Considering the sheer number of times I get told I’m insane by people who refuse to believe the possibilities I discuss for the various technologies I write about, it’s hard to resist the occasional “I told you so.”

But… I told you so.

Back in September of 2010, I wrote an article titled “Fly Your POV Around with Your Own personal Quadcopter.” In that article, I discussed using such quadcopters as “Remote Telepresence Units” by connecting a camera and microphone to one, connecting it to a “smartphone” or other computing device, and enabling someone to use it as a “surrogate.”  I even discussed connecting an Emotiv Epoc style BCI to the device to allow control of the RTU by simply thinking about it.

And, like so many other devices I discuss, it was dismissed.  People claimed it was not feasible; batteries were too weak; copters were too expensive; quadcopters were just toys anyway, etc. And yet here we are a year and a half later, and we have such milestones as K Eric Drexler asking “Where are the Parrots?” in a blog discussing the recent Japanese reactor disaster in which he points out that the “Parrot AR” drone, a commercially available quadcopter controlled by a smartphone application, could have been used to inspect the reactors for a fraction of the cost of the two track-based drones used, and could have done the job in a fraction of the time. In fact, with the cost of such drones being less than $300 USD each, they could have easily been considered “expendable,” and sent into areas deemed “too risky” for the larger and far more expensive drones used. In addition, you have Drones playing the James Bond Theme, showing off sophisticated swarming skills, and building a six foot  tower. All of this shows the validity of the ideas for the uses one could put an RTU to in the original article I wrote, but all that progress is still not the RTU I described, but autonomous drones carrying out preprogrammed actions.

However… This is:

By the way, that’s a Parrot AR drone. A laptop, and an Emotiv Epoc BCI device. It’s built exactly from the components I described in the original article. All it would need now is a decent VR headset, like the Oculus Rift and a basic RTU is born. Give it the ability to connect to the internet wirelessly, and the RTU drone could be controlled from anywhere in the world.

So, yeah, I told you so. The RTU is born. Now get ready, because in a few years, they will start to become as commonplace as smartphones, and our world will never be the same.

So here we are in the year 2012 and the apocalypse is still happening. We saw the rise of Internet culture as the lines between the virtual and the physical were forever blurred. 2012 was the year that everything happened but it was also the year that nothing happened. We joined the masses in zombie flash mobs to compete for a shifting demographic: technoshamans turning into digital celebrities turning into social media coaches: insert something about storytelling: insert something about worldbuilding. Was it too late to stop the postmodern world from turning us all into Lolcats? Could we fight against the great mashup of nothing? Could the true geeks, freaks, thinkers, innovators, mutants, cyborgs, and future-gods unite for the final-harvest-of-whatever?

Of course my answer here is yes. 100% yes. I’m one of those super enthusiastic types who does not give up in the face of adversity. I decided to throw the second annual Extreme Futurist Festival  on December 21^st, 2012. If there is going to be an apocalypse I want us to be the designers of it. If we are opening up the gates for a new subculture that defines itself as a new species I want us to explore transhumanism in a way that makes us look like more than playground occultists and sci-fi fanatics. We should be ready to lead the DIY evolution. We should be ready to define this paradigm shift and give meaning to the fnording around us. Why not call Eris and tell her the golden apple has broken the spell of digital catatonia?

In the spirit of events like Autonomous Mutant Fest and websites like Acceler8or we want to showcase the most cutting edge projects and performances our tribe of cyborgs/mutants/future-gods has to offer. This isn’t just about finding the others but engaging with the others in a way that will give the Mayans a run for their money. We want to do the apocalypse right and prove that authentic culture is more-alive-than-ever in 2012.  Let us become friendly with the fnord once again and show reality how we truly feel about its weak limitations. Let us unite in the extreme future and be remembered for years to come as the makers of culture, evolution, and chaos. Hail Eris!

Extreme Futurist Festival 2012 Trailer from H+ Worldwide on Vimeo.

