Posts Tagged ‘Futurism’
“Our poetry is courage, audacity and revolt”*…
One of your correspondent’s daily delights is Rusty Foster‘s Today in Tabs, a newsletter that informs and provokes as it, inevitably, amuses. Take for example this excerpt from Monday’s installment, subtitled “Today in Fascism”…
“Could the end of the AI hype cycle be in sight?” asked TechBrew’s Patrick Kulp and precisely on time today here’s a doorstop of LinkedIn-brained crypto-(but-not-too-crypto)-fascism from Egg Andreessen titled “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” It’s very long, and you should absolutely not read it, but it’s useful for finally making explicit the fascist philosophy that people like Brad Johnson have long argued is growing steadily less implicit in Silicon Valley’s techno-triumphalism.
“Techno-Optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die,” writes Egg, and Rose Eveleth was already like 🤔:
But before going fully mask-off, Andreessen has some crazy things to say about AI.
There are scores of common causes of death that can be fixed with AI, from car crashes to pandemics to wartime friendly fire.
But AI can surely help us kill the right people in war much more efficiently, yes? Still, he needs to make a pseudo-moral case to keep pumping cash into the AI bubble, so we get this:
We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.
Got that, Untermenschen? Regulation == murder. [Followed by the photo at the top]
But let’s get to the good stuff, in the section titled “Becoming Technological Supermen” (I swear I’m not making this up).
We believe in the romance of technology, of industry. The eros of the train, the car, the electric light, the skyscraper. And the microchip, the neural network, the rocket, the split atom.
We believe in adventure. Undertaking the Hero’s Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.
To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: “Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”
The first two paragraphs here are just bonkers. He’s horny for trains? I guess he saw North By Northwest at an impressionable age. But that last paragraph contains the only quote in the whole piece that isn’t attributed to a specific source, and it turns out it’s not really a paraphrase, it’s a direct quote from Filippo Marinetti’s 1909 “Futurist Manifesto” with “technology” substituted for the original’s “poetry.” I wonder if Marinetti wrote any other famous manifestos?
In case we somehow still don’t get it, Andreessen specifies that “The Enemy” is “the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable…” and then drops an extended Nietzsche excerpt. You know who else hated the ivory tower and loved Nietzsche?…
“Industrial Society and Its Future (Are Gonna Be Great!),” from @rusty.todayintabs.com. Do yourself the favor of subscribing to Today in Tabs— it’s marvelous.
* Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Manifesti Futuristi
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As we reprioritize prudence, we might recall that it was on this date in 1896 that Richard F. Outcault‘s comic strip Hogan’s Alley— featuring “the Yellow Kid” (Mickey Dugan)– debuted in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. While “the Yellow Kid” had appeared irregularly before, it was the first the first full-color comic to be printed regularly (many historians suggest), and one of the earliest in the history of the comic; Outcault’s use of word balloons in the Yellow Kid influenced the basic appearance and use of balloons in subsequent newspaper comic strips and comic books. Outcault’s work aimed at humor and social commentary; but (perhaps ironically) the concept of “yellow journalism” referred to stories which were sensationalized for the sake of selling papers (as in the publications of Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, an earlier home to sporadic appearances of the Yellow Kid) and was so named after the “Yellow Kid” cartoons.
“Art is an outsider, a gypsy over the face of the earth”*…
A man’s death revealed his secret masterpiece—his rented home, illegally transformed into a classical villa. What happened next questions how we define art. Max Olesker explains…
It’s a cold February morning, and I’ve come to Birkenhead, just outside Liverpool, to visit the former home of a man named Ron Gittins, a property affectionately known as Ron’s Place. Over the course of 33 years, Gittins painstakingly transformed almost every surface of this flat with a series of artworks in a variety of styles and mediums, from friezes on the walls of his living room to a Roman altar in his kitchen and enormous, ambitious fireplaces (yes, multiple). It’s a singlehanded labor of love. But, because Gittins was renting the flat—with no right to modify the property to this extent—it’s also illegal. As a result, the work was created almost entirely in secret. It was only after Gittins’ death at age 79 that word gradually began to trickle out about the existence of this strange cave of wonders…
“Outsider art,” “folk art,” and “art brut” are designations frequently applied to artists—often untrained—who work outside the classical tradition (and frequently the law). If the work is a large-scale installation, permanent or semi-permanent, it might be deemed an “outsider environment” or “visionary environment.” Outside Madrid, a former monk named Justo Gallego Martínez spent 60 years singlehandedly building his own cathedral, working on it daily until he passed away in 2021. In Westbourne Grove, London, retired postal porter and factory worker Gerry Dalton, an “Irishman and self-proclaimed gardener” according to his site’s Instagram bio, created a series of remarkable outdoor sculptures along the Grand Union Canal, in a collection he dubbed Gerry’s Pompeii. In South Africa’s Eastern Cape, Helen Martins, who lived from 1897 to 1976, created The Owl House, which features over 300 sculptures made from concrete and ground glass. And there are many, many more across the globe, each with its own infinitely rich backstory.
