zerosociety

Tomorrow the Senate will vote on immigration legislation that includes a version of the Real ID Act, which would require all U.S. citizens have a national ID card to do everything from getting on an airplane, opening a bank account, collecting Social Security, using any government service, to getting a job. This bill has not even been heard by Congress—it was attached to a bill, passed in 2005, that funded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We’ve already lost so much in the way of civil rights and privacy these past several years; this would further chip away at them. It would be a disturbing slip down the slope towards totalitarian government and represents a level of state surveillance we cannot accept.

This page explains the history of the bill, more about why it’s dangerous and how it erodes our rights, and how Baucus-Tester and the Grassley-Baucus amendments to the current immigration bill will eliminate the REAL ID provisions from the bill. It has details of how you can fax your Senator and ask him or her not to support the REAL ID Act. There is not much time–this will be voted on tomorrow.

More info on the REAL ID here. Americans, don’t just sit around and let this happen.

Moving Through Walls: How Deluze, Guattari and Debord are Transforming Space and War in Palestine.

“I conducted an interview with Kokhavi, commander of the Paratrooper Brigade, who at 42 is considered one of the most promising young officers of the IDF (and was the commander of the operation for the evacuation of settlements in the Gaza Strip).2 Like many career officers, he had taken time out from the military to earn a university degree; although he originally intended to study architecture, he ended up with a degree in philosophy from the Hebrew University. When he explained to me the principle that guided the battle in Nablus, what was interesting for me was not so much the description of the action itself as the way he conceived its articulation. He said: ‘this space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. […] The question is how do you interpret the alley? […] We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps. […] I want to surprise him! This is the essence of war. I need to win […] This is why that we opted for the methodology of moving through walls. . . . Like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. […] I said to my troops, “Friends! […] If until now you were used to move along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls!”’2 Kokhavi’s intention in the battle was to enter the city in order to kill members of the Palestinian resistance and then get out. The horrific frankness of these objectives, as recounted to me by Shimon Naveh, Kokhavi’s instructor, is part of a general Israeli policy that seeks to disrupt Palestinian resistance on political as well as military levels through targeted assassinations from both air and ground.”

“ In addition to these theoretical positions, Naveh references such canonical elements of urban theory as the Situationist practices of dérive (a method of drifting through a city based on what the Situationists referred to as ‘psycho-geography’) and détournement (the adaptation of abandoned buildings for purposes other than those they were designed to perform). These ideas were, of course, conceived by Guy Debord and other members of the Situationist International to challenge the built hierarchy of the capitalist city and break down distinctions between private and public, inside and outside, use and function, replacing private space with a ‘borderless’ public surface. References to the work of Georges Bataille, either directly or as cited in the writings of Tschumi, also speak of a desire to attack architecture and to dismantle the rigid rationalism of a postwar order, to escape ‘the architectural strait-jacket’ and to liberate repressed human desires.
In no uncertain terms, education in the humanities – often believed to be the most powerful weapon against imperialism – is being appropriated as a powerful vehicle for imperialism. The military’s use of theory is, of course, nothing new – a long line extends all the way from Marcus Aurelius to General Patton.”

This morning someone said to me: “Some days you just want to hit everything and everyone, all at once.”

And then, seconds later, I read this entry over at Other Magazine’s Blog and I couldn’t agree more. “Kazim Ali, a professor at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, took a box of old poetry contest manuscripts out of his car and set the box next to the dumpster outside of his office, for recycling, as he had done many times before. A student called the police and reported that a Middle Eastern man driving a white Volkswagon had left a possible bomb on campus. Classes were canceled, buildings evacuated, and the entire campus closed.” Ali gives a pretty good account of the incident over here on his blog.

It’s the fact that the school agrees that Ali needs to recycle in a less… middle eastern/hostile fashion that really boggles my mind. Fear! It’s what’s for dinner.

I tell you, Some days it’s not worth getting out of your rubber bondage sleep sack in the morning.

There’s a longer post in here about the participatory panopticon, I’m sure.

