We live in a period of time that will produce more change for humanity than any previous era in history. Wholesale change is taking place in almost every segement of our reality - and the pace will only increase in coming years.Cyberia
by: Selena SolWhen we think about the future, what are we doing?
I identify with the characters of Star Trek.
Don't you?
Picard, Kirk, even Troi...an alien...she's basically like you or me.
I mean, sure, she's an individual with her own unique qualities,
but if I met her on the street
I wouldn't
for one second
think she wasn't a
1995
American
human
woman.
images of the present you and I frozen in .gif format and a click on the scissors icon and a click pasting them on top of "futuristic" technology.BEGIN animation."Humanity is constant. It is only the environment that changes. Bill and Ted can cut Beethoven out of the 17th.century and paste him into one of those cheesy piano shops at the mall and he will jam Hendrix." says the institution, say the holy holders of cultural identity. "Who we are now, is good, is timeless, is correct, is true, is objective."
Not.
Most of our "living" grandparents can barely cope with the exponential rate of change of our evolving world let alone Beethoven, or even some early human Neanderthal. They thought of the world so fundamentally different that there can be no real comparison.
What makes us think that Picard or Troi or anyone else in the far future will look like us, think like us, or have our cultural institutions.
How far into the future can we extrapolate from where we are?
Given the exponential rate of change, what will it mean to be sentient in 2100, 2050, or even 2012?
This paper will outline some of the ingredients of the 21st cetury psyche in both a predictive and ethnographic/qualitative sense in hopes that such an inductive approach will lead us to more qualitative theories of future culture than would any analytic step-by-step appraoch would.
It is only through such generalistic forethought and prediction that we can hope to
transfer
the free will
of
individuals
to that
of the greater
collectivity."...and you know me, I was like, dude your phucked up. Chaos theory teaches us that all one can do is understand the patterns of one's flow and work within those limitations. The only rule of nature is that things change. Trying to control or institutionalize nature is flawed from the outset. If you fight the flow you're in, you give up your only chance to help determine your destiny. Instead, you'll get dragged along, kicking and screaming, by the great attractor of history. And so then Lewis Thomas cut in,""When you are confronted by any complex system, such as an urban center or a hamster, with things about it that you're dissatisfied with and anxious to fix, you cannot just step in and set about fixing with much hope of helping. You cannot meddle with one part of a complex system from the outside without the almost certain risk of setting off disastrous events that you hadn't counted on in other, remote parts. If you want to fix something you are first obliged to understand, in detail, the whole system"
"I was like 'exactly!' and then Brian [Arthur] goes,"
"If you think that you're a steamboat and can go up the river, you're kidding yourself. Actually, you're just the captain of a paper boat drifting down the river. If you try to resist, you're not going to get anywhere. On the other hand, if you quietly observe the flow, realizing that you're part of it, realizing that the flow is ever-changing and always leading to new complexities, then every so often you can stick an oar into the river and punt yourself from one eddy to another. So what's the connection with economic and political policy? Well, in a policy context, it means that you observe, and observe, and observe, and occasionally stick your oar in and improve something for the better. It means that you try to see reality for what it is, and realize that the game you are in keeps changing, so that it's up to you to figure out the current rules of the game as it's being played. "
"Anyway, so then DJ Acid Phreak made this rad cut from ambient to industrial NIN and I found myself back in the 120 BPM throng with Dierdre. And I mean, philosophizing is kool, but Dierdre is more kool. Adiablo homie I'm outa here"
"...The I Ching is thought to work the same way, and uses a sixty-four-part structure almost identical to that of DNA to help people predict future events and understand their personal roles in the overall continuum of time and space. Terence and Dennis McKenna used computers to compute the I Ching as a huge fractal equation for all of human history. According to their fractal, called "Time Wave Zero," history and time as we know it will end in the year 2012. This date has also been linked with the Mayan Tzolkin calendar, which many believe also calls 2012 the end of linear time. It makes the notion of a simple, global renaissance pale by comparison..." - Douglas Rushkoff
WHAT'S ALL THIS ABOUT THE SINGULARITY?
