A Forum for the New World Order

Congressional Republicans say Mr. Obama’s stimulus will cost too much, and that over time the economy will cure itself. When critics raised the same objections to F.D.R.’s programs, his relief administrator, Harry Hopkins, had a ready answer: “People don’t eat in the long run. They eat every day.”

—ADAM COHEN, New York Times Editorial Observer

As is my current style, I’m choosing not to fear the future and instead find promise in emerging knowledge. I think science fiction paints a traditionally morose picture of the future in a way to warn us about the dangers of using new technology unwisely. However, I don’t think we need to look into the future at all to see negative technological manifestations. What we can be sure of is that negative forces aren’t sustainable, and our species’ survival instinct will always at least try to overcome them.

One recent emerging technology is the ability to read minds, essentially. To some, this ability raises ethical questions a la Minority Report. It’s true that such use of technology is dangerously possible. But when we fear for such possibilities, we’re ignoring the more insidious ways in which we suppress human freedoms without new technology.

Consider indictment and conviction. Our legal system is imperfect at best, and imperfection promises that innocent people are put to death unjustly. Consider brainwashing. In a way, it’s a technology unto itself. Technologies that facilitate brainwashing (marketing, “news”, and religion) merely speed up and streamline the process. Brainwashing has effectively taught us to accept these systemic casualties. It has convinced us that there is a black and white answer to good vs. evil, and that if some people die unjustly in order to ensure the “real” evil is put to death, we accept that we must break human eggs to make human omelets.

So, what’s the difference? Our prison population is becoming hard to ignore in the way we’ve tried to ignore the more innocuous landfill population. Why should we be scared of a mind reading technology that might better quantify the concept of criminal justice?

I would argue, in a broader sense, that we wouldn’t focus such technology simply on convicting fellow humans. Although we consider computers to be very fast, we’re limited in how we interact with them. In order to get my thoughts into this blog, I’ve needed to speed up my typing ability to keep up with the thoughts in my brain, and alas, some of those thoughts don’t make it to the page because of what I’ve trained myself to believe is the process of (sentence, paragraph, thesis) formulation. But what about the thoughts in-between? Wouldn’t that reveal something more about what we as humans are trying to communicate with each other?

We’re concerned about mind reading, either out of embarrassment for what really goes through our minds, or out of the implications of being caught thinking something terrible. But if we’re more progressive thinkers, our awful thoughts might be the result of recognizing the atrocities inherent in our world, to the possible end of directing more energy to eradicate human suffering.

REDACTED

It’s true. Punk lyrics regard paranoia and lonely iconoclasty. They’re talking about cutting through the cloud of lies that surrounds us and seeing truth and being frustrated by a system seemingly insurmountable to change. I don’t know how else to put it, but they’re our youth movement’s lifeline to transcending humanism. Our children really are our future.

ADDENDUM
ALL art is transhuman, only punk is transitionally centristically transhuman; more immediately available to the to the public at large who haven’t delved into prefer it to the aspects of transhumanist musicians who operate in a more cerebral state, and are by definition therefore, less accessible.