We just met our goal of 20K and are in the process of booking speakers and performers. If you would like to participate in Extreme Futurist Fest 2012 please email us at extremefuturistfest2012@gmail.com

V. Vale, the great publisher of Re/Search, has sent out a very thoughtful essay wondering who is predicting the future as well as William S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard did (particularly Ballard, I think) and calling everyone’s attention to an upcoming appearance by William Gibson in San Francisco.

EDITORIAL FROM V. VALE: “Mirror Mirror On the Wall, Who’s the Most Prophetic of Them All?”

It is difficult to survive and transcend the loss of one’s “father” [figures] — in my case there were three: William S. Burroughs, Philip Lamantia and J.G. Ballard. Philip was an authentic American Surrealist poet and first-generation “Beat” luminary — he read at that very first public reading of “Howl” at the Six Gallery at 3119 Fillmore Street/Filbert-Greenwich Sts, SF, Oct 7, 1955. Mr Lamantia was my first mentor. William S. Burroughs I didn’t meet until fall of 1978 when he came to San Francisco to read at the Keystone Korner in North Beach next to the Police Station. J.G. Ballard I corresponded with beginning in 1978 when I finally got an interview with him by proxy for my Search & Destroy #10 (incidentally, still available in a low-cost reprint from the original negatives). That same issue featured Burroughs on the cover; photo by Kamera Zie, who worked at City Lights, as I did.

When J.G. Ballard died April 19, 2009, I looked around and wondered who could replace him. He was a magnanimous, generous, spontaneous, unpretentious, publicity-avoiding ORIGINAL whose darkly imaginative literary output seemingly contradicted the ultra-polite, warmly humorous manner in which he treated people who visited him (including me). I was fortunate to be in his presence (and tape-record him) a number of times — in San Francisco, Berkeley, Palo Alto (?), and at Shepperton, outside London, near the Thames river where he took frequent après-lunch perambulations. By sheer luck I managed to tape-record both Burroughs and Ballard just months before they died…

Needless to say, nobody has yet “replaced” the above three deceased mentors. The nagging question is: Who are the people alive on the planet who are predicting the future as well as Burroughs and Ballard? The so-called CyberPunk writers (William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Richard Kadrey, Rudy Rucker; who else?) are alive and penning miles of sentences — are they still the “zeitgeist” of now? Is there a zeitgeist of now, besides “Things Fall Apart” and –? Maybe we all need to attend the Extreme Futurist Festival…

We have long supported Survival Research Laboratories in their noisy machine performances divining a rusty, improvised-technological future in the perhaps money-less, state-less, more robotic- and drone-filled world landscape ahead of us. We’re reviewing the past 20 years, and an SRL associate comes to mind who has more or less selflessly curated dozens (maybe hundreds) of futuristic, bursting-with-ideas presentations by the crême-de-la-crême of cutting-edge thinkers, scientists and artists — most of them free; no admission charge — at U.C. Berkeley. That would be Ken Goldberg, who has been studying the future for several decades. Anyone heard of telerobotics? To quote, “Telerobotics is the field of robotics concerned with the remote distance control of robots using wireless connections, tethered connections, or internet connectivity via human input. Ken Goldberg, a pioneer of telerobotic art and his collaborative installation “Memento Mori” can be seen as the first telepresent, internet-based earthwork controlled by minute movements of the Hayward Fault in California and transmitted continuously as a seismic data stream to an embedded audio visual display.” [!]

To read this entire essay, go here.

Timothy Leary ranted to Lord Nose and myself for High Frontiers at his Hollywood home in 1987.  In “honor” of the Republican Convention in Tampa Florida, I now present the part where he goes off on Ronald Reagan and the War On Drugs, which the Reagan’s really started (you could say they escalated it, since Nixon announced the War on Drugs. But Nixon’s policy  suggestions would, today, make him seem like a liberal reformer. It really became a war under Reagan.)

There are some obviously flaws. It was spontaneous, and of its time. Still… I love this rant.

