synthetic happiness video - dan gilbert

part of a series of video mini lectures,
over on T.E.D.

http://www.gcarlson.com

"Gary strives to bring a level of artfulness to medical illustration that makes it exciting as well as informative"

4 pages from THE INSURGENT
(an ongoing online foto-graphic novel and self help manual)



















anarcho-transhumanism



Political Freedom: Against the tyranny of government.

Economic Freedom: Against the tyranny of capitalism.

Biological Freedom: Against the tyranny of genes.

It is my belief there is no reason why clothing should be compulsory. It is simply my ordinary human body that is visible. We are criminalised because of prejudice against our appearance. Religious concepts of bodily sin and shame continue to inform our contemporary self-perceptions, while advertising exploits both our fascination with the body as well as our low self-esteem, through limited representations of ideal bodies. This campaign of public nakedness is a simple action that simultaneously invigorates numerous complex issues.

I am not a naturist, a nudist, a streaker, nor an exhibitionist. Labels are for clothes. My unclothed appearance is also not motivated sexually nor out of any gratuitous need to seek attention. I believe that while society continues to have a fundamentally negative relationship with the human body and appearance, we can never be a free or mature society. It's the 21st century. Time to evolve.

(Russell Higgs, Brixton prison, december 2000, from a letter to the guardian)

INTELLIGENT DESIGN

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In the beginning was the word and from that moment on there was no turning back. We are no longer apes, yet not quite gods. We are more like frightened children, trapped in a story about the world that we recite aloud to ourselves, over and over in the darkness. We want to go back to the garden. We want to go back to the womb. We want to go back. But our ambiguous future keeps calling to us and its time to grow up. Homo-technicus is waiting.

Simone de Beauvoir believed it to be the height of irresponsibility for any serious thinker to attempt to make the world seem less ambiguous. Our most precious gift is our freedom of choice. But choice entails commitment and responsibility and because individuals are free to choose their own path, they must accept the risk and responsibility of following their commitment through to wherever it leads. Therefore as Donna Haraway has similarly pointed out, commitment and ambiguity are intertwined. That is what grown-up thinking and commitment is all about, recognising the ambiguities of the world and of our positions within the world. There is no natural. There is no purity. There is no separateness. There is no turning back.

For many of us our concerns regarding either genetically modified food or the molecularly engineered machinery of nanotech or most of all the fusion of our own organic bodies with our own technologies, is "that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But..." as Haraway reminds us in her 'Cyborg Manifesto' "...illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential".

"This is an argument.." she says "for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction"

(originally published in dogmanet july 2004)

"ICON"

full size 144k

Gods are created according to our needs

and...

On War and Transhumanism

"There's one sure way to preempt self-evolution: Let battles waged by undemocratic countries send us back to prehistory" (...by Philip Shropshire 2003)

"These aren't good times if you believe that you should control your own evolution, and be able to avoid your own destruction.

we must take steps to prevent war's threat to the future by expanding democracy and taking power from corrupt elites.

We have a president who takes the advice of Leon Kass, a guy who is on record as wanting desperately to stop the future.

a war over oil is like fighting a war over floppy discs or pre-1988 television sets. It's just plain absurd. Unless, of course, you happen to make your living in the fossil fuel industry.

the invasion of Iraq is symptomatic of a larger war that Transhumanists can probably appreciate. It is a war between two realities: A race between what we're betting will be a transcendent technological singularity versus a planet-wide catastrophe when Christian fundie fanatics with nukes finally meet up with Islamic fundie fanatics with nukes and subsequently move toward their Final Conversation.

There is one sure way to stop the Transhumanist dream and that's to return all of us to the Stone Age."

plus...

Atheism is Indeed A Civil Rights Issue

nonbelievers should focus on electing other nonbelievers to political office.

in 1958, a Gallup poll revealed that 53 percent of American citizens would vote against a Black candidate for president on grounds of race alone. In a 1999 Gallup poll, that figure had declined to four percent.