The trends are already in place. If you're an adult, during your lifetime science learned more about how nature works than it learned in the 5,000 years before you were born. Fifty years ago, astronomers could only identify two galaxies. Now we know there are more than 2 billion. Eighty percent of the scientists who have ever lived are alive today; and they (and every other segment of life) are producing extraordinary amounts of new information. Some estimates say that the total amount of information in the world is now doubling every 18 months.
This explosion of information is changing who you are. You are a far different person today than you would have been had you lived, say, 200 years ago. If, this coming Sunday, you were to read the entire New York Times, you would absorb more information in that one reading than the average person absorbed in a lifetime in Thomas Jefferson's day. Over the next 20 years, the pace will only increase - because the forces that are driving this change are extraordinarily powerful, and exponential.
Meanwhile, distance is becomming shorter. My children will attend virtual school with Chinese, Namibians and Peruvians. I'll work in Downtown Tokyo while sitting in my living room in Silverlake, Los Angeles. Life times are extending, the human genome project continues, diets change, aging slows, populations explode, environmental degredation focusses global attention, families dissolve, cold fusion and nanotech tease, and technology becomes internalized and invisible allowing us to become our machines as they become us. It is a common criticism of our age that we seem out of control.
So what's going on? Why all this change now? Has there been a time like this before?
Yes, in fact, there have been a number of times like this - transitions from one era to another. Bifurcations, points during which order falls into chaos from which a new order emerges.
A trapse through the history of life on this planet is quite revealing for the qualitative lessons it holds. Figure 1-1 shows the period of the earliest known life. During those billions of years there were several major transformations. In the first case, there was a moment-about a billion years ago-when, in an exclusively single-cell world, the first multiple-cell life evolved. This was followed, about 500 million years ago, by the first vertebrate beings, and then again by the rise of placental mammals, some 150 million years ago.
As Figure 1-2 shows, the progression continues, only in millions instead of billions of years. Somewhere around 70 million years ago, primates begin showing up in the fossil record. Some 50 million years later, Hominoids veer off on their own evolutionary path, only to face their own crossroads some 5 million years ago with the development of Hominids, and 2 million years ago with the genus Homo. Merely 500,000 years ago, of course, we record the first appearance of Homo Sapiens.
Yet evolution i s not solely a biological phenomenon
Some forty thousand years ago, humans began planting crops and settiling into agricutural societies. Five thousand years ago, the first humans moved into towns and cities, and only 500 years have passed since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Figure 1-3 shows the relationship of our present era, the Information Age (which started only about 25 years ago) to these earlier times.
There are 3 important themes to draw from these patterns which will guide our discussion of future culture.
Figure 1-1 shows the period of the earliest known life. During those billions of years there were several major transformations. In the first case, there was a moment-about a billion years ago-when, in an exclusively single-cell world, the first multiple-cell life evolved. This was followed, about 500 million years ago, by the first vertebrate beings, and then again by the rise of placental mammals, some 150 million years ago.
NOTE: IMAGE WILL GO HERE
As Figure 1-2 shows, the progression continues, only in millions instead of billions of years. Somewhere around 70 million years ago, primates begin showing up in the fossil record. Some 50 million years later, Hominoids veer off on their own evolutionary path, only to face their own crossroads some 5 million years ago with the development of Hominids, and 2 million years ago with the genus Homo. Merely 500,000 years ago, of course, we record the first appearance of Homo Sapiens.
NOTE: IMAGE WILL GO HERE
i s
NOTE: IMAGE GOES HERE
Evolution thrives on diversity and creates complexity thereby spontaneously generating the means for its own advance.
Further, each evolutionary transformation can be understood in terms of more efficient means of gathering, interpreting, storing, and disseminating information, which allows for the further proliferation of diversity.
