As technology advances, people with certain skills formerly in prominence find themselves unemployed, made unfortunate and obsolete by the march of machines. But, few ever consider the unfortunate problem of those whose talents have yet to find a niche at all. What would Mozart have done before the invention of the piano? What would Van Gogh have painted before the invention of vibrantly colored paints? What sort of empire would Napoleon have had without gunpowder? The world is awash in an epidemic of underemployment, talented people without a socially acceptable outlet. All over the world humans are engaged in strange practices that could one day manifest as the single edge required to reach a new historical plateau. For better or worse, humanity is chomping at the bit of its true potential for tyranny and liberty. Old Man Burroughs warned us in an essay entitled, “The Coming of The Purple Better One” that “The aggressive southern ape will block your way to space.” A symbol for the conservative warmongers, the aggressive southern ape aims to use all technology as a club and block any progressive potential.
The technology currently being researched by the government of the aggressive southern ape will ensure a more complete tyranny for the future, and reduce the time required to conquer small countries to mere hours. Soldiers riding in armored, robotic exoskeletons will run at vehicle speed and be impervious to small arms fire. Linked to a centralized command that will be able to correlate their sensory inputs to adjust combat strategy in real-time, no fleshy insurgency will stand a gooey oozing bloody chance. Semi-autonomous, all-terrain robots will provide logistical support without need for roads or direct supervision. Semi-autonomous flight drones will run constant surveillance, and provide cover fire for their semi-autonomous machinegun carrying brothers. No longer suffering the weakness of human frailty, these robots will bind together the future military into a metallic force to be feared. What underemployed talent pool, you ask, lies at the heart of these robotic storm troopers of our vast future empire? The caffeine-twitchy, obese children, mashing buttons on their video game controllers are the genocide reaping soldiers of the future. Their button clicking pudgy fingers are wearing jackboots; I can hear them coming now.
No tyranny is to be without its own underground resistance force. Indeed, the future resistance will require a human capable of pursuing supply vehicles across impossible terrain. A human willing and capable to personally plant improvised explosives on the back of an armored exoskeleton, and then dodge away from the hail storm of fifty caliber rounds spewed forth from the cyborgs ammo-hopper when it explodes. The resistance will need humans able to perform feats of daring acrobatics in urban environments to avoid surveillance drones. Who, you ask, what force of underemployed supermen can perform such feats? The impressive, fit practitioners of free running will not stand for the limits placed on them by the southern ape agenda. These future soldiers of the underground will fight off the robot hordes that are the military pipe dream of the aggressive southern ape, and help to clear our way to space.
Every time a man tosses himself from the top of a building with a parachute just to enjoy the fall, the world should think, there goes another desperate spaceman looking for employment. Any business person with an office above the fiftieth floor should not be calling the police to have these thrill seekers imprisoned by the ape administration. No! Instead they should be helping to clear a way to space. The future space laborer lives in the heart and strong stomach of the BASE jumper. In the soul of the human willing to take risks for the joy of freefall lays the space faring potential of our species. We here on space station earth need to foster their semi-suicidal risk taking for the benefit of us all. But, no, says the aggressive southern ape, the unrestrained class of climber-jumpers must be understood for the real threat they pose. People seeking to upset the ape agenda with boundary pushing practices must be stopped. In the post-911 world, these insurgent threats must be shipped off, preferably to some far away Prison Island to preserve civilian calm and bring balance and mediocrity to the population.
Infodump:
Sarcos: Robot Exoskeleton Manufacturers
Robotic Exoskeleton Story By Ed Yeates of KSL
FutureWeapons Coverage of The Crusher Robot Vehicle
Wikipedia: Free Running
Wikipedia: Parkour
BASE jumping
BASE jumpers who have died for the feeling of free fall
7.01.2008
Underemployed: Chomping at the bit
6.29.2008
You are Beautiful Battlefield
His body is a beautiful battlefield in a culture war being waged in the name of self-expression. Shotgun shells hang from the gauged earlobe of each ear, and the tattoo on his chest reads, “Live Free or Die.” He explained that I could skin him alive if he ever stopped believing in that message. An interesting offer to receive from someone who has merged pain, politics, flesh, and fashion into a single image; but I doubt I will ever be taking the blade to this pop cultural combatant.
Body modification is perhaps the fastest growing front in pop cultural warfare; with over a third of the people between 18 and 29 having received at least one tattoo. This phenomenon, far from being a superficial style trend, shows that there has been a significant shift in the way that the human form is viewed by the generation now in their twenties.
In the traditional social conception of the human form, the body is a static unit made after the image of God. Everything that constitutes straight-laced professionalism in western society is founded upon this idea. Under this regime the shape of the human form is to be dictated from up-on-high by God, the state, or the corporation. The old static regime is now facing attack by pop cultural combatants that believe the shape of the human body should be dictated from below, by the self.