That same 1999 Gallup Poll revealed 49 percent, would vote against an atheist on grounds of atheism alone than would vote against someone for any other reason.

Ever since the famous Supreme Court rulings of 1962 and 1963 that ended teacher-led prayer and Bible readings in public schools, in poll after poll Americans have favored returning government sponsored prayer to public schools by a minimum margin of 69 percent to 27 percent. In many surveys the percentage favoring restoration of school prayer exceeds 75 percent.

ape alliance
the great ape project
The Great Apes Survival Project
The Australian Orangutan Project
Balikpapan Orangutan Society
Berggorilla & Regenwald Direkthilfe e.V.
Bonobo Conservation Initiative
Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund
Great Ape World Heritage Species Project
international Gorilla Conservation Programme
The Orangutan Foundation
The Wild Chimpanzee Foundation
Center for Orangutan and Chimpanzee Conservation



prevention of child cruelty
end child exploitation
the refugee council
human rights watch
anti-slavery international
stop human traffic
Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Technoliberation

Technoliberation is a rainbow coalition that extends beyond the visible spectrum.

We are all champions of democracy here and we are all progressives.

Many of us are post-naturalist Greens and champions of sustainable development. Many of us are secular humanists and post-humanist humanitarians.

Many of us are pro-choice feminists and morphological freedom fighters, defending consensual personal genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive practices of self-creation. Many of us are atheists, aesthetes, and nonjudgmental people of many faiths and spiritual practices. Many of us are transgendered, queer theorists, biopunks, democratic transhumanists, and psychedelic experimentalists.

Many of us are copyfighters, defenders of the creative and genomic commons, enthusiasts of social software tools, free software, open source, peer-to-peer democracy. Many of us are policy wonks, technocrats, world federalists, human rights activists, election reformers, advocates of basic income guarantees and universal health care, leapfroggers, and space enthusiasts.

Many of us are champions of consensus science, of genetic science and evolutionary theory, but none of us are genetic determinists or Social Darwinists. None of us are all of these things, of course, but many of us are many of them, and we are all of us inspired and provoked by the connections we find among these struggles and celebrations. Bioconservatives, market libertarians, religious fundamentalists, and retro-futurists are NOT WELCOME among us.

naked burial wish denied

During his life Robert Norton, of Pekin, Illinois, was often prosecuted for gardening and wandering outside his house in the nude. Robert Norton fought 20 arrests for "indecency" since his first in 1962, arguing that he had a constitutional right to public nakedness.

The 82-year-old said he wanted to be buried unclothed.

but his brothers have decided to lay him to rest in grey trousers and a shirt.

One of them, Jack, is a minister. "He's not going to be buried in the nude," he said.

a brief archive of the ridiculous...

the guardian, 26 apr 01
"a replica of Michelangolo's David now wears a white loincloth after complaints by residents of Luke Alfred, Florida."

evening standard, 25 jul 01
"art prankster Alan Abel, with his campaign placard that reads: "clothe all animals for the sake of decency". With S.I.N.A. Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, Abel claimed that low moral standards in USA are due to publicly naked animals. Their motto was A Nude Horse Is a Rude Horse. The society even managed to attract contributions. (alanabel.com)

metro, 22 nov 00,
"one in 4 businesses allows staff to wear casual clothes at least once a week.....but a magazine survey of 1,000 workers found women in particular preferred a smarter dress code.......3 out of 5 women said they hated casual dressing in the office and many described dress-down days as 'baffling and confusing'. a third of women and 1 in 4 men said they wouldn't have a clue what to wear if a casual dress code was introduced by their employers. most women said they would have more confidence in their bank manager, lawyer, or doctor if they wore a smart suit rather than jeans and a t-shirt,"

meanwhile...

NAKED PROTEST
a culture's power structure depends largely on how we look and are looked at.

"To be offended by the visual appearance of another person is prejudice, akin to racism. The right to exist, uncovered, should hold precedence over the right not to view this, for the objection is irrational."

....said warhol