These processes materializs when we realize that each succeding era clearly represents a time with a much higher average level of information. Multiple-cell organisms, for example, are more complicated than single-cell ones, vertebrates are far more complex than their ancestors, and so on.
Similarly, the anthropological divisions have been enabled by information technology inventions. The oldest discovered example of writing, scratches on an antler horn, has been dated soon after Homo sapiens moved from hunting and gathering to farming. Five thousand years ago, when humans were moving into towns, the first writing system, cuneiform tablets, was invented to keep records of economic transactions. Table 1-1 shows the correlation between the printing press and the beginning of the Industrial Age. And the microprocessor, of course, enabled the Information Age.
Table 1-1 ---------------------------------------------------- Invention Human Epoch First Notation Hunter-gatherer Writing System Agricultural Printing Press Industrial Microprocessor Information ----------------------------------------------------
Secondly, there are clearly observable relationships between stages of evolution.
For instance, the rate of change from one evolutionary state to the next is clearly accelerating. Indeed, the change is geometric. Hence, though it took Western society 30,000 years to move from farms to industry, it took only 500 years to move from industry to the information era.
The bar graph is a good way to graphically represent this acceleration, but it is a limited way to begin to understand other aspects of social evolution. A better way to visualize and understand these relationships, as suggested recently by the Tofflers and Dr. Halal, is to think of evolution in terms of waves.
Figure 1-4 below, for example, diagrams for Western society, the rough percentage of human productivity devoted to specific social modes of production in relationship to other modes of production over time
IMG GOES HERE
Understanding social evolution in terms of waves helps us gain two important insights. Viewing social transformation through the eyes of this metaphor allows us not only to identify the evolutionary acceleration, but allows us to identify both the life cycle of any particular social era and the commonalities of all "transitional" eras. Figure 1-5
IMG GOES HERE
In Figure 1-5, we see that waves, as graphic representations of life cycels, be they biological, technological, or social, have three distinct phases.
The first stage of any wave is marked by the struggle of the new paradigm against the old. In this stage, the percentage of human productivity devoted to the demands of each paradigm are shifting dramatically, the new at the expense of the old.
The second stage is one of institution building. By this time, the demands of the previous waves are being automated by the institutions of the new paradigm, and the institutions of the new paradigm are themselves beginning to settle into place as people acclimatize to the new environment.
The third, of course, is marked by institutional decay. During this phase, we see the failure of a paradigm to keep up with the demands of a changing environment. the complexity facilitated by its rise eventually becomes its downfall as the new environment undermine the old institutions and prime society for the next wave.
When analyzing our own era, it is clear that we are at a point of critical change in which our industrial institutions are rapidly becomming hamstringed, somewhere just after the intersection between the industrial and information waves, perhaps just ovr a third of the way into the information wave. As we would expect, modern theorists from all fields are rmarking how age old institutional givens from nationalism to intellectual property to the family structure to environmental ideology are clearly being stressed to their limits. Thirty years from now it will not be US pasted onto a backdrop of nano-tech, genetic engineering, cold fusion, and AI. We will be fundamentally changed, or left behind. Everything except industrial age institutions are changing SIGNIFICANTLY and RAPIDLY.
Our very conceptions of the world will change or the world will leave us behind like so many fossil relics. Now, given one and two, we can begin to predict aspects of two crucial approaching revolutionary paterns, one social, and one biological. Considering it bagan about 25 years ago, we may be a third of the way through the shortest and most information-explosive era in human history, one that will end in about two decades.
Since we are about halfway into this cultural shift, we should be beginning to feel the weight of the new paradigm on our social institutions. Theorists like McLuhan forecasted this and contemporary popular literature documents McLuhan's precience.
"That guy...Marshall McLuhan...wrote this back then...