“I hate old people.” That’s what he thinks of people that can’t conceive of why he would wear shotgun shells in his ears. “I wear these so that I can have more opportunities to confront the ignorant and stagnant people like that. It’s a lot of fun.” In his mind, body modification is about establishing more dynamic social standards. “Nose jobs, sports doping, sex changes, exercise, pacemakers, it’s all technically body modification. People who hate someone because they have their septum pierced…” the frustration builds in his eyes, “…they’re idiots that I don’t understand. In my experience a lot of them are also the same old people that hate people for being a different race.”
The new social order writes its’ manifesto in the flesh. Declaring that the body is a plastic medium for the expression of the self, and that an act of body modification is an act of self-possession, self-definition, and cultural aggression against the bigotry designed to force conformity to cultural definitions of beauty and acceptability. The new social order stands its’ ground in the pain and permanence of their self-possession.
Make no mistake; this is a culture war with real consequences. For all the lip service paid towards the idea of western economic meritocracy by conservatives; in the end, their irrational bigotry always seems to thwart their economic models. The outcome of this conflict could mean the difference between a full third of a generation joining their peers as employable citizens, and their becoming a permanent unemployed underclass of scarred freaks, regardless of skill. Furthermore, the connections between self-possession of the body and other social issues such as abortion and drugs will not go unnoticed, even if not explicitly connected. Unlike with past generations, traditional society will not be able to easily assimilate this cultural rebellion with hair-dye and long-sleeved suits. A conflict in social institutions, if not immediate, is inevitable.
So, take off your clothes and look at the naked body you inhabit. Observe the rake and jut of your flesh; the corporeal human shape, your own beautiful battlefield in this culture war. Look past gauged earlobes stuffed with shotgun shells, and ask yourself the underlying question being brought forward by these daring rebels of the new social order: who will dictate the nature and form of your body, you or society?
6.28.2008
Paraplegics and Autistics: New Nodes in the Comm-Network
Computer, a catch all word that hardly comes close to explaining the outer reaches of its implied potential. Its antiquated syllables slide off the speakers tongue with such speed that you can almost leave them out, assume them as being universally implied. Someday the word will become the verbal cue of a person’s age and technical ignorance, like when my grandmother advised me to adjust the antenna after the digital cable had gone to pixilated static.
Like the television, the radio, and the car before it, the computer is slowly fading into that ever present realm of invisible technologies. Little by little we fail to notice, or simply accept as axiomatic the computers in everything, connecting everything. We’ve ceased to wonder at the novelty of sending a file from one device to another. Now, we only notice we’re doing it when those devices fail to network, or – how quaint an idea – when a device wasn’t intended to network, and we find ourselves taking for granted that it would and should.
Many skeptics, Luddite technophobes, have come to question our growing relationship with the network. Parading in these Theroux-like ideas that we should return to nature, or at least that the computer should never have been given such power in our world. But let’s be honest with ourselves: the computer is not the prime mover of this grand network we are all a part of, it’s merely so much accelerant tossed on the unstoppable communications conflagration.
Really, it’s been growing for as long as humans have engaged others as messengers. There is a sort of charm for my cyberpunk soul in the idea of a human based proto-telecom network. But there is simply no way that sort of network could ever enable communications with the otherwise incommunicado worlds of the paraplegic and autistic in the profound way that computer driven networks have allowed.
Researchers at Cyberkinetics have received an Investigational Device Exemption from the FDA to conduct a clinical trials on a device they are calling BrainGate. With this device they hope to break open the confines of the paraplegic’s inability to communicate and self-mobilize by interfacing the brain directly with a computer that will read the brains output signals. In short, by learning to think the proper signals to the BrainGate, the paraplegic is able to move the cursor on a computer with their mind to enable communications, or - at some point further along in the project – pilot an electric wheel chair, or maybe a robotic exoskeleton.
Less physically invasive use of the computer is starting to force us to notice the complex ethical issues around our narrowly defined concepts of personhood, especially when applied to people with Autism. The Autistic Liberation Front, an organization that is challenging the idea that autism as a disease, contends that Autism is a way of life, a mode of perception, and they are using virtual worlds like Second Life to communicate their concerns to the unaware masses that seek to cure them.
Those who may be skeptical of ALF’s position on Autism should review the websites and videos of Amanda Baggs, an Autistic activist, whose perceptive analysis of the institutional bias of the normal opened my mind to thinking about this issue differently. The struggle of ALF and that of the Transhumanists is definitely running a parallel circuit. Asking the important question: what do we mean by human?
We’ve already been co-opted into this system. We’ve already taken many bites from the apple here, and there are many possibilities to expand the horizons of human understanding staring us in the face. Today the new connections in the network forged by technological advancement seem radically invasive, they make us uncomfortable. But tomorrow, they’ll become common place, be considered passé, and become invisible to us.
Infodump:
Cyberkinetics Inc. Site
Cyberkinetics Inc. BrainGate Page
Paraplegic using similar technology to BrainGate on PBS Show
Paraplegic using BrainGate on ABC 6
HAL Exoskeleton
Autistic Liberation Front
BBC News 4 Story On ALF
Amanda Baggs FAQ
Amanda Baggs Popular Youtube Video "In My Language"
