tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post3616428804099262331..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: Not Necessarily Abnormal, But Certainly StupidDale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-56099312695183310622012-04-05T12:05:23.935-07:002012-04-05T12:05:23.935-07:00Michael Anissimov, Media Director for the Singular...<i>Michael Anissimov, Media Director for the Singularity Institute and Co-Founder of the XFF said: “This is a festival for the new generations, the young people using more artistic forms of expressions bringing down the hard-core academics.</i><br /><br />Boy, isn't he singing a different tune, nowadays? I remember when the official line was that effete elite aesthetes like me, teaching woo-woo Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, were too muzzy-headed to grasp the steel hard dildo of transhumanoid High Science, and that's why I couldn't see the superior rationality that leads the Robot Cultists into pseudo-scientific marginality on issue after issue after issue, from Drextech to Cryonics.<br /><br />Now, we are meant to regard the Robot Cultists as artistic avant-gardists? Well, it is true that some Italian fascists began as mouthpieces for the Futurist art movement, I suppose... One has to wonder why so much of their art looks like warmed over velvet conquistador painting and cgi for low-rent tee vee commercials and soft porn if they are actually so cutting edge?<br /><br />No doubt just as my training in philosophy of science and the social study of technology rendered me too inexpert to diagnose their theoretical pronouncements and technoscientific posturing, so too my teaching of actual artists in an actual art school (San Francisco Art Institute, founded in 1871, birthplace of more vital American art movements and thinking than one can reliably count) has blinded me to the merits of their revolutionary aesthetics -- just as my years in nonviolent activism and queer rights advocacy makes me insensitive to the power of their, er, activism qua sf fandom.<br /><br />Who can say why I read Anissimov disdaining academic standards from the perch of his pseudo-science pop-tech think-tank and hear Wilde's words fluttering in the background? "Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can't get into it do that."Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-16615537354051138342012-04-05T10:23:36.046-07:002012-04-05T10:23:36.046-07:00> [F]ew people are idiotic enough to pretend th...> [F]ew people are idiotic enough to pretend that if<br />> they only clap louder this paradise will blossom into<br />> spontaneous existence. . .<br /><br />Hey, Doc, why you brandishing that needle at me?<br />I want one o' them hypospray shots like I seen on TV.<br /><br />Look, here's a picture I made.<br /><br /><br />http://www.examiner.com/culture-events-in-los-angeles/leap-forward-into-the-future-with-extreme-futuristic-festival<br />--------------------------<br />Anyone who wikipedias words like Singularity and Transhumanism<br />realizes those schools of though describe elements of our<br />daily lives, from the technology we use to the films and TV<br />shows we watch. Sci-Fi tends to be an advance on reality and<br />it will continue being so as we now have more technology that<br />was first invented in movies, like vaccines delivered<br />subcutaneously with an air shot as we have seen hundreds<br />of times in Star Trek. Soon intelligent robots similar to<br />those in the movie AI, may walk among us as Raymond Kurzweil<br />describes.<br /><br />Arts, science, philosophy and technology combine in a<br />multi disciplinary collage that Transhumanism defined decades<br />ago. There are no frontiers anymore: “This is a cultural<br />movement seeking to take down the barriers. Transmedia is<br />taking off, as people use different media to express themselves”<br />said Rachel Haywire, writer/musician and<br />Extreme Futurist Festival (XFF) Co-Founder. This weekend, the<br />Extreme Futurist Festival brought together a diverse group<br />of people with multiple interest and careers to share and<br />contribute in their path towards the future. Michael Anissimov,<br />Media Director for the Singularity Institute and<br />Co-Founder of the XFF said: “This is a festival for the<br />new generations, the young people using more artistic forms<br />of expressions bringing down the hard-core academics. We<br />are an activist group, embracing everyone within our generation.”jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-52276414702497508932012-03-29T10:04:49.281-07:002012-03-29T10:04:49.281-07:00That's a tricky connection -- the one identify...That's a tricky connection -- the one identifying Robot Cultism, usually but not always through some variation on libertopianism, with reactionary