"The medium, or process, of our time-electronic technology-is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and reevaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted"Today, every magazine from Scientific American to Playboy has a coluimn on the cyberspace revolution.
commerce philosophy love
writingthinkingspeaking
art healthcare politics creation
friendship
education industry
iiiiiiiiiiiiiimeyoutheyus.
All these things will significantly change in the Information Age.
Distance.doesn't.matter
Place_doesn't_matter
Race.doesn't.matter
ideas matter
This happened in the future................
collage of samples atop live 4444 piece jams in the basement recording studio in wherever Brazil. Quarter inch cable...directly into four track...directly into Macintosh...directly into DAT...directly onto the Internet...directly into headphone in wherever Los Angeles...directly back to Brazil with feedback. No publisher...no distributor...no promoter...just the artist the art and the audience.
No wonder ours is an age of anxiety. Ideological givens, which have held together our cultural and individual identities, are disintegrating and new ones are solidifying.
Cyber-theorist John Perry Barlow writes,
"On the most rudimentary level, there is simply terror of feeling like an immigrant in a place where your children are natives - where you're always going to be behind the 8-ball because they can develop the technology faster than you can learn it. It's what I call the learning curve of Sisyphus. And the only people who are going to be comfortable with that are people who don't mind confusion and ambiguity. I look at confusing circumstances as opportunity - but not everybody feels that way. That's not the standard neurotic response. We've got a culture that's based on the ability of people to control everything. Once you start to embrace confusion as a way of life, concomitant with that is the assumption that you really don't control anything. At best it's a matter of surfing the whitewater."And what's more, given the rate of change of cultural evolution, we should be already in the early swell of the next era. So not only are we being "knocked offbalance" by the current paradigm shift, we'll soon be shifting again before we know it.
Homo-Sapiens-O-Centricity
Why are you the pinnacle of nature,
the paragon of animals?
While to me,
you are but the quintessence of dust.
Ironically enough, Homo Sapiens began showing up about 500,000 years ago. So it would seem we're about due.
On one hand, the body is progressively colonized by prosthetic devices.
As one moves from a model of mechanical production to electronic reproduction, it is necessary to shift from the framework of dialectical materialism to non-dialectic immaterialism. The dematerialization of culture presupposes material transformation which, in turn, changes the conditions of production and reproduction. Traditional oppositions like substructure/superstructure and depth/surface are not adequate for understanding these complex processes. Indeed, the very notions of materiality and immateriality, as well as the human and the inhuman, must be rethought. In the age of silicon chips and DNA programs, it is no longer possible to be certain where the material ends and the immaterial begins.
Date: Sat, 22 Jan 1995 21:38:49 -0400 (EDT)
Jerome Glenn writes:
> Before you knew it, we started wearing eye glasses. Then we put on contact lenses. And no
> we are surgically implanting all kinds of technological advances to see better. We also throw
> out old bone in our bodies and replace it with stainless steel. Plastic is becoming a substitute
> for destroyed skin. Slowly but surely we are adding more technology to our bodies. We are
> becoming cyborgs.
> Although the early technological additions to our body have been for remedial purposes, we
> will also add technology to enhance our capabilities. We have created temporary cyborgs for
> working under water and in outer space with artificial skin, lungs, lighting, and robotic
> attachments. Contact lens with zoom vision. miniature shotgun hearing aids to hear selected
> sounds at greater distances, or miniature transceivers to "reach out and touch someone" are
> just some of the ways future cyborgs will go beyond our inherited biology.
Selena Sol responds:
Several years ago, with a suddeness that was jolting, sugar suddenly became a poison to his
system. What had been a source of energy became a cause of fatigue. Life changed in that
moment in ways he still cannot calculate. From then on, the natural and the unantural became
impossibly confused. Wihtout artificial chemical prostheses, he can no longer live. Indeed,
nothing natural lives without the artificial. And vice versa.
