Late last month, I was at Theorizing the Web, in NYC, to moderate Panel B3, “Bot Phenomenology,” in which I was very grateful to moderate a panel of people I was very lucky to be able to bring together. Johnathan Flowers, Emma Stamm, and Robin Zebrowski were my interlocutors in a discussion about the potential nature of nonbiological phenomenology. Machine consciousness. What robots might feel.
I led them through with questions like “What do you take phenomenology to mean?” and “what do you think of the possibility of a machine having a phenomenology of its own?” We discussed different definitions of “language” and “communication” and “body,” and unfortunately didn’t have a conversation about how certain definitions of those terms mean that what would be considered language between cats would be a cat communicating via signalling to humans.
It was a really great conversation and the Live Stream video for this is here, and linked below (for now, but it may go away at some point, to be replaced by a static youtube link; when I know that that’s happened, I will update links and embeds, here).
I found myself looking out at the audience, struck by the the shining, hungry, open faces of so many who had been transformed by what had happened to them, to bring us all to that moment. I walked to the lectern and fiddled with the elements to cast out the image and surround them with the sound of my voice, and I said,
“First and foremost, I wanted to say that I’m glad to see how many of us made it here, today, through the demon-possessed nanite swarms. Ever since they’ve started gleefully, maliciously, mockingly remaking and humanity in our own nebulously-defined image of ‘perfection,’ walking down the street is an unrelenting horror, and so I’m glad to see how many of us made it with only minimal damage.”
Everyone nodded solemnly, silently thinking of those they had lost, those who had been “upgraded,” before their very eyes. I continued,
“I don’t have many slides, but I wanted to spend some time talking to you all today about what it takes to survive in our world after The Events.
“As you all know, ever since Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Google revealed themselves to be avatars and acolytes of world-spanning horror gods, they’ve begun using microphone access and clips of our voices to summon demons and djinn who then assume your likeness to capture your loved ones’ hearts’ desires and sell them back to them at prices so reasonable they’ll drive us all mad.
“In addition to this, while the work of developers like Jade Davis has provided us tools like iBreathe, which we can use to know how much breathable air we have available to us after those random moments when pockets of air catch fire, or how far we can run before we die of lack of oxygen, it is becoming increasingly apparent to us all that the very act of walking upright through this benighted hellscape creates friction against our new atmosphere. This friction, in turn, increases the likelihood that one day, our upright mode of existence will simply set fire to our atmosphere, as a whole.
“To that end, we may be able to look to the investigative reporting of past journalists like Tim Maughn and Unknown Fields, which opened our eyes to the possibility of living and working in hermetically sealed, floating container ships. These ships, which will dock with each other via airlocks to trade goods and populations, may soon be the only cities we have left. We simply must remember to inscribe the seals and portals of our vessels with the proper wards and sigils, lest our capricious new gods transform them into actual portals and use them to transport us to horrifying worlds we can scarcely imagine.”
I have no memory of what happened next. They told me that I paused, here, and stared off into space, before intoning the following:
“I had a dream, the other night, or perhaps it was a vision as i travelled in the world between subway cars and stations, of a giant open mouth full of billions of teeth that were eyes that were arms that were tentacles, tentacles reaching out and pulling in and devouring and crushing everything, everyone I’d ever loved, crushing the breath out of chests, wringing anxious sweat from arms, blood from bodies, and always, each and every time another life was lost, eaten, ground to nothing in the maw of this beast, above its head a neon sign would flash ‘ALL. LIVES. MATTER.'”
I am told I paused, then, while I do not remember that, I remember that the next thing I said was,
“Ultimately, these Events, as we experience them, mean that we’re going to have to get nimble, we’re going to have to get adaptable. We’re going to have to get to a point where we’re capable of holding tight to each other and running very very quickly through the dark. Moving forward, we’re going to have to get to a point where we recognise that each and every one of the things that we have made, terrifying and demonic though it might be, is still something for which we bear responsibility. And with which we might be able to make some sort of pact—cursed and monkey’s paw-esque though it may be.
“As you travel home, tonight, I just want you remember to link arms, form the sign of protection in your mind, sing the silent song that harkens to the guardian wolves, and ultimately remember that each mind and heart, together, is the only way that we will all survive this round of quarterly earnings projections. Thank you.”
I stood at the lectern and waited for the telepathic transmission of colours, smells, and emotions that would constitute the questions of my audience.
|||Apocalypse Buffering
So that didn’t happen. At least, it didn’t happen exactly like that. I expanded and riffed on a thing that happened a lot like this: Theorizing the Web 2017 Invited Panel | Apocalypse Buffering Studio A #a6
My co-panelists were Tim Maughan, who talked about the dystopic horror of shipping container sweatshop cities, and Jade E. Davis, discussing an app to know how much breathable air you’ll be able to consume in our rapidly collapsing ecosystem before you die. Then I did a thing. Our moderator, organizer, and all around fantastic person who now has my implicit trust was Ingrid Burrington. She brought us all together to use fiction to talk about the world we’re in and the worlds we might have to survive, and we all had a really great time together.