politics -- but I do agree with you about it when all is said and done. As you know one of my futurological brickbats more or less baldly asserts "every futurism is finally a retro-futurism," but I do think the critique is a bit more complicated than that pithy assertion suggests. Of course, with some sects of the Robot Cult, like the Extropians, the case is cut and dry, they mostly affirm the connection, and their slogans (no death, no taxes!), their attraction to explicitly libertopian sf like early Vinge and campy Wright and others, their attachment to gun-nuts and Bell Curve apologists and so on, are all available for anybody to see who can use the google, and of course I haven't forgotten Tech Central Station, the fraudulent "think tank" celebrating high tech and free markets in ways that were characteristic of the whole futurological archipelago but got exposed as corporate-militarist right wing tools -- this is why I often deride an Ayn Raelian spirit in so much futurology. <br /><br />But things get trickier with the futurologists who claim liberal and democratic socialist and even anarcho-socialist roots. I happen to think even futurists with good intentions and earnest progressive assumptions are incredibly vulnerable to right-wing appropriation but also structurally tend to advocate variations of progressivism that are more authoritarian than not (eg, technocratically elitist policy wonk circle-jerks and ultimately anti-democratizing "design" discourses) or only vacuously democratic (eg, digital utopians mistaking surfing of packaged advertorial content in highly surveilled contexts as "open access" and superficial tweeting as "deliberation" and self-promotional deception as "expression"). <br /><br />There is a real sense in which the progressive developmentalist investment of Dewitt Clinton (who shepherded the Erie Canal and en-gridded Manhattan in a way that fostered both democracy and eventually progressive infrastructure services there) is hard to separate from the speculative mindset that yielded vast economic panics (including Depressions) in the name of exorbitant wealth-capture. That progressive-reactionary ambivalence in developmental investment is already there in Alexander Hamilton and still there in FDR -- and I personally see this as a prefiguration of the uniquely American varieties of futurological discourse. <br /><br />I suspect that sustainable urban planning and progressive macroeconomics and democratizing planetary developmentalism (and I do not mean by this Washington Consensus globalization in its complementary neoliberal and neoconservative faces/fasces, but technodevelopmental social struggle of a kind informed by environmental justice critique and social democracy/democratic socialism) provide the sensible substantial kernel out of which much well-intentioned futurology finds the foothold it goes on to derange out of too superficial popular scientific understandings, too privileged penchants for undercritical enthusiasms, and common or garden varieties of greed for easy profit and a fairly widespread death-denialism (more usually in the form of mid-life crises, but in futurology, as you know, sometimes taking for more extreme forms taking us into the territory of organized religiosity and un(der)critical True Belief).Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-36257405472678994652012-03-29T08:33:07.640-07:002012-03-29T08:33:07.640-07:00> Robot Cultists like to paint themselves as br...> Robot Cultists like to paint themselves as brave for devoting<br />> their adult lives to daydreaming about how awesome it would be<br />> if magic were real, . . . then they like to rail against phantom<br />> armies of supremely powerful mortality-loving disease-loving<br />> luddites. . .<br /><br />and non-libertarians (especially Democrats)<br /><br />> . . .who presumably stand in the way of the spontaneous emergence<br />> of all the magic.jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-24606417734611949702012-03-29T08:24:42.641-07:002012-03-29T08:24:42.641-07:00> I own one myself.
You got one of these?
htt...> I own one myself.<br /><br />You got one of these?<br /><br />http://lh3.ggpht.com/abramsv/SDTypiFUXII/AAAAAAAARls/RkttYgqy4IU/315442512_f8dbae7a79_o.jpgjimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-89263981361719590902012-03-28T15:57:31.930-07:002012-03-28T15:57:31.930-07:00Now you mention it, I own one myself.Now you mention it, I own one myself.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-88895062936897010892012-03-28T15:48:56.458-07:002012-03-28T15:48:56.458-07:00I'm pretty sure they actually make foot long r...I'm pretty sure they actually make foot long robot schlongs. <br /><br />The future is now.Chad Lotthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07532435215151055258noreply@blogger.com