No longer sugar but a substitute- a substitute named equal. The name is richly suggestive
because it is formulated to erase the very distinction it embodies. If EQUAL is equal, the
artificial and the natural become indistinguishable. Nature becomes artifice and no one can tell
the difference. For many, this confusion is a disaster. For him, it is the condition of life.
The issue does not simply involve matters of sugar and sweetness. One can, after all, live
without sugar. But the chemical prostheses that sustain his life do not end with sugar; he
depends on another more critical substitute- synthetic insulin. Without the products of
recombinant DNA, his so-called natural body would be dead. For many critics, genetic rsearch
is the paradigm of technology's Frankensteinian possibilities. Appocolyptic tales of mutant
genes run wild are fabricated to scare people into putting an end to such research. Though
possible dangers should not be ignored, it would be foolish not to proceede with this area of
research in a deliberate and reasonable way. Wihtout genetic engineering, he probably would
already be dead. He can continue to live only because he has become a cyborg."
----transmission interrupt-----
Q: How did it happen?
The dream of artificial intelligence is to replicate or replace the human
mind; the dream of intelligence amplification is to extend and expand
human sensation and cognition. In cyberspace, it becomes possible to
integrate AI and IA to create a machinic organism that is a cyborg of
cyborgs. If this super-cyborg can be interfaced with the human organism,
whaich has itself become a cyborg, evolution might proceed by quantun
leaps instead of in incremental steps. As man becomes an appendage of
machines, evolution shifts from the organism to the mechanism. When the
number of computer linked reaches a critical mass, some networks gain the
capacity for spontaneous generation. Programs and computations unplanned
by designers suddenly begin to appear.
WARNING: "As with any significant change in life, many humans will call
such a cyborg future unnatural. Some will say it is not within biological
evolutionary dynamics, and it is not part of God's plan. Is the Dali Lama
less spiritual because he wears a wristwatch and a pair of glasses? Are
you less of a human being because you lost your hand and now have a
mechanical one?" - Jerome Glenn
Statistics, as I have said, are the propoganda of the religion of science
and Paleontology is a young sect. So I mean not to convince you with hard
and fast evidence of Mesazoic dates and standard deviations.
through which we can better understand the river on which we float, and to
make preparations for
the journey into an Anthropology of the future.
And so as we return to the topic of the formation of culture in the twenty
first century, we see the now as both similar and different to all of the
history of life.
If this is truly the future, personal identity and cultural identity are
about to change immensely as they have in every previous shift.
As we navigate between two epochal global shifts, information technology
and new science are converging to produce an era that is moving so fast
that few can understand it.
But we must try, for if we can't make sense of the context in which we
must live, we guarantee that every significant new event will be a
surprise - and many of those surprises will be disasters.
PS: Are we (humans of the industrial age) the transitional generations who
are cursed with an environment swiftly becoming incionsistent with social
institutions culturally and biologically selected for hundreds and
thousands of years?
I recognise that every generation says "Hey, something's going on!" and I
don't wish to be cliche, bu then again, hey, there IS something going on!
When I speak of culture, I loosely mean a set of shared values and norms
derrived from similar sets of experiences, crystalized in institutions,
and evolving (not to imply progress but just for alack of a better word)
through both incremental and crisis-like social revolutions (in which
crystalized institutions are supplanted by newer-more environmentally
relevant institutions).
CYBERIA AS A FORESHADOW OF EMERGING CULTURE
An extended quote from the introduction of Cyberia by Rushkoff
"On the most rudimentary level, there is simply terror of feeling like an
immigrant in a place where your children are natives - where you're always
going to be behind the 8-ball because they can develop the technology
faster than you can learn it. It's what I call the learning curve of
Sisyphus. And the only people who are going to be comfortable with that
are people who don't mind confusion and ambiguity. I look at confusing
circumstances as opportunity - but not everybody feels that way. That's
not the standard neurotic response. We've got a culture that's based on
the ability of people to control everything. Once you start to embrace
confusion as a way of life, concomitant with that is the assumption that
you really don't control anything. At best it's a matter of surfing the
whitewater. - John Perry Barlow
We may in fact be at the brink of a renaissance of unprecedented
magnitude, heralded by the 1960s, potentiated by the computer and other
new technologies, mapped by chaos math and quantum physics, fueled by
psychedelic drugs and brain foods, and manifesting right now in popular
culture as new music, fiction, art, entertainment, games, philosophy,
religion, sex, and lifestyle.