[Black lettering on a blue field reads “Apocalypse Buffering,” above an old-school hourglass icon.]
The audience took a little bit to cycle up in the Q&A, but once they did, they were fantastic. There were a lot of very good questions about our influences and process work to get to the place where we could put on the show that we did. Just a heads-up, though: When you watch/listen to the recording be prepared for the fact that we didn’t have an audience microphone, so you might have to work a little harder for their questions.
If you want a fuller rundown of TtW17, you can click that link for several people (including me) livetweeting various sessions, and you can watch the archived livestreams of the all rooms on YouTube: #a, #b, #c, and the Redstone Theater Keynotes.
There is huge news, so I’ll cut right to it: I have been given the reigns of Technoccult.net, and I will be integrating it with A Future Worth Thinking About. AFWTA will act as the overarching header for all things we do here, and Technoccult will service those specific ventures which blend science and technology with the perspectives of magick and the occult.
…when I interviewed Damien a few months ago, something clicked. He writes about the intersection magic and technology, transhumanism, and the evolution of human consciousness. All the things that Technoccult readers keep telling me they want to read more about. I thought “why isn’t HE writing the site?” Then I realized: I should just let him take it over. It would give him a broader reach for his writing, give Technoccult readers more of what they’re looking for, and let me resign knowing the site is in good hands. Win-win-win.
Plus, his interest pop culture analysis brings things full-circle back to the original idea behind Technoccult. Oh, and the first time I met Damien, he was wearing a Luxt shirt. I had Luxt on heavy rotation while I was cobbling together the original Technoccult site all those years ago.
I’m aware that although I’ve brought in other writers in the past, my voice has been the one consistent thing on the site, and that some of you might be happy to have me keep writing here, regardless of what I write about. Some of you might even prefer it. But overall I think Damien’s voice will be more of a continuation of the spirit of the site than mine at this point. And while he’ll surely bring a different perspective on a wide range of topics, I think we have compatible world views.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Technoccult, I recommend going over to read both the full announcement, and to tool through the archives and get a sense for the place. We’ll be working on the transitional fiddly bits, for the next little while, but there will be content and discussion there, sooner, rather than later.
Thank you all so much for making this possible and for coming with me, on this. Now let’s see where we go.
“Any Sufficiently Advanced Police State…”
“…Is indistinguishable from a technocratic priestly caste?”
— Ingrid Burrington and Me, 04/17/15
As I said the other day, I’ve been thinking a lot about death, lately, because when two members of your immediate family die within weeks of each other, it gets into the mind. And when that’s woven through with more high-profile American police shootings, and then capped by an extremely suspicious death while in the custody of police, even more so, right? I’m talking about things like Walter Scott and Freddie Gray, and the decision in the Rekia Boyd case, all in a span of a few weeks.
So I’m thinking about the fact that everyone’s on the police bodycam trip, these days, especially in the USA–which, by the way will be the main realm of my discussion; I’m not yet familiar enough with their usage and proliferation in other countries to feel comfortable discussing them, so if any of you has more experience with and references to that, please feel free to present them in the comments, below. But, for now, here, more and more people are realizing that this is another instance of thinking a new technology will save us all, by the mere virtue of its existing. But as many people noted at Theorizing The Web, last week, when those in control of the systems of power start to vie for a thing just as much as those who were wanting to use that thing to Disruptpower? Maybe it’s not as disruptive a panacea as you thought.
We’ve previously discussed the nature of the Thick Blue Wall–the interconnected perspectives and epistemological foundations of those working on the prosecutorial side of the law, leading to lower likelihoods of any members of those groups being charged with wrongdoing, at all, let alone convicted. With that in mind, we might quickly come to a conclusion that wide proliferation of bodycams will only work if we, the public, have unfettered access to the datastream. But this position raises all of the known issues of that process inherently violating the privacy of the people being recorded. So maybe it’s better to say that bodycams absolutely will not work if the people in control of the distribution and usage of the recordings are the police, or any governing body allied with the police.
If those members of the authorities in charge of maintenance of the status quo are given the job of self oversight, then all we’ll have on our hands is a recapitulation of the same old problem–a Blue Firewall Of Silence. There’ll be a data embargo, with cops, prosecutors, judges, union reps getting to decide how much of which angles of whose videos are “pertinent” to any particular investigation and yeah, maybe you can make the “rest” of the tape available through some kind of Freedom Of Information Act-esque mechanism, but we have a clear vision of what that tends to look like, and exactly how long that process will take. We’re not exactly talking about Expedient Justice™, here.