…
“It’s all quite powerful, isn’t it?” says Martin Wallace, as he shows me around the flat. Wallace, 55, is a warm, articulate Scouser and BAFTA-nominated filmmaker who frequently collaborates with Jarvis Cocker, the frontman of ’90s Britpop band Pulp. Together, they made a documentary series, Journeys Into the Outside, traveling the planet to investigate extraordinary places built by regular people. Wallace, who lives nearby, is now working on a feature-length documentary about Gittins, and in the process has become inexorably drawn into the orbit of Ron’s Place. Initially, this only involved helping cover the flat’s rent—as a trustee—after Gittins passed, and thinking of a long-term strategy to preserve the unique interior. But it’s rapidly become far more problematic. Ron’s Place is under threat: After months of stasis, the landlord and owner, Salisbury Management Services, has finally decided enough is enough. The building is to be sold at auction.
The front door flies open and Jan Williams and Chris Teasdale hurry in. They huddle with Wallace in the Egyptian corridor; urgent crisis talks begin. Jan Williams, 61, is Gittins’ niece. Together with her partner, Teasdale, 71, they work as artists under the name The Caravan Gallery. Along with Wallace, they have now dedicated themselves to preserving Gittins’ legacy. The current discussions, hushed and frantic, are about potential investors who might work with them—but they don’t sound promising. One man claiming to have the money also had quite a lot of snot on his jumper. The housing associations who expressed interest the previous summer have all gone quiet, the occasional sympathetic voice inevitably getting lost in the mundane realities of running a large business. In order to be eligible to apply for funding, the trio has created a legal entity, The Wirral Arts and Culture Community Land Trust. But, with time now of the essence, it’s not clear how that will save the property…
Read on for more of the story, the (happy) ending– and many more photos: “Ron’s Place,” from @maxolesker in @Longreads (though it’s not really that long :).
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As we embrace outsiders, we might send agitated birthday greetings to painter Giacomo Balla; he was born on this date in 1871. An early member of the Italian Futurist movement, he emphasized light, movement, and speed in his work. But unlike most of his Futurist colleagues, Balla tended toward the witty and whimsical, not the machines and violence (and ultimately Fascists sentiments) that characterized so many other Italian Futurists.
“The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.”*…
Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It’s a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity — a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied — and the world will pass beyond our understanding.
Vernor Vinge, True Names and Other Dangers
The once-vibrant transhumanist movement doesn’t capture as much attention as it used to; but as George Dvorsky explains, its ideas are far from dead. Indeed, they helped seed the Futurist movements that are so prominent today (and here and here)…
[On the heels of 9/11] transhumanism made a lot of sense to me, as it seemed to represent the logical next step in our evolution, albeit an evolution guided by humans and not Darwinian selection. As a cultural and intellectual movement, transhumanism seeks to improve the human condition by developing, promoting, and disseminating technologies that significantly augment our cognitive, physical, and psychological capabilities. When I first stumbled upon the movement, the technological enablers of transhumanism were starting to come into focus: genomics, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology. These tools carried the potential to radically transform our species, leading to humans with augmented intelligence and memory, unlimited lifespans, and entirely new physical and cognitive capabilities. And as a nascent Buddhist, it meant a lot to me that transhumanism held the potential to alleviate a considerable amount of suffering through the elimination of disease, infirmary, mental disorders, and the ravages of aging.
The idea that humans would transition to a posthuman state seemed both inevitable and desirable, but, having an apparently functional brain, I immediately recognized the potential for tremendous harm.
…
The term “transhumanism” popped into existence during the 20th century, but the idea has been around for a lot longer than that.
