Author: Jon Lebkowsky

Co-wrangler of Plutopia News Network, cohost Radio Free Plutopia. Podcaster, writer, dharma observer, enzyme. Former editor/publisher, FringeWare Review; associate editor at bOING bOING and Factsheet Five; writer at Mondo 2000, 21C, Wired, Whole Earth Review, Austin Chronicle; sub-editor at Millennium Whole Earth Catalog; blogger at Worldchanging. Digital culture maven, podcaster, writer, dharma observer, enzyme. On The WELL, Cohost of VC (virtual communities), Media, and Civil War (.ind) conferences.

Transhuman Responses

Natasha Vita-More has guest edited the Metanexus Institute’s “GlobalSpiral.” She’s created a response to a “Special Issue on Transhumanism.” In her intro, she says

There are numerous forbearers of theories on human evolution and traces can be found in a plethora of sources, all suggesting that the biological human is not the final stage of evolution for the Homo sapiens sapiens. The philosophy and social/cultural movement of transhumanism has developed not only from the words “trans” and “human”, but also through an understanding that the human condition is one in which we might go outside to gain perspective, a process in becoming, an evolutionary transformation:

“Trans-human” and the Italian verb “transumanare” or “transumanar” was used for the first time by Dante Alighieri in Divina Commedia.It means “go outside the human condition and perception” and in English could be “to transhumanate” or “to transhumanize”.

T.S. Eliot wrote about the risks of the human journey in becoming illuminated as a “process by which the human is Transhumanised” in “The Cocktail Party”, Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950.Julian Huxley wrote about how humans must establish a better environment for themselves, while still remaining man in New Bottles For New Wine, which contains the essay “Transhumanism”.Teilhard de Chardin wrote about intellectual and social evolution and ultra-humanity in The Future of Man.Abraham Maslow referred to transhumans in Toward a Psychology of Being.

The Reader’s Digest Great Encyclopedia Dictionary defined “transhuman” as meaning “surpassing; transcending; beyond”.The Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary defined “transhuman” as meaning “superhuman,” and “transhumanize,” as meaning “to elevate or transform to something beyond what is human”.

Obama’s cloud

Read Write Web compares word clouds of Obama’s inaugural speech to those by Bush, Clinton, Reagan, and Lincoln. Interesting comparison. (RWW’s other inauguration day posts were underwhelming. You don’t really have to post about the inauguration if you don’t have something new and useful to add to the general noise.)

We set up an ad hoc chat room to hang out and discuss the Inauguration while it was happening, and I was reminded that chat feels more like coherent conversation than Twitter. The Inauguration was meaningful, an historic event, but I’m more interested in the real work that starts today.

“All we say to America is be true to what you said on paper…”

“I have been to the mountaintop. I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life, longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will, and he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I’ve looked over, and I have seen the promise land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”

Free Paper

We dropped by Flatbed Press last night for Annette Lawrence’s “Free Paper” exhibition, hosted by Austin Green Art. It was an activist exhibit – Randy Jewart was strongly encouraging, if not requiring, people to sign the ForestEthics Do Not Mail petition. They want to create something similar to the “Do Not Call” registry, which lets you opt out of telemarketing calls. With a “Do Not Mail” registry, you could opt out of hardcopy junk mail, which we seem to tolerate better than the calls or email spams – but the mountains of junk mail are taking down whole forests, which is one point of Lawrence’s exhibition. The exhibition “onstitutes a body of work that addresses issues of excess and consumerism.”

While journals and personal calendars have provided inspiration in previous series, daily junk mail provides the source material for this exhibition. Lawrence explores her concerns about the extreme amount of paper used in the effort to advertise products and services through direct mail. The paper collected over 395 days (thirteen months) weighs a total of 265 pounds. Free Paper is both a commentary on the disposability of consumer culture and an attempt to introduce order and meaning.

Ana Sisnett

I met Ana Sisnett just after she arrived in Austin in 1983. She was very smart and very kind, and we immediately became friends. We crossed paths over the years, and in the 2000s when she became executive director of Austin Free-net, I joined the Board of Directors and, for a time, I was President of the Board. It was wonderful to work with Ana – we talk about building the digital divide; she wanted to blast it out of existence. She understood that digital access would have growing relevance to social and economic justice, and no one was more passionate about justice.

Here’s what I told the Statesman: “She was passionate and powerful in her support of people who are traditionally underserved online. Some people just want to make the system work the way that it should. She was one of those people.” Her daughter Meredith said “She was always willing to teach anyone all that she knows. She was an international teacher of love.”

Resources for hacking consciousness

Clifford Pickover posted at Twitter the url for a very rich web site rich with resources for exploring consciousness… audio and video from Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, Tim Leary, Huston Smith, Robert Anton Wilson, Daniel Pinchbeck, Alex Grey, our pal Mark Pesce, et al. Quote from RAW:

Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.