The Reagan administration is an extraordinary recurrence, or flare-up, of the basic American disease, which is the Protestant ethic, the original Massachusetts Bay Puritan notion of predestinarianism. The idea that there are the elect and the damned. Naturally, white Protestants are the elect and everyone who’s not a white Protestant Puritan is damned. Therefore they have no rights, can be offed, enslaved, can be treated basically as in the service of the Devil.

But I feel that 1988 will be the ending of the cycle. I think you can already sense the distaste which 8 years of Reagan is going to produce. Hopefully, in 1988, the post-war baby-boom generation, 76 million-plus strong, will exercise their voices for the first time politically. Now when that happens, you’re going to see an enormous 1960’s surge of hope, optimism, and scientific utopianism.

People like Reagan because he’s got enthusiasm, energy, charisma. He smiles and feels good about himself. My god, if your president doesn’t feel good about himself, if he’s dragging his ass around like Mondale, what message is he sending to the herd or to the tribe. But I think everyone would agree that at the level of creativity, open-mindedness, tolerance — the basic intellectual virtues — Reagan is a 1 on a scale of 1 to 8.

I don’t think that being illegal is going to stop people from taking XTC. America’s going through a hysterical fanatic paroxysm of religious intolerance. These Protestant types truly believe they have to have an enemy to be against. First there was Hitler, then there was Japan, and then it was the Soviet Union. For the last twenty years we’ve been at war with Central America, Nicaragua, Cuba. We have to have colored people, or different language people, or different religions as scapegoats.  These South Americans are obviously dirty sinful people because they don’t sing Protestant hymns. So the American government has to have an outside enemy to whip up the military fervor, and it also has to have an internal domestic civil war going on at all times. So that we started with the Civil War 100 years ago, which was a total disaster; an unnecessary war, whipped up by this insane Protestant desire, “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and then, just in the last century, the scapegoating of Wobblies and trade union people, then the Jews have always been scapegoats of the Protestant ruling class, and then the Japanese for awhile during World War II.  And then after World War II it became reds and communists and pinkos. If you were not a total rightwing republican, you were a communist. Because it’s either/or. There’s no shade. You’re either a god or a devil. So they had to have a new domestic enemy and, of course, drugs are the perfect scapegoat. People that use drugs are young and they tend to be dissident. They don’t tend to be Born Again Christians. They tend to be everything that’s sinful and horrible to a Protestant ethic predestinarian. So the war on drugs is a religious war, and in a religious war there’s no pretense at honesty or clarity or tolerance — anything goes, propaganda, lies, persecution. That’ll end, hopefully, by 1988.

Eric Packer (played by Robert Pattison) — reigning master of the universe of unencumbered digital financial trading — spends most of his disastrous day in the back of a limo determined to make it across New York City in the midst of traffic chaos caused by a presidential motorcade, to get a haircut, but not, as we will discover, any haircut.

Impeccably dressed, physically perfect, emotionally smooth, and despite a series of sexual encounters during this single day with beautiful female subordinates — Packer’s world, until today, is nothing but data.

At the beginning of the film, we see massive data flows zipping around a small computer screen operated by a hacker employee, and we understand that his world of unfailing predictions based on this data has been disrupted by an error that threatens him with massive financial losses.  But Packer, despite the seeming practicality of the bad day he is facing, is more interested in his existential situation.  He’s having a crisis of meaning and of feeling.

As he and his driver make their way through NYC’s jammed streets, various courtiers slip into his limo to talk about some aspect of his business situation only to be peppered by stark questions that tilt away from business and lean towards meaning.  And yet, his quasi-philosophical inquiries  are all oriented towards calculation as opposed to insight (and how many of our singularitarian friends would acknowledge that a distinction exists).  Packer is in the vanguard of his generations’ and our culture’s reorientation from lived to statistical experience.

The film hinges on two particular events.  Event one: Packer’s previously unfailing prediction machine has failed to predict a crisis in the yuan