I'm here. Come get to know the digital me.

The theme I've been exploring lately is Futurism/Cyberpunk.What comes next??Where will our technology take us??I Started with William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and Spook Country which are more properly called post-cyberpunk. The original genre of Cyberpunk is extinct since the type of world envisioned in books like Neuromancer where Corporations have superseded Nation-States as the primary force in shaping social/political/economic is already with us. In fact, Huey Newton was arguing that this was a fact back in the early seventies with his notion of Intercommunalism. Our technology has already surpassed the then-fantastic ideas of highly intelligent computers, biometric surveilance, nanotechnology, and biosensors.

So gone are the historic conditions from which this genre arose, the early days of computing and the Internet. Really cyberpunk is just a period in the history of Sci-fi, which has alwaysponders the future while reflecting the conditions of the society at that particular time. Much of it has a darker vison then what came before it, but all of it deals with pertinent issues of the period from the early 80's to the mid 90's. The word was first used in 80, Bladerunner was out in 82, Neuromancer in 84. The most basic defintion of Cyberpunk is Postmodern Science fiction, but I think its fairly accurate, as accurate as a concept like postmodernism can get, but it fits.

Ray Kurzweil's book The Age of Spiritual Machines is an example of modern futurism that sees the inevitable growth of computing power to the level of self-consciousness and beyond as a benevolent event. To be fair, Kurzweil acknowledges that tech is a double-edged sword, but thinks we can direct the growth of tech to our advantage. I think his hypothesis that computers will become more human as humans merge with computers is accurate. The most interesting part of the book was the beginning where he explains how the evolution of technology follows the pattern of evolution in general. Natural selection gave humans larger, more complex brains with ever-increasing computation ability, and computers are just an extension of this, but can take to the next level. The question is not whether technology will continue to evolve, but what our fate in all of it will be.

Our intelligence has obvious shortcoming (Nuclear weapons, pollution), so perhaps the evolution of an intelligence above our own will help correct these self-destructive tendencies. But what will a correction of human failings look like?? This question is explored in sci-fi movies like Appleseed and I, Robot. I feel the intellectual speculation behind these Sci-fi scenarios is actually the most relevant philosophical investigations we can undertake.

This leads me to a field of study that I could devote a lot of time to researching, which is the effects of technology on culture and society. Looking at the historic record, studying the direction of tech growth and speculating and how future society will function. What I really want to get at is that we don't need to be passive observers of social change. We can ask ourselves what we want our future society to look like and then focus our tech developments on that. We have the tools and the intelligence to create a society we find more fitting, but the power to direct change is concentrated in the hands of people who have another sort of vision. It is the vision of using tech to further control society and stifle human potential.

As long as we are alienated, jaded, and sedated consumers, we will not take the steps to create the world we want to live in. As long as our idea of human nature is a Hobbesian world of selfish individuals stabbing each other in the back for egotistic gain, we will accept coercive control and a society that has been hacked apart to create autonomous consumers seeking satisfactions not in human relationships, but in products. So I want to study how tech has impacted society and show how the use of tech and the changes engendered have not been the natural outcomes of the tech, but the result of direction in manners benefiting the ruling class. (That may sound dangerously Marxist to some, but we should get over that linguistic taboo. Marx's critique of capitalism was quite valid and we would be fools to ignore it. You don't need to be a Marxist to realize that. Marx himself is quoted as saying he was not a Marxist, but I digress)My point is that tech changes society (tip of the hat to McLuhan) but the uses of technology are many and the resulting changes are conditioned by the objectives of those creating and controlling them.

An example of the effects of tech on society is found in another book I'm reading, The Birth of the Cool which explores the links between Bebop, the Beat movement in literature, abstract expressionism, and Zen Buddisms introduction to the west. I feel all these phenomenon adress the fear and uncertainty of life after the invention of atomic weopons. Bebop and abstract Exp. take the fractured world of cubism to a new level of frantic excitement and confusion. They try to give order to the disorder and incongrous world we found ourselves in as americans after WWII. Zen buddism enters western consciouness at the time we need it most, a time of irrationality and frenzied emotional reaction to the development of the technology neccesary to make our planet uninhabitable. Seeing the effect that the bomb had on society, most now feel Nuclear weapons should be abolished. The demand is there to use tech in a wiser manner, but the political power to do so is lacking. That doesn't say much about democracy in America, but if you still believe that our government is democratically accountable you have probably stopped receiving any news about what has gone on the last 50 years or you just have turned off your criticial thinking abilities and bought the lies they sold ya, but hey, its easier that way.

This issue combines my interests in political science, economics, (our poli-systems are run by the biggest players, corporations) history, media studies, and anthropology. We should remember at all times that we are talking about is how to change things to make life more satisfying for us, our families, and those that live around us. The idea of satisfaction I'm talking about is basic; enough food, clean water, health care, education, and social interaction thru viable communal institutions to function as human beings. By viable I mean created by members of a community to satisfy the needs of the community, rather than to satisfy the needs of any dominate group. We know what we want, we have to tools to achieve it. What we're lacking is the will. As long as our minds are shackled by corporately controlled media, government by big business, and an indoctrination system that tells us capitalism and the individual are the only valid concerns in our lives, the will to create change, even if its a small scale alternative to the structured way of life, is not present in any significant amount.

The will is there, in all of us, or at least he knowledge that something about the way we are living is wrong. Its just buried by layers of egotism, distrust, and a negative concept of human nature. We are taught that what I'm saying is childish crap, we can't change the system, its the only way to prevent us evil humans from murdering one another. If you look at history with a mind that can see through some of these ideological filters you see that the only thing that ever has effected positive social change has been small groups of dedicated people, and that our systems of state control has lead to the most murderous era in human existence.

If any of this strikes you as being true or if you feel that it is bullocks, please let me know.
The only way to get anything done is to share ideas, and that is my intention.