These changes are being implemented and enjoyed by a group of young people
we'll call the cyberians, who are characterized primarily by a faith in
their ability to consciously rechoose their own reality to design their
experience of life.
Theoretical mathematicians and physicists were the first to predict this
designer reality. Their ability to observe phenomena, they now believe, is
inextricably linked to the phenomena themselves. Having lost faith in the
notion of a material explanation for existence, these scientists have
begun to look at the ways reality conforms to their expectations,
mirroring back to them a world changed by the very act of observation. As
they rely more and more on the computer, their suspicions are further
confirmed: This is not a world reducible to neat equations and pat
answers, but an infinitely complex series of interdependencies, where the
tiniest change in a remote place can have systemwide repercussions. When
computers crunch data from real-world observations, they do not produce
simple, linear graphs of an orderly existence but instead churn out phase
maps and diagrams whose spiraling intricacy resembles that of an ancient
mosaic, a coral reef, or a psychedelic hallucination.
When the entire procession of historical, biological, and cosmological
events is reanalyzed in the light of modern mathematical discoveries like
the fractal and feedback loops, it points toward this era the turn of the
century as man's leap out of history altogether and into the timeless
dimension of Cyberia.
Inklings of what this dimension may be like come to us through the
experience of computer hackers and psychedelic tripsters, who think of
themselves not as opposite ends of the spectrum of human activity but as a
synergistic congregation of creative thinkers bringing the tools of high
technology and advanced spirituality into the living rooms of the general
public.
The cyberian experience finds its expression in new kinds of arts and
entertainment that rely less on structure and linear progression than on
textural experience and moment-to-moment awareness. Role-playing games,
for example, have no beginning or end, but instead celebrate the
inventiveness of their players, who wind their way through complex
fantasies together, testing strategies that they may later use in their
own lives, which have in turn begun to resemble the wild adventures of
their game characters.
Similarly, the art and literature of Cyberia have abandoned the clean
lines and smooth surfaces of Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey in favor
of the grimy, posturban realism of Batman, Neuromancer, and Bladerunner,
in which computers do not simplify human issues but expose and even
amplify the obvious faults in our systems of logic and social engineering.
Not surprisingly, the reaction of traditionalists to this expression has
been harsh and marked by panic.
Cyberians question the very reality on which the ideas of control and
manipulation are based.
The result is that the population at large gains the freedom to reexamine
previously accepted policies and prejudices. Using media "viruses,"
politically inclined cyberians launch into the datasphere, at lightning
speed, potent ideas that openly challenge hypocritical and illogical
social structures, thus rendering them powerless.
A new scientific paradigm, a new leap in technology, and a new class of
drug created the conditions for what many believe is the renaissance we
are observing today. Parallels abound between our era and renaissances of
the past: the computer and the printing press, LSD and caffeine, the
holograph and perspective painting, the wheel and the spaceship,
agriculture and the datasphere.
But cyberians see this era as more than just a rebirth of classical ideas.
They believe the age upon us now might take the form of categorical
upscaling of the human experience onto uncharted, hyperdimensional turf.
Our technologies do give us the benefit of instant access to the
experiences of all who went before us and the ability to predict much of
what lies ahead.
We may soon conclude that the single most important contribution of the
1960s and the psychedelic era to popular culture is the notion that we
have chosen our reality arbitrarily. The mission of the cyberian
counterculture of the 1990s, armed with new technologies, familiar with
cyberspace and daring enough to explore unmapped realms of consciousness,
is to rechoose reality consciously and purposefully.