Last year, around this time, I was talking to a Professor of Folklore about transhumanism. She had just finished an ethnography on transhumanist art and also had some interest in magic. I had just finished delivering a paper on methods that can be used in sequential art to enhance interactivity with the reader. (Seriously, my paper was one step away from being “here’s how comics characters can break through into the space outside of their narrative… so you can meet them”.) She was curious, though, because in our conversation I self-identified as a transhumanist and a magician and she wasn’t used to seeing a lot of crossover between the two groups. (This led to a conversation about our old mutual acquaintance Anders Sandberg, but I digress.)

So, onto the question she asked of me: “How does this work, this magical transhumanism”?

Good question.

Contrary to what you may have read, there are a lot of different faces to the transhumanist movement. While those who envision a future where human consciousness has been uploaded into nanoswarms or various other electronic frameworks get most of the press these days, there are also biotech fanciers in dozens of stripes, gene-therapy proponents, biomimetics proponents. But aside from the various “high tech” movements, there are also people who are trying to achieve human life extension and enhancement through nutritional experimentation, alternate physical fitness regimens, and other “low tech” technologies. The “transhumanist movement” has everything from neo-fascist closet eugenicists to ex-hippie organic farmers.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of many of the high-tech transhumanist approaches. I’d be happy to augment my flesh with synthetics, invite neural networks to piggyback on my consciousness, use software to stimulate DMT production, and maybe get uploaded into a new body where I could live out the rest of my days as a hyperintelligent fart forever at play in the endless fields of Creation.
But, from where I stand, nanotech is just now becoming a reality (picotech is waaayyy off) and while advanced computer tech is becoming available faster and faster and biotech and other life enhancement technologies are developing at an accelerated (possibly exponential) rate… these tend to be technologies that are currently the province of highly developed countries and only really currently available to the affluent. And even as these ideas and technologies propagate and spread and become cheaper, there are still very human issues to deal with in the spread of materials and access to these systems. Just as currently there are still many people and places which are currently relegated to living under the overpass of the information superhighway; I have a difficult time picturing the hard technologies of human enhancement becoming readily available to everyone in the world. While in theory, any really revolutionary transhumanist technologies could easily be distributed, that same theory holds true for internet capable computers, cheap AIDS medicines, contraception, education, affordable transportation and food for the hungry.

But this is not a rant about how Ray Kurzweil needs to get out more. (He’s brilliant, don’t get me wrong, but I’m really not on the same page as him in regards to capitalism’s ability and willingness to spread radically transformative technologies to all social strata.)

What currently most interests me on a practical level, however, are those technologies that are easily portable, have a large degree of possible cultural penetrability and are able to be constructed, experimented with and enacted by a wide range of people. I’m invested in the work of people who through non “high tech” means are doing the work of life extension, physiological enhancement, cognitive enhancement and transformation. The materials and technologies to reconfigure the self both physically, ideologically, symbolically and cognitively are not strictly the province of DARPA-related experimental labs or self-modifying cyborg experimenters like Kevin Warwick.

The body can be changed by alternative diets, aggressive nutritional reprogramming, experimental physical fitness programmes, enthogen experimentation, vitamin therapy, nutritional supplements and the like. Ray Kurzweil claims to have slowed down the effects of aging and beaten back disease via a radical diet change and aggressive vitamin infusions. The technologies which claim to be able to enhance the body and clear the mind are not all new things or theories, either. Tai Chi and Qi Gong practitioners have claimed life extension as a benefit of their disciplines for years as have Yogis. Long term, low threshold exposure to psilocybin has been proven to enhance visual acuity and pattern recognition. The list of “low tech” enhancements that have either been proven to enhance some aspect of physiological performance beyond the “norm” or at least make that claim is vast.

Which is not to say that I instantly buy into every person who comes along the block stating that their colon cleansing program enhances lifespan as well as purges the body of negative emotions or who passes off chicken livers as psychically removed cancer tumors. I consider myself a pretty skeptical person.

This is by no means supposed to be a survey of the world of transhumanism, the scope of that project is too broad for this blog. (And really, I’m probably way behind the curve, science-wise.) What I’m trying to establish is this:

The technologies for human enhancement and transformation are not strictly the domain of cutting-edge scientific research.

“We can only transform ourselves as fast as we can transform our language.” –Terrence Mckenna

Which brings us slightly closer to my point.