The quest for immortality has always been a part of our history, and it probably always will be. The Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh is the earliest written example, while the Fountain of Youth—the literal Fountain of Youth—was the obsession of Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León.
Notions that humans could somehow be modified or enhanced appeared during the European Enlightenment of the 18th century, with French philosopher Denis Diderot arguing that humans might someday redesign themselves into a multitude of types “whose future and final organic structure it’s impossible to predict,” as he wrote in D’Alembert’s Dream…
The Russian cosmists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries foreshadowed modern transhumanism, as they ruminated on space travel, physical rejuvenation, immortality, and the possibility of bringing the dead back to life, the latter being a portend to cryonics—a staple of modern transhumanist thinking. From the 1920s through to the 1950s, thinkers such as British biologist J. B. S. Haldane, Irish scientist J. D. Bernal, and British biologist Julian Huxley (who popularized the term “transhumanism” in a 1957 essay) were openly advocating for such things as artificial wombs, human clones, cybernetic implants, biological enhancements, and space exploration.
It wasn’t until the 1990s, however, that a cohesive transhumanist movement emerged, a development largely brought about by—you guessed it—the internet…
[There follows a brisk and helpful history of transhumanist thought, then an account of the recent past, and present…]
Some of the transhumanist groups that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s still exist or evolved into new forms, and while a strong pro-transhumanist subculture remains, the larger public seems detached and largely disinterested. But that’s not to say that these groups, or the transhumanist movement in general, didn’t have an impact…
“I think the movements had mainly an impact as intellectual salons where blue-sky discussions made people find important issues they later dug into professionally,” said Sandberg. He pointed to Oxford University philosopher and transhumanist Nick Bostrom, who “discovered the importance of existential risk for thinking about the long-term future,” which resulted in an entirely new research direction. The Center for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge and the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford are the direct results of Bostrom’s work. Sandberg also cited artificial intelligence theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky, who “refined thinking about AI that led to the AI safety community forming,” and also the transhumanist “cryptoanarchists” who “did the groundwork for the cryptocurrency world,” he added. Indeed, Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum, subscribes to transhumanist thinking, and his father, Dmitry, used to attend our meetings at the Toronto Transhumanist Association…
Intellectual history: “What Ever Happened to the Transhumanists?,” from @dvorsky.
See also: “The Heaven of the Transhumanists” from @GenofMod (source of the image above).
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As we muse on mortality, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Marvin Minsky; he was born on this date in 1927. A biochemist and cognitive scientist by training, he was founding director of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Project (the MIT AI Lab). Minsky authored several widely-used texts, and made many contributions to AI, cognitive psychology, mathematics, computational linguistics, robotics, and optics. He holds several patents, including those for the first neural-network simulator (SNARC, 1951), the first head-mounted graphical display, the first confocal scanning microscope, and the LOGO “turtle” device (with his friend and frequent collaborator Seymour Papert). His other inventions include mechanical hands and the “Muse” synthesizer.
“We need the tonic of wildness”*…
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwp. Thwp. Thwack. The sound of stone striking wood. Rustling leaves. A loud crack as a tree falls. A dry whirring of insects. Further off, a monkey shrieks. Shhpt. Shhpt. Water purls over stones in a brook; the heavy pitter-patter of rain taps the forest floor.
These are the sounds of primitive technology. Primitive Technology: an oxymoron, perhaps a logical impossibility, a collision of two buzzwords, and one of the most arresting (and unexpectedly popular) channels on YouTube.
Primitive Technology was created two years ago by a man in Queensland, Australia, who builds huts, weapons, and tools using only naturally occurring materials. In all of his five- to ten-minute videos, the man wears only navy blue shorts, rarely looks at the camera, and never speaks…
An appreciation of Primitive Technology, a You Tube series the episodes in which have garnered as many as 46 million views each: “A Walden for the YouTube Age.”
[TotH to @kevin2kelly, who suggested that I check it out]
* Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods
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As we appreciate apocatastasis, we might recall that it was on this date in 1909 that The Futurist Manifesto (download it here) was first published (in the French periodical Le Figaro). The creation of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti– who authored the manifesto, used his private fortune to publish it, then recruited artists to his banner– Futurism paved the way for Dada and Surrealism… and suggested some pretty evocative imagery to the likes of Fritz Lang…
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