Also a great quote from Alan Watts:

Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—to the “conquest” of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.

Note that there’s also a Bill Hicks video page.

Cory Doctorow’s best practices

Cory Doctorow once told me he had a pile of book contracts and writing projects in queue, and I asked him how he managed to produce so much (and blog at boingboing, too) – at the time he was also employed as online activist for th Electronic Frontier Foundation. He was just disciplined – an early riser who committed a daily couple of hours to writing before jumping into the fray.

For the science fiction trade magazine Locus, Cory’s documented the current state of his best practices in Writing in the Age of Distraction.

When I’m working on a story or novel, I set a modest daily goal — usually a page or two — and then I meet it every day, doing nothing else while I’m working on it. It’s not plausible or desirable to try to get the world to go away for hours at a time, but it’s entirely possible to make it all shut up for 20 minutes. Writing a page every day gets me more than a novel per year — do the math — and there’s always 20 minutes to be found in a day, no matter what else is going on. Twenty minutes is a short enough interval that it can be claimed from a sleep or meal-break (though this shouldn’t become a habit). The secret is to do it every day, weekends included, to keep the momentum going, and to allow your thoughts to wander to your next day’s page between sessions. Try to find one or two vivid sensory details to work into the next page, or a bon mot, so that you’ve already got some material when you sit down at the keyboard.

Whole Earth redux

I’m psyched to see that some, if not all, of the Whole Earth Catalog‘s archives have been published. Whole Earth inspired me throughout my adult life, and led me online via The WELL – I bought my first computer and modem because I found out Stewart Brand and the whole earthers were online. I wanted to hang out with ’em, and that did ultimately happen. I found myself writing for Whole Earth Review and helping edit The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog. When Whole Earth Magazine ran out of funds several years ago, I exchanged email with Danica Remy of the Point Foundation Board and contributed some thoughts about potential web strategy. She was talking then about placing more of the articles online. She and the rest of the board kept the faith and got it done. boingboing reported that all the publications are scanned and online, though the site says “the collection of that work provided on this site is not complete — and probably never will be — but it is a gift to readers who loved the CATALOG and those who are discovering it for the first time.” Okay by me – I still have most of the hardcopies. If you haven’t read Whole Earth before, suggest you take an afternoon to browse… you’ll be amazed how current it all seems. Note how much the reviews look like blog posts – not an accident.

National Geographic: Best News Photos 2008

National Geographic Best of 2008 photo - crocodile hatching

Though I’ve avoided year-end best-of lists – there’s just too many channels, and I’m trying to move on from 2008 – I did appreciate National Geographic’s Editor’s Picks for 2008. NGeo also has a most viewed list, and top ten space photos. Here’s a Martian landslide:

Bruce Sterling State of the World 2009

The annual State of the World conversation with Bruce Sterling, led by yours truly, is under way. You have to be a member of the WELL to post directly, but nonmembers can send comments and questions to inkwell /at/ well.com. Link

Ed Ward leaves Berlin

Ed Ward My pal and rock journalist extraordinaire, Ed Ward, is leaving Berlin and putting his Berlinbites blog to rest. He’s setting up in Montpellier, France, and will have a new blog soon. Ed’s been planning this move for several years. Why is he moving?

Ultimately, the city and I just didn’t get along. I became unhappy with the picture Berlin was painting of itself to the world, emphasizing the negative, emphasizing death over life, always twisting the narrative to avoid mentioning things the city should have been proud of. The weather, of course, could be brutal in the winter, and the winter seemed to last for seven months. The food, for most of my stay, was awful, although I have to say that’s one thing which was definitely on the upswing in my last couple of years there. The architecture was relentessly grim, and, with the city sprawled out over an area that seemed the size of Los Angeles, there was an awful lot of it: this past March I’d just returned from Texas and France when I agreed to meet friends at a recently-discovered Chinese restaurant in Neukölln and took the Ringbahn from Schönhauser Allee to get there. I was really demoralized by the time I arrived from the endlessly repetitive vistas of depressing buildings and squalid streets, and this just fuelled my need to get out even further. And I saw all of this reflected in the faces of the residents, so many of whom look either desperately unhappy or lobotomized. I couldn’t see myself getting older there, and given that one of my not-so-unconscious goals in moving in the first place was to find female companionship, I’d long since given up on finding a German woman who wasn’t consumed with self-loathing or incipient mental illness. Not to say that they don’t exist, but the only one I found wasn’t a romantic prospect, although it was encouraging after all those years to discover there were occasional nonconformists.

I’ll post here when Ed’s new blog is up. Meanwhile Ed has a regular rock ‘n’ roll spot on NPR’s Fresh Air. (Photo: Ed Ward and Curra’s in Austin during SXSW 2008, by Jon L.)