Cyberians are not just actively exploring the next dimension; they are
working to create it. As the would-be colonizers of Cyberia, they have
developed new ways of speaking, creating, working, living, and loving.
They rebel against obsolete systems of language, thought, and government
and may be at the forefront of a significant new social movement.
Computers
Drugs
Ideological collage (Shamanism, Zen, and Locke)
Role Playing Games and Comic Books
THE SHARED VALUES AND NORMS OF CYBERIANS
Interactivity-interconnection, heisenberg, morphogenetic fields
POINTS OF CONFLICT WITH THE GREATER SOCIETY
Species defining characteristics, hence Shakespeare remains pertinent. However, how those
universals are played out are not universal. Second as we evolve and blend with our machines,
we muct understand what the universals will be for the next species.
class, gender and first/third world relations to all this
What is identity? Who are you? We talk much about the individual in
Western mythology, but what does it mean to be an individual? How well
does the individual metaphor map to reality?
The first thing to understand about the individual in reality is that...
Identity is a socio/cultural construction. That is, one's identity,
though rooted in and predisposed by genetics, is primarily shaped by the
environmnet (physical, political, technological, ideological/religious,
economic, etc...) in which it is formed. Phenotype, that is, is more
powerful than genotype.
mask given to us by parents, by society, by our teachers...that is a
fragmented self. Anonymity frees you of the chains of socially determined
identity...so tied to the name....
However, this is not to discount the effects of genetics. The interaction
of genetics and environment is like that of intersecting waves of unequal
magnitude. Though the effects of nature, the smaller wave, can be
cancelled out, reversed, or amplified by nurture, nature will have left
its mark on the final composite wave.
Taking this as given, I find it difficult to challenge the idea that all
values and norms are relative. There is no overarching truth that
encompasses time and space. Values and norms can be seen as "ideological
institutions" serving to bind and unify human societies. They are ancient
human tools for social organization (technologies).
Selective breeding as well as cultural lock-in solidified many varied
values and norms while cultural colonization and imperialism homogenized
them in our contemporary world.
Perhaps, at best, one could argue not for the absolute superiority of one
value over another but only that one value is more "appropriate" for a
given historical/structural situation than another.
Secondly, identity is constantly in flux.
For one, the environment is dynamic. Be it one's physical body growing
older, the rise and fall of social institutions, or the changing of
seasons, "change" seems to be the only "constant" of our reality, however
paradoxical that seems.
Another source of flux derrives internally; we learn. In a Lamarkian
sense, we actually adapt many times in our lives to outside conditions and
those "internal" adaptations form complex feedback loops between the past,
present, and future external and internal environmnet. Identity flux is
not simply a "reaction" to outside "causes". Humans do have agency, or
will. They are certainly not "predestined" in the classic sense for
anything. Through our decisions, we help create our reality.
We create our internal and external pasts by rewritting and reinterpreting
them. We create our internal and external futures by limiting the scope
of our vision.
[a note of confusion here is the degree to which we are "limited" in our
free will. I do not accept that human will is unlimited. Environmnet
will limit the possible choices. Individuals might seek to change the
range of choices, but such a change is complex, and not necessarily rapid]
Thus, identity is constantly changing due to forces both internal and
external which interact in extremely complex ways.
Discussion of quantum theory
In Future Mind, Glenn discusses the amazing things we'll do with our minds
in the coming post- Information Era society, from healing our bodies with
a thought to transcending the speed of light. And I'm sure, Dr. Halal
will discuss some of those Conscious Technologies after I'm done.
However, though I tend to agree strongly with both of their predictions
about the future, I still think there is something about their assumptions
that seems to me slightly tweaked. At the root of these expeditions into
the terminally touchy-feely, is a very subtle, but fundamental issue. An
issue which I think will become more and more apparent in the next couple
of decades.
