanted their stupid little futures and who were too stupid to see that the future is now.  It’s always now.  Except it isn’t anymore.  The TITANs changed that.  The future is now yesterday, and last week, and ten years ago.

–ECLIPSE PHASE

In August of this year, I had the opportunity to interview Rob Boyle and Brian Cross - two of the minds behind the post-singularity, transhumanist horror Role-Playing Game ECLIPSE PHASE.  We covered a lot of topics — from details about the game and the game world to the singularity, technology’s influence on politics, reputation economies, anarcho-transhumanism and more.

(Also?  Creative uses for bacon in the dark post-singularity future.)

You can listen to the interview (recorded August 7th, 2009 in a noisy bar during the GEN CON gaming gaming convention in Indianapolis, Indiana) here:

(Or you can download it in a podcast format from here.)  As a minor warning, there are some setting spoilers in the interview.

ECLIPSE PHASE comes out this week in the US and elsewhere from bookstores and gaming retailers.  (Or in PDF format from Drive Thru RPG.)

Last year, Grinding did a cross-promotion with Esozone, the Portland-based “unconference”. This year we can’t offer a reduced ticket price because this year Esozone is free.   For those Grinders looking for something to do this weekend in the Portland area, Esozone once again promises to bring in a mix of people and interests.  Last year there was magick, marketing, and fringe technology.

This year there’s going to be an Ignite Esozone, music, Radical Therapy for Radical Minds, tantra,  more marketing, psychogeography, data modeling and an Ex-Occultists Support Group and all sorts of general high-weirdness and possible upgrades for your mind.

ESOZONE 2009 takes place OCTOBER 9-10 in Portland, and it is mutant friendly and free to all.

Jamias Cascio drops violent wisdom over here at The “End of Politics” Delusion.

You have my express permission to kick the next person — especially someone advocating the embrace of radical forms of technological advancement — who tells you that they wish nothing more than to get rid of, move beyond, or otherwise avoid “politics.” Kick them hard, and repeatedly. They have adopted a profoundly ignorant and self-serving position, one that betrays at best a lack of understanding of human nature and society, and at worst a malicious desire to preemptively shut down any opposition to their goals.

He’s right, you know. But I tell you, sometimes I do wish there were no politics and people could pull their heads out of their asses long enough to do the right thing. And yes, all of that is code for “Dammit, why doesn’t everyone think like me?!”

I’m not proud of the times when I think like that, but there you go. I tend to call those my “Magneto Days”.

I agree that there are a lot of technophiles who express either a desire to be “above politics” or who believe that technological advances will free us from politics, but I think a lot of technophiles are really looking for an out of politics as we experience them today.  And that IS something I think technological advances can pull out us out of.

Speaking as an American, embedded squarely in the middle of American media and politics, what we refer to as “politics” bears little or no resemblance to any rational form of communication or discourse. Of course there is no “golden age of politics” to look back on. Politics, being the interaction of various levels of power, has always been an affair that has been ugly and has brought out the worst in people. So long as there are power differentials between people or groups, there will be politics. The technological Singularity has more potential for creating power disparity as it does for levelling the playing field.

And keep in mind that the last major Political movement that had a goal of moving beyond conventional politics was the Neoconservative movement, whose experiment in national myth-making is in part responsible for the wreck of the political system we’re witnessing today. The technofuturist “End of Politics” is no more upon us than the Neoconservative “End of History” was when Francis Fukuyama declared it was imminent.

But…

Technology does have the potential to change how politics are perceived and performed. Right now, in the US, the political discourse is a screaming match between two major factions that only agree on one thing: theirs are the only voices that should be heard. There’s no readily visible relationship between the left and the right in the US save one of antagonism. The right is against the left and the left is against the right, no matter what shape that debate takes.

One of the main reasons for that, of course, is that Politics as it visibly manifests in the US is mediated and shaped by corporate media. The 24 hour news networks and their various other media limbs, in order to sustain and grow their business model, sell a purely oppositional narrative. The system insures that the lack of a national dialogue on any sort of important issue translates directly into profits for the corporations that run mass-market media. This is why what should be a national discussion about a health care system that no one really likes (save politicians who get kickbacks from insurance companies) has turned into a screaming match with bold-faced lies and national coverage of supposed politicians ranting incoherently about “Death Panels” and telling people on national news that the old and infirm will be euthanized.