What is magic? Why is magic? Didn’t you read too much Harry Potter? What would Agrippa say? Don’t you mean “reality hacking”? Can magick help me bowl better? Ask a magician what magic is and you’ll probably get a different answer from each of them. Magic is a intensely personal and complicated process and is not so much an end point for many, but an ongoing process. So I’m not going to try and tackle those questions here.

However, in practice, many magical techniques are tools for restructuring and reconceptualizing the self as well as your relationship to linguistic structures and the symbolic order. The modern magician (of various flavours) is often engaged in the risky work of attempting to deconstruct and then rebuild and reconfigure notions of their selves based on any number of frameworks, experimental scenarios or paradigms.

Technology changes how we think, and how we think changes our technologies. The expanded focus on networks brought on by constant exposure to the internet has bled back into many other fields. Study after study has shown that kids who have been exposed to the internet from a young age think differently, have different learning styles, and according to some studies (I need to find this link again) have differently constructed ideas of their self (or more accurately selves).

In order to get the most out of the possibilities for personal transformation, people are going to have to be able to cope and change with those technologies. If Kurzwiel and his camp are to be believed, we are on the cusp of advances in science that will completely alter how we define human. And yet, if the ontological landscape and the symbolic order reject those reconfigurations of “self” and “human” then those technologies will never be healthily integrated into any sort of growing and maturing society.

That’s why the future needs magicians as much as it needs scientists. Just like poets and artists who are people who catch glimpses of a better world and try to share that vision in this world - terraforming the present - magicians are people who can operate outside the various standard constructions of “i” and “self” and “being” and experiment with new ways of being. They can try and build new topologies of the soul using themselves as a testbed.

That’s my Work. I go out into altered states (of many, many kinds) and try to bring back new technologies for the transformation of being. I’m a memeplex, I’m a cyborg, I’m part idea, I’m the bastard daughter of hybridity, I’ve talked to the snakes on the other side of a enthogen experience and brought back things that have helped people. (Not the least of whom was myself.)

It’s not glamorous work, it’ll never make me rich or famous, (hell, I just wish I could figure out how to do it while paying the bills) but I feel that if there are not people out there trying to change the games we play, finding new ways of being with each other, trying to tear down false binaries, making their lives a political act and finding (and constructing) meaning where meaning “breaks down”, then all that will come of the many wonderful technologies for human enhancement, life extension and social and economic growth are systems of control driven by fear, stasis, and systems of thought long since grown toxic.

We can’t live in this constant fear of the Other, when the Other is just us five minutes in the future.

So that’s one of the ways in which I feel that magicians and traditional transhumanists have more of a common dialog than you may think.

But that’s just my two cents. I am, like most people, making this up as I go along.

This week’s Time magazine features one my favourite moments of the week.
No, not the weepy Ronald Regan cover. Between this and how in 80’s fashion is for women, this season, I’m terrified that somehow I hit the wrong button in my Tardis and I’ve ended up in the decade that time forgot.

No, the moment of beauty is this:

As you may know, Jean Baudrillard, social theorist, author of Simulacra and Simulation and The Illusion of the End, died on March 6th. In this week’s Time magazine, the man who coined the term the desert of the real ’s obituary is right smack dab next to…

Captain America’s.

Any day that one of the nation’s supposedly most prestigious magazines morns the death of a controversial postmodernist and a fictional character side by side is awesome in my book.

What do you get when you cross Second Life with X-Box live?

Sony’s home for PS3.

It looks like Linden Labs’ Second Life without the free market economy, the creative freedom or the lizard sex. It operates like an elaborate version of Microsoft’s elegant X-Box Live. At first glance it seems like the end result of the corporate sponsored spaces that you find in Second Life, where you can download content from whatever company is sponsoring that zone. (The exact replica of NBC’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza - sans Tina Fey… trust me I looked - is my favourite for sheer ridiculousness.) I don’t know if this is the kind of thing that users will twig onto or not, the PS3 demographic is so weird anyway.

Still, this is an unexpected application for the expensive giant box that a handful of people have in their media centers.

And speaking of virtual worlds:

One of the things that most floored me about Children of Men was the sheer detail used in creating the near-future setting. You normally only see that kind of detail in historical movies or (more recently) in pseudo-historical fantasy epics. To see such thought and careful attention to detail used to construct a future history really made Children of Men one of my favourite films of the year. Here’s a video showing the detail of some of Foreign Office’s worldbuilding for that movie.