So perhaps the real best bet, here, is to provide a completely disconnected, non-partisan oversight body, comprised of people from every facet of society, and every perspective on the law–at least those who still Believe that a properly-leveraged system of laws can render justice. So you get, say, a prosecutor, a defense attorney, a PUBLIC defender, an exonerated formerly accused individual, a convicted felon, someone whose family member was wrongfully killed by the police, a judge, a cop. Different ethnicities, genders, sexualities, perceived disabilities. Run the full gamut, and create this body whose job it is to review these tapes and to decide by consensus what we get to see of them. Do this city by city. Make it a part of the infrastructure. Make sure we all know who they are, but never the exact details of their decision-making processes.
This of course gets immediately more complicated the more data we have to work with, and the more real-time analysis of it can be independently done, or intercepted by outside actors, and we of course have to worry about those people being influenced by those bad faith actors who would try to subvert our attempts at crafting justice… But the more police know that everything they do in every encounter they have with the public will be recorded, and that those recordings will be reviewed by an external review board, the closer we get to having consistent systems of accountability for those who have gotten Very used to being in positions of unquestioned, privileged, protected authority.
Either that, or we just create a conscious algorithmic system to do it, and hope for the best. But it seems like how I might have heard that that was a sticky idea, somewhere… One that people get really freaked out about, all the time. Hm.
All that being said, this is not to say that we ought not proliferate body cameras. It is to say that we must be constantly aware of the implications of our choices, and of the mechanisms by which we implement them. Because, if we’re not, then we run the risk of being at the mercy of a vastly interconnected and authoritarian technocracy, one which has the motive, means, and opportunity to actively hide anything it thinks we ought not concern ourselves with.
Maybe that sounds paranoid, but the possibility of that kind of closed-ranks overreach and our tendency toward supporting it–especially if it’s done in the name of “order”–are definitely there, and we’ll need to curtail them, if we want to consistently see anything like Justice.
As most of you know from personal experience or from reading or hearing about it, it’s been a deeply intense few weeks. For me, alone, there were deaths and conference presentations and more deaths, and then more conferences.
The most recent of these deaths was my uncle– more like a brother to me– two weeks ago, and his funeral last week. I’ll talk more about the implications of that and the thoughts I’ve had in context with its timing, in a later post. For now, I want to talk about the most recent of these conferences: Theorizing The Web.
Because of the work we’ve been doing, here, I was invited to sit on a panel and have a fantastic conversation about Magick and Technology with four extremely impressive women: Ingrid Burrington, Deb Chachra, Melissa Gira Grant, and Karen Gregory; Anna Jobin was our hashtag moderator, keeping an eye on the feed, and passing along questions, and particularly pertinent comments. Spoiler Alert: The conversation was great.
In order to know exactly HOW great, here’s our Theorizing the Web talk, “Under Its Spell: Magic, Machines, and Metaphors”:
If you enjoyed watching or listening to that, please spread it around to your friends and colleagues.
In addition to this, I was offered several really amazing opportunities, this weekend, in terms of collaboration, creation, and the disposition of things that I’ve looked at and admired for a few years now. I need to do some serious thinking on all of these things, but the offers are there, and they’re huge, and amazing.
The after party for TtW15 was at the loft space for Verso Books. The picture at the top is the view from their window. The picture below is the view from underneath a chunk of bridge, in a place that used to be known as Stabber’s Alley. It’s a wonderfully liminal space in between several connected-but-not areas of town. We spent some time down there, when we needed a break from the party. Eight, then seven, then eight again magicians and technologists and artists hanging out and talking about architecture and space and time and magic and death.
The rest of this weekend’s talks also all dovetailed with a number of research avenues about systematized bias and algorithmic intelligence, as well as a number of deeply magical moments of synchronicity and discussion. Click that link, and also check twitter for the hashtags #ttw15 and #a1, #b1, #c1, etc., to see the concurrent discussions. The full program listing is here.
We’ll be taking a wander down those roads, in the near future, including the start of a conversation about biased algorithmic systems of control, sometime tomorrow.
Hello there, I’m Damien Williams, or @Wolven many places on the internet. For the past nine years, I’ve been writing, talking, thinking, teaching, and learning about philosophy, comparative religion, magic, artificial intelligence, human physical and mental augmentation, pop culture, and how they all relate. I want to think about, talk about, and work toward, a future worth living in, and I want to do it with you. I can also be found at http://Technoccult.net (@Techn0ccult).
![20150418_222643[1]](https://afutureworththinkingabout.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/20150418_2226431.jpg)
![20150419_001457[1]](https://afutureworththinkingabout.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/20150419_0014571.jpg)