What technology could do is make it easier for people to escape from the “us” vs. “them” mentality that drive the media machines and give them the power to come to their own educated conclusions. It seems like a long shot, most days, but technology has the potential to infuse the volatile political landscape with knowledge, non-media mediated discourse and hopefully a little bit of compassion. Technological mediation has the potential to create a more permeable membrane between “them” and us”.

No, I don’t think that we can ever escape politics for good or ill, but what we have, is the potential to forge politics tempered by knowledge, compassion and real human needs.

io9’s Charlie Anders reports on Worldcon’s  ”The Singularity: Are We Getting Any Closer?” panel.

Some highlights:

Wilson pointed out that if the Singularity really is coming, then it’s inevitable — so there’s no need for people to be cheerleaders for it. He compared it to “telepathy or dianetics,” science-fictional ideas which some people adopted “with religious fervor.” A core question in science fiction is “where is our technology going, and what can we do with it,” noted Wilson. “The Singularity is just one answer.”

…

“The question I sometimes ask myself is, How would the Singularity work in Darfur?” says Wilson.

Interesting stuff, and questions well worth asking even if you’re not a Sci-Fi fan.  Me?  The only sci-fi stuff I read tends to either be so near-future that calling it Sci-Fi is just pointles genre-pigeonholing (like say Spook Country ) or transhumanist stuff.  But, by and large that’s because tranhumanist-themed books seem to be where the heirs to Cyberpunk ended up.

Doug Rushkoff’s appearance on The Colbert Report. Great to see his book Life, Inc getting increased exposure!

As some of you may know, I live in the US, and today, July 4th, is the day we celebrate beer and large colorful explosions.  Also, guns.   There’s some rehtoric about liberty and Independence in there, too, but you’ll get as many answers about what that means as you’ll find people to ask.

However, a bit more recently (set your wayback machines for 1996) Grateful Dead lyricist, former campaign manager for Dick Cheney, cattle rancher, and Co-founder and Vice-Chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation John Perry Barlow sat down in Davos, Switzerland and wrote “A Declaration of the Independance of Cyberspace”.

What follows is one of the most famous and influential statements on the liberating potential of telecomunications technology:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

It’s easy to look back on this ancient relic of the first days of “cyberspace” and dismiss a lot of it as fantasy, wish-fulfillment and undelivered promises.   Of course two months ago, the cyber-pundits that dismissed Twitter as “for Twits” hadn’t seen the most innocuous of information technologies turn, however briefly, into the voice of a national revolution.

So, almost 13 years have come and gone since the piece was written.   The “Walled Garden” model of information control on the internet came, went, and is coming around again.  Virtual Worlds are here, but not in the way they were invisioned back then, and dreams of immersive Virtual Reality are shifting towards visions of intergrated Augmented Reality.   Whole nations seek to control the flow of information across their borders more than ever before and corporate giants seek your consent in controlling the information you have access to.

My question for you is this:   Do you think that the “Declaration of the Independance of Cyberspace” is still relevant?  Is the vision of a kingdom of the mind as presented there still one that can or should come to pass?  Or have the shapes of the technologies involved changed the shape of what technologicaly-assisted freedom and liberty look like?

Re-blogging Warren Ellis’s posting of the trailer for Douglas Rushkoff’s new book: Life, Inc.

Life Inc. exposes why we see our homes as investments rather than places to live, our 401k plans as the ultimate measure of success, and the Internet as just another place to do business.

Though there’s already some contention in the (forgive me) blogosphere about whether Rushkoff has all the answers here, there’s no doubt he’s asking a lot of the right questions.

The last part of this interview on Richard Metzger’s Dangerous Minds is particulary interesting, where he looks forward, beyond the current financial crisis:

Previously:

• Douglas Rushkoff’s guides to understanding Marketing

Warren Ellis linked to this article a few days ago, and while I realize that means half of the known world has now read it, I had to repost it over here due to the extreme relevance.  While yes, it’s a story of the strange places the space race played out in, it’s also the story of how a few hobbiests turned a garage into a hub of international activity and secret intelligence with just their passions and the tech they could find and repourpose.