The issue is simply, Who are you and what is your relationship to the "not
you".
When we think about our selves, we do so with a specific frame of
reference. That frame of reference is individualism. When you think
about yourself, you think about an individual. So what does it mean to be
an individual?
Here are some adjectives I compiled from a couple of dictionaries. An
individual is
Another thing that we must recognize about individualism is that
Individualism is an historical/structural phenomenon set within the
context of
These changes include
However, nust as Copernicus and Newton laid the groundwork for the
fundamental shift towards individualism, so has science laid the
groundwork for the contemporary shioft away from individualism. As a
warning, these issues are all extremely complex. I'll do my best to sum
up the relevent aspects of these theories but understand that they are
only cursory views.
So we must understand who we are int erms of our environmnet past, present
and future.
How will our time affct our identities?
Identity in the Agricultural Age
From: Jerome Glenn ,future@cyborg.com>
To Selena Sol
Subject: Will We Become Cyborgs?
A: The technological gamete slipped in unnoticed and rapidly.
"What are you in for?"
"I'm getting a neural implant. You?"
"Geez, I just had my appendix removed...why are you getting one of those
things...isn't it still in
beta testing?"
"My doctors assured me that the success rate was nearly 99%"
"uh huh"
"And I got a promotion on top. I mean, look, if Matsushita has wired
techs, we'll never
compete..especially with sixth generation PCs on the horizon."
"I...guess"
"And what does it hurt. It just makes me smarter...I get the promotion,
and the company pays!"
"Yeah"
"You should look into it. In a couple of years it'll be too late to get
into the race. First to market
and all that! And what's the big deal, I can see you already have optical enhancers and a bionic
arm..."
"Yeah well I work nights in a werehouse"
Electronic media are supplements to the human organism. Computers become
the brains, engines the legs, video cameras the eyes, telephones the ears,
and wires the nerves, veins the arteries of the world organism. The
lifeblood of this corporate body is electricity. When the blood flows,
the globe becomes a cyborg.
I wish only to suggest
emerging
patterns
of change...
Change
Complexity
Equality
Non Linear
CAREERS
LOVE
IDEOLOGY
Politics
Work
Family
Beliefs
"Changing your name to signify an important change in your life was common
in many North American cultures. Names themselves weren't codified as
personal descriptors until the Domesday book. The idea behind taking a
name appropriate to one's current circumstance was that identity is not
static. Rather, the concept of one's public and private self, separately
or together, changes with age and experience (as do the definitions of the
categories public and private); and the name or the label for the identity
package is an expression of that. The child is mother to the adult, but
the adult is not merely the child a bit later in time. Retaining the same
name throughout life is part of an evolving strategy of producing
particular kinds of subjects. In order to stabilize a name in such a way
that it becomes a permanent descriptor, its function must either be split
off from the self, or else the self must acquire a species of obduracy and
permanence to match that of the name. In this manner a permanent name
facilitates control; enhances interchangeability...if you can't have a
symbolic identity (name) that coincides with your actual state at the
time, then your institutionally maintained or fiduciary identity speaks
you; you become the generic identity that the institutional descriptors
allow."
DEAL WITH FRAGMENTATION OF IDENTITY
This all sounds great...the American spirit and all. When you say that
someone is an individual you think of a rugged mountain man on the crest
of some red rocked cliff, stiff chinned and looking off into the sunset.
But what they don't tell you is that the individual is also
In the words of Gary Zukoff, author of Dancing Wu Li Masters, the
individual is an impotent bystander, one who sees but does not affect.
>
and supported by enabling technologies like
Individualism, however, is not the only way to look at life. Recently,
the theme of individualism has begun to dissolve, being undercut by the
postmodern, post-industrial world.
Since we have dealt with some of the other trends in previous
presentations, I will not dwell long on the first three except to point
out a few important themes.
Identity in the Industrial Age
Identity in the Information Age