Transhumanism Has Already Won?

Michael Anissimov makes one compelling case, starting with Pocahontas Dances with Ferngully in Space:

The mainstream has embraced transhumanism. A movie about using a brain-computer interface to become what is essentially a transhuman being, Avatar, is the highest-grossing box office hit of all time, pulling in $2.7 billion. This movie was made with hard-core science fiction enthusiasts in mind. About them, James Cameron said, “If I can just get ‘em in the damn theater, the film will act on them in the way it’s supposed to, in terms of taking them on an amazing journey and giving them this rich emotional experience.” A solid SL2 film, becoming the world’s #1 film of all time? It would be hard for the world to give transhumanism a firmer endorsement than that.

I’d qualify the description of Avatar as SL2 by noting that the “alien” culture is aboriginal American with some unique Gaia theory bioconnectivity thrown in for fun. It isn’t that alien, but his point is well made nonetheless. The best counterpoint I can make at the moment is that people don’t know they already support transhumanist ideas, because they compartmentalize their ethics: for example, twins are “normal,” but a cloned child is scary. But on the whole, Anissimov is right about the societal and economic impacts that will emerge as transhumanist technology progresses. Much like the way the rise of deism and atheism lead to the increase in religious fundamentalism, I suspect the bioconservative and technopessimist movements will become more entrenched and vocal as transhumanism becomes more and more mainstream.

Where is the Wire of Sci-Fi?

I explore the question in my most recent hplus magazine article and give a few pitches to get the ball rolling:

Transmetropolitan, written by Warren Ellis, follows Spider Jerusalem, a Hunter S. Thompson for the 22nd Century. After five years living in paranoid isolation on a mountain, Spider’s book contracts are due. To write, he needs his fingers around the seedy, black, artificial heart of the city so that he can squeeze the tar and plaque from its arteries onto the blank pages in front of him. Spider’s column is “I Hate It Here” and its popularity is directly related to Spider’s level of misanthropy. He’s the only writer angry enough to seek the truth and insane enough to print it. His bodyguard, Channon, and his assistant, Yelena, both as debauched and deranged as their surly boss, help Spider get into trouble and right back out of it. The show, like the comic, would follow Spider’s return to the city, starting out in a disgusting apartment in the worst part of town writing about the filth and decay around him. In the comic, Spider is promoted to a new apartment as his popularity grows. The formula for the show is built right in: at the beginning of each season, Spider moves into a new apartment. In step with his rise through society, Spider’s gaze moves from the filth and corruption in the gutters of the City up to the filth and corruption of the city’s and country’s highest offices.

Cyborgs, hybrids, uploaded nano-clouds, bowel disruptors, neuro-implants, cryonics, A.I., vat-grown meat, and a smorgasbord of transhumanist tech bursts from the background in every panel of the comic and sits at the heart of every story line. The show would be no different. Transmet would be an anthropological window into the City, a thriving transhuman society, the same way The Wire and Treme artfully let us into the soul of Baltimore and New Orleans.

A Comic Guide to Transhumanism

My latest article is up on hplus magazine, “Transhumanism and Superheroes.” I find myself explaining transhumanism in bars more often than one might expect, so this quick little guide has been tested in the field. A snippet:

If Peter Parker’s Spider-Man is the representative for biological transhumanity, then Iron Man is unquestionably the representative of technological transhumanity. Tony Stark is an irreversible cyborg: without his artificial heart, he will die. Like Bruce Wayne, Stark is almost impossibly intelligent and wealthy, but unlike Batman, he is quite literally at one with his technology: the Iron Man suit is powered by the same thing that lets Stark’s heart keep beating. Inside his singular piece of hardware, Tony Stark combines every tool possessed by Batman into an embodied technology, the natural completely at one with the artificial, linked literally at the heart of the system.

A Cyborg Sphinx

And other glorious cyborg animals. Raise your hand if you love photoshop. RAISE IT! [via Digg]

MST3K Haiku

<3

via Sully

Gaga “Telephone”

The short, edited version. Look out for the Dune and other sci-fi references. Also, Diet Coke can curlers:

Telephone – Short Version from Popsessed on Vimeo.

Playing Catch Up

The name of this blog is indeed “Pop” Transhumanism, is it not, implying I’m supposed to know something about popular culture? To my shame, there are epic gaps in my monstrous compendium of entertainment knowledge. I’m taking steps to correct some of those. Namely: BattleStar Galactica and its prequel series Caprica; Star Trek: The Next Generation; Transmetropolitan; Y: The Last Man; Bostrom and Savulescu’s Human Enhancement; Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget; some Thomas Sowell, L. Frank Baum, and I’ll probably pick up Mass Effect 1 & 2.

Additionally, Red Dwarf and Ghost in the Shell are getting a second going through.

Stuff on deck includes Stephenson’s Diamond Age, Brin’s “Uplift Series,” are in my reading cue, and my netflix cue contains Metropolis, THX:1138, The Lawnmower Man, and Machine Girl. I have a stack of JET and Bioethics articles I’m burning through, I’m reading back issues of the godforsaken disaster that is The New Atlantic, and am going to be tackling Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia as soon as possible.

Sci-Fi Gets Classy

Awesome posters from Travis Pitts:

via io9

Vampires Are People Too

Margot Adler tries to figure out the appeal of bloodsuckers:

But what I started noticing as I read all these novels and looked at all the recent television shows featuring vampires is that their near-immortality isn’t the most interesting thing about them. Almost all of these current vampires are struggling to be moral. It’s conventional to talk about vampires as sexual, with their hypnotic powers and their intimate penetrations and their blood-drinking and so forth. But most of these modern vampires are not talking as much about sex as they are about power.

Our culture has been trying to reason with the moral burden of posthumanism long before it became a plausible reality.

Borg Breakfast

Yum yum yum yum. The borg on the upper right sure is cheerful. I’m eating it first.

[Wil Wheaton via Geekologie]