Suddenly, an angry voice rang out; the man who lived on the floor below leant out of the window and screamed: “Will you stop that racket, I’m trying to sleep!”

One of the young men shouted back “Sorry sir; the Soviets have launched a satellite and we’re trying to intercept it!”

The brothers finished setting up, grabbed their head-sets, twiddled the knobs on their portable receivers, hit the record button and listened…

“Come in… come in… come in… Listen! Come in! Talk to me! I am hot! I am hot! Come in! What? Forty-five? What? Fifty? Yes. Yes, yes, breathing. Oxygen, oxygen… I am hot. This… isn’t this dangerous?”
The brothers looked nervously at one another. They only fully understood the Russian later when their sister translated for them, but the desperation in the woman’s voice was clear.

“Transmission begins now. Forty-one. Yes, I feel hot. I feel hot, it’s all… it’s all hot. I can see a flame! I can see a flame! I can see a flame! Thirty-two… thirty-two. Am I going to crash? Yes, yes I feel hot… I am listening, I feel hot, I will re-enter. I’m hot!”

The signal went dead.

Today, there are do it yourself genetics clubs, you can mail out to have your genome sequenced, open source engeneering labs and all sorts of places that people can come together and test new frontiers outside of an institutional heirachy.  The street still finds its own uses for things, and while the space race has stagnated (a topic of black rage for myself) , there are still many envelopes to push, many mysteries to probe, and many wonders to be found with whatever tools we can scrounge to find them.

Sorry, if I sound like an evangelical Grinder, today, but I find this article to be really inspiring.

[Via Warren Ellis and Fortean Times]

From WIRED:

In just over a day, a powerful computer program accomplished a feat that took physicists centuries to complete: extrapolating the laws of motion from a pendulum’s swings.

…

Condensing rules from raw data has long been considered the province of human intuition, not machine intelligence. It could foreshadow an age in which scientists and programs work as equals to decipher datasets too complex for human analysis.

…

Initially, the equations generated by the program failed to explain the data, but some failures were slightly less wrong than others. Using a genetic algorithm, the program modified the most promising failures, tested them again, chose the best, and repeated the process until a set of equations evolved to describe the systems. Turns out, some of these equations were very familiar: the law of conservation of momentum, and Newton’s second law of motion.

…

Lipson likened the quest to a “detective story” — a hint of the changing role of researchers in hybridized computer-human science. Programs produce sets of equations — describing the role of rainfall on a desert plateau, or air pollution in triggering asthma, or multitasking on cognitive function. Researchers test the equations, determine whether they’re still incomplete or based on flawed data, use them to identify new questions, and apply them to messy reality.

…

It was always about co-evolution.

thanks to bookhling for the tip-off!

This is a clip from the 1999 documentary TechnoCalyps featuring the late Robert Anton Wilson and Terence McKenna.  It’s a little dated, but touches on other interpertations of the Singularity outside of the Vinge/Kurzweil AI-induced Singularity.

And personally, I can’t ever get enough McKenna.

(Link Via Phase II)

From levitated.net.

h+ spring issue is out.

I just had a quick flick through and it’s full of goodness.  Check it out!

Juan Enriquez’s TED talk is online now and very, very pertinent. It’s also hilarious!

So sit down for 18mins and watch him run through the reasons for the Economic Crisis, and then show how the seeds for a beautiful, transhuman future are here and our rebirth as Homo Evolutis is just over the horizon.

thanks to Midare for the tip-off!

David Forbes, journalist and Coilhouse contributor, whom we’ve linked to a few times, has written a very thoughtful response to my recent rant “It’s going to get worse, before it get’s better”.

I’m going to quote and respond to a few key points now.