I’m not a big follower of 9/11 conspiracy theories but after chatting with another Axis of Evil-ite @ Ctrl-Alt-Del on Tuesday about the documentary Loose Change I saw this come across my desk this morning and thought I’d share.

Let me preface this with my stating that I’m (contrary to reputation) not much of a conspiracy theorist and that I think large swaths of the “9/11 Truth” are utter crap. That said, I am fascinated by weird news anomalies (my mind keeps returning to the Martial Law lockdown of Cincinnati several years ago) of several kinds - which this certainly qualifies as.

Time Stamp Confirms BBC Reported WTC 7 Collapse 26 Minutes in Advance.

While this doesn’t make me leap up and down, secure in the knowledge that the Man has slipped up, it certainly goes in my mental folder of weird news reports. Right up there with the 9/11 Capitol Building bomb, the 9/11 USA Today Building bomb and the many reports of the planned destruction of Building 7. (I wish I’d kept my giant archive of AP reports for that day. I had an archive of pretty much everything going across the AP wire that day that was NOT adjusting itself for updates. In other words you could track the updates and changes and just plain odd things as the morning progressed. But sadly, it did not come with me when I left the job I was working for at the time.)

I also have to say that it’s interesting that You Tube/Google Video has allegedly been removing copies of the video.

What interests me is information flow. A lot of the things I’ve mentioned in this post (the phantom 9/11 DC truck bombs, the Cincinnati Martial Law outbreak) seemed to be limited to local or regional news. While in some cases, like with bombings that were widely reported by the media but obviously didn’t happen (the DC truck bombs) it makes sense that the stories would vanish or not travel far. In other cases (a major midwestern city is placed under Martial Law due to “race riots”) it makes no sense. How does that kind of information simply not go anywhere? (Save by word of mouth and indymedia and similar grass roots outlets.)

Sorry, no answers this time around, only questions.

Holy crap, the zerosociety has been silent! There was a non-manifesto and then a giant zooming nothing filling this corner of the blogosphere with its echoing emptiness. Well, between the day job, a suddenly assigned writing piece and one of my future articles turning into a big sprawling mass requiring… investigation (?!!) I have been consumed with things that are not in fact zerosociety-ish.

Allow me then, to make a few quick notes. All of them are in fact quite relevant even if they are also somewhat shameless plugs.

Item the first: I often in my bleaker moods find myself scowling menacingly in the direction of speculative fiction - especially things proudly in the sci-fi/fantasy camp. However, while my tendency is to throw the baby out with the bathwater, there are some really interesting things going on in spec-fic. The so called “new weird” movement (new weird is such a really horrible title for a “movement” - I really preferred infernokrusher… and all movement names pale in comparison to Fantastika!) rarely fails to entertain. If you can get your hands on the latest issue of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and you’re of like minds with the staff here at zerosociety, I’d encourage you to check out Darja Malcolm-Clarke’s article “Subversive Metropolis: The Grotesque Body in the Phantasmic Urban Landscape”. She looks at the relations between urban systems and the body in several “new weird” settings and the conclusions she draws from these tales of strange retro-fantastic landscapes are more applicable to posthumanists trying to map the trajectories of their own bodies (fleshy, political, imagined and other) in the here and now than the average Ray Kurzweil speech.

Item Deux: While I’m on the topic of spec-fic… The Terrorism Act of 2006 made it a crime in the UK to, among other things, to “glorify terrorism”. Well, the folks over at Rackstraw Press have recently published an anthology with the charmingly blunt title of “Glorifying Terrorism”. Featuring fiction from sci-fi wunderkind Charlie Stross, my personal new “new weird” crush Hal Duncan, and close personal friend of the staff here at zerosociety Marie Brennan — it looks to be an interesting anthology if nothing else (hideous cover aside). It still remains to be seen if it will garner any sort of political attention in the UK or in the States (and if it doesn’t, that would be a bit of a fizzle), but it’s nice to see genre writers really trying to be overtly political when playing it safe and conservative seems to be the publishing rule of the day.

That’s it for this evening.