There is a significant difference between wanting the future and working towards it. We are at a point where we are an increasingly design driven society. We’re in a feedback loop of building a narrative about what we want and then trying to flesh out that fiction with some reality. Design fiction is getting a really great rap right now. You’re Google, you say you are going to build some blimps, and then you just… go out and build blimps.
For some reason, it never really occurred to the rest of us that sitting around and telling each other stories about the future might not pan out the way we planned. That the build up and the pitch might just fall flat and we’d be left with, literally, a pocketful of processing power and absolutely nothing else. This isn’t the “where is my jetpack” rant. I was born after the 50’s, nobody every promised me a jetpack. Strapping an explosive to my body and shooting myself into the sky really doesn’t resonate. This is a little more fundamental than that.
Vernor Vinge said that if the Singularity came and went and we weren’t ready, we get a “glut of technological riches, never properly absorbed.”
We’ve all talked some great game about the Singularity. About how awesome it will be, how we won’t be eaten by rampant machine intelligence, there won’t be the crushing oppression that comes with radical class shifts and stratification because people are learning how to program.
It’s a little late. A “glut of technological riches, never properly absorbed”, that’s us in a nut shell. We cherry picked these ideas about the future and built ourselves a great narrative about how things will just work out, with no real plans for how things would just fall apart. You literally can not code yourself out of this issue. There is no elegant way to express the inequalities and the failures of our current technologically riddled societal body. Basically, we needed to be super human. Instead, we perfected the super size. Keeping track of the top tier companies in the world making the next micro-adjustment in their portfolio, waiting for the scraps that come from trickle down economics in a time of war is just not a viable plan for the future.
Software will not save you.
Luckily, we have a rising rear guard, coming in where the narrative just never really got filled in. Small groups of excited and dedicated people willing to wade through the mess that has been made and flat out ignore the mistakes of the previous generations. People that still want to be superhuman, and are willing to carve it out on the testbeds of their own bodies.
What we need is action, not design porn. What we need for action is functionality. How we get functionality is through open access, with information and knowledge distributed through the community. We need to remember, design fiction does not equal a cultural shift.
So, what I’m talking about here isn’t the hard sell, it’s the no sell.
I had a postdoc explain to me how to break a tremendously cool huge idea into tiny tiny parts, so that they could be worked on. This was a very important skill. A thing I had never been taught before in the fashion of what I was trying to achieve. Sure, I had learned to think critically and to divide tasks in to parts that I can handle. I had a life and I was hacking it. This was something else. It went right past critical thinking and straight into the banality where true functionality exists. It was amazing. The conversation was all about breaking up some really novel idea like mammalian ametabolism in to tiny pieces, unrecognizable from the whole. This was so you could properly focus on developing a protocol. Not just a hip narrative that made someone give you money, but a functioning set of systems that did something.
These tiny parts were filled with minutiae. For example, mapping the movements of molecules. This is the slow and awkward progress of tagging proteins and chemical structures. Waiting while nature takes its course and then decanting the results. This sounds cool conceptually, but in reality it’s bench work and waiting and failure and repeatability. All the things that are crucial to science. Very little of it looks great on film. It’s dry and it’s dull and this is it’s power. This is what makes it a real thing.
I’m part of the Grinder community. Depending on who you talk to it’s either practical transhumanism or some exceptionally flagrant acts of body modification. A lot of crazy ideas get tossed out there, but beneath that is a core of functionality and action that is still lacking in the broader scope of the transhumanist community. We aren’t science cheerleaders. We are experimenters, working with the tools that we have, and what we can salvage from the scrap available. We could do more if you just opened up and gave us more…
For instance, there are some Grinders working on new transdermal implant coatings. Not just a piercing that breaks the surface of the skin, but one with a coating that will bond to the skin, integrate with it. While this has been done before, it has been done in the ways that don’t actually help us as a community. Developments behind paywalls and patents, locked off in the hopes of future financial fecundity.
What these Grinders hope to do is open up this technology to everyone. Put a twist on it and release into the wild. No patents will be violated. The technique will new and open source, because everyone needs to have access to the tools and methods for moving forward. The future needs all of us.
The steps we take forwards are made by scores of papers breaking down the various pathways and mechanisms of senescence and by people developing new techniques for implantables in their garages.
Even with all the steps being made, transhumanism continues to be a crew of advertisers in a field where we desperately need more products. We need to stop selling the future. Advertisements always disappoint.
Grinding is essential. It’s not the iPhone future. It’s not all shiny. It’s like the sewer system. It’s un-sexy, and dirty, and it makes sure we aren’t all wading around in shit. It’s how the world actually functions.
This is the new grind. The way that we should be doing things. Collaboration and stepping outside the cycle of proprietary knowledge. Finally moving beyond that learned sense of personal helplessness.
What excuses do we have about the intense failures and issues that pervade ourselves and our environment?
It’s time to get a grip on our situation here. Nothing of value comes without sweat equity.
What will you bring to the table?
* hero image used: http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/off-topic-31/can-someone-tell-me-what-cyberpunk-and-steampunk-a-485443/
November 24, 2014 at 3:07 pm
I was unhappy with my dentures. I took a Dremmel™ to them and cut them down about half their size. I was unhappy with paste adhesives and wondered if I inserted repelling hard drive magnets into them would they push apart obviating any need for pastes. The orientation is used was only good for straight down biting. Any side to side moved the magnets into attraction mode. The result as such was a failure. A different implementation may have better results.
Being immune compromised from a bone marrow transplant I shun implants of all sorts. I was very interested in gaining magnetic field sensory ability so I epoxied a small neodymium magnet to my thumb nail. Unfortunately it peeled off in less than a day. I have not found a viable adhesive. I’m thinking of making a ring from melted then remagnetized neodymium.
November 24, 2014 at 7:37 pm
the magnet thing I tried too. however I took a very small one and would super glue it to my pinky nail. seems to come off every couple days. the ring idea is good… 🙂
December 1, 2014 at 10:51 pm
I went to a multi-award-winning tattoo shop one day in my hometown and asked if they are capable of surgically inserting a neodymium magnet into someone’s finger and after i explained it they said not only had they never heard of it but they didn’t know anyone in the whole city capable of doing it… Reading this article, it seemed like you were basically saying, people need to stop promoting how great transhumanism is and start inventing and developing new and better transhumanist things… and for me personally… my skills are all in the arts… im a music composer and a photoshopper and a video editor and illustrator even and so i don’t know how i personally can help the transhumanist community if it isn’t thru one of those skills… even if i take the time to learn anatomy and physics and engineering just so i can understand more of the nitty-gritty details you’re talking about… will i ever be good at it enough that i’ll be able to contribute anything? i sort of doubt that i can contribute anything of substance… except thru the promotion and selling and advertising that you despise so much.
December 1, 2014 at 11:24 pm
Pete, You may want to look at past attempts to do that before you try it on yourself. The typical immune system will do it’s very best to break down that foreign substance in your finger with possibly disastrous results. I heard from one young lady who like her implant until that happened at which point she nearly lost her finger.
On the other note, I can’t think of any educational work that can’t be advantageous in some way. Go for it.
December 1, 2014 at 11:30 pm
With the proper coating, you don’t have those type of issues. Yet another reason to learn more about how things work. Early grinder kids were using dental resin or even suguru D: It’s important to learn how biological systems work if you want to interact with them.
December 1, 2014 at 11:27 pm
First, let’s not put words in mouths. I never said that I despised selling and advertising, just that it’s overdone with so little material on the table right now.
As far as magnet implant techniques, I figure that you can probably learn how to do that yourself. I imagine you have steady hands, with all your art skill training… Subcutaneous implants are not that difficult, given a bit of know how. If you’re nervous, swing on down, we’ll teach you 🙂
If you learn new things about how the world works, will you ever be good enough to contribute? I don’t know, that’s a difficult question. I am sure that if you don’t try, you will always fail.
This concept of “will I be good enough? I doubt I can contribute” seems kind of defeatist to me. Hardware or prosthetic design takes, well, design. The best promotion requires an understanding of the material. If you have that nitty-gritty detail understanding of how a thing works, how would you think that it is detrimental?
Maybe your background plus a little more sci background is just the thing to come up with a fresh idea that can help us all out.
December 2, 2014 at 1:32 am
i appreciate all the quick responses. I guess my attitude might be a bit defeatist but i’m more thinking, if there are people that already know all this nitty-gritty detail front-to-back, then can i really contribute anything they couldn’t… but i guess if everyone had my attitude then the transhumanist movement wouldn’t grow so i see where i might be wrong… I’m just scared of some of this stuff… the fact that you Gabriel suggest i could learn to do surgery on myself is exactly the kind of gung-ho attitude that scares me… but i guess progress is based on taking risks… I wish i could just walk into the transhumanist store at my local mall and buy a robot tail or whatever but i guess the only way to get to that future is for guys like me to work hard on what’s possible NOW…
December 2, 2014 at 3:16 am
Yes! That’s exactly what I was hoping to hear.
Right on, man. I hope you move forward with this concept.
March 29, 2015 at 11:37 pm
As a science fiction writer, your call to stop telling the stories and start building stuff didn’t really go down very well. Of course, I know that people like me were not your real target. However, there is an important point to make about the value of stories about the future. As a former scientist and software designer, I feel that what I’m doing now (writing sci-fi) is a far more important contribution to building the future we want than any I made in the past. Most sci-fi is derivative rubbish – kids adventure stories set in exotic worlds – but the good stuff is about exploring the consequences of scientific and (especially) technological advances. I write a lot about transhumanity and think a lot about how that’s all going to work out for us – and if you had read my novel about augmented reality, you might be glad that Google Glass was such a flop 🙂 The point is that, without someone looking at the as-yet-unrealised technology and trying to work through the implications for people using it, we’re liable to stumble blindly into some really bad places.
March 30, 2015 at 1:48 am
I’m not saying that everyone everywhere should stop what they are doing and pick up a soldering iron (or whatever).
More that we currently have a glut of talkers, and not a lot of doers. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, blog. By all means, let’s not stop looking ahead, building new futures in our stories and minds… But we need more builders for the future outside of our heads. We need people to read the stories and then go out and have their own adventures. And fuck it, if there isn’t enough in the world now, make it! No complaining about how things were better, or being middle children. Get your hands dirty.
As for stumbling into some really bad places… Do you mean worse than where we are now, dramatic anthropocentric climate shifts, oppressive governments masquerading as opportunity, most of the wealth in the world held by an elite few while we think things are going to get better down here? If we don’t start working here and now, there may be no future to speak of. I’ve got your dystopian cyberpunk future right here man, and we need more feet on the street.
March 30, 2015 at 1:58 am
Though I’m 57 years old, whenever I hear someone say “Why don’t they invent a _____” I switch it to “Why don’t I invent a ____”. Then I go to my sketch pad and start inventing.