People, yes, do have a right to separate from mainstream society and live the way they please, it’s not something to marvel at when an event like the Tarnac crackdown happens. The pattern goes like this. An alternative culture gets some radical insight, decides it wants to break out of society and does so in a way that’s immediately, easily identifiable. Again, they have every right to do this. But it shouldn’t surprise anyone when the equivalent of shouting to the people and ideas running the show “hey bastards, we’re here!” gets a backlash. Well, what do they expect?

I disagree.  The best argument the French authorities seemed to have here was that by throwing away their mobile phones, this group was trying to drop off-the-grid and be untrackable; ie by ‘hiding’, they’re Terrorists.  When actually all they were doing was trying to live out their ideal utopia in a peaceful manner.

I think they didn’t shout “We’re Here!” loudly enough.  What they should have done is be far more public.  Showcase their revolution-in-living with blogs; get testaments from the much happier locals.  In short, make it cool and appealing to the greater public.

Status quo literally means “where things stand.” Said dominant cliques and cultural institutions “stand” and clawed to the top in the first place because they’re very, very good at handling straight-up, blatant opposition. If alt cultures put more energy into building political connections or spreading in a manner less separatist and more viral or developing tactics to deal with this kind of response, the future would be closer already.

Again, I think demonstrating loudly and publicly that an alternate way can exist is a far better response to ‘working within the System’.  Be the Leader and the rest will follow.  Make it cool, and they will beg to join.  Imagine some bastard hybrid of this scenario and Big Brother.  Not only should the Revolution Be Televised, it should be the highest rating show on the planet!!!

The idea that tech will save us from our sins should itself be a thing of the past.

I don’t think technology itself will save us.  But we’ve reached a radical point here; the creation of a technologically-facilitated, global human network.  Through social media (twitter, blogs, wikis, forums, etc etc) we can collaborate world-wide and prototype in parallel a wide array of solutions to the world’s problems.  All in real-time, with immediate feedback. It’s going to take everyone working together to get us out of this mess.

This time around those who want to build tomorrow need to spend as much time thinking about those old thorny questions of power as new technology. The alternative is that it won’t be “worse before it gets better,” it will just be worse and worse, down into the dust.

I think the politics here comes with the technology.  In short, the need for a Managerial Class is eliminated.  The hierarchies are collapsed and we can revert to our natural state of individuality and equality.

OK, that’s all I’ve got.  I want to thank David for his contributions and insight.  I’ve only quoted a fraction of his response; I encourage everyone to click through and read the whole thing.

I hope this is a discussion that continues to occur both publicly on the internet and in private.

We need to understand the potential we have to re-shape things, in light of the changes and challenges ahead of us.  Let’s all do our best to make this the best of all possible Futures!

Presenting Farm Fountain:

..a system for growing edible and ornamental fish and plants in a constructed, indoor ecosystem. Based on the concept of aquaponics, this hanging garden fountain uses a simple pond pump, along with gravity to flow the nutrients from fish waste through the plant roots. The plants and bacteria in the system serve to cleanse and purify the water for the fish.

The perfect water feature for a re-claimed McMansion turned artist’s colony. Or for the lounge of a low-gravity space habitat.

They’ve included full instructions and a video overview. It’s a simple, but powerful concept. Great work!

thanks to Nova for the tip-off!

Jamais Cascio’s new book Hacking the Earth is now available.  

What do we do if our best efforts to limit the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere fall short? According to a growing number of environmental scientists, we may be forced to try an experiment in global climate management: geoengineering. Geoengineering would be risky, likely to provoke international tension, and certain to have unexpected consequences. It may also be inevitable. Environmental futurist Jamais Cascio explores the implications of geoengineering in this collection of thought-provoking essays. Is our civilization ready to take on the task of re-engineering the planet?

I haven’t had a chance to read it, but Cascio rarely disappoints and is always willing to tackle the big topics… like, well, world hacking.  

On November 14th, 2008, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology and the Lifeboat Foundation hosted the “GLOBAL CATASTROPHIC RISKS: Building a Resilient Civilization” seminar in Sillicon Valley’s Computer History Museum.     The speakers list was a who’s who of transhumanists and futurists and now the talks are all available on IEET’s website.

I haven’t worked my way through the list, yet, but they’re definately worth checking out - and they’re available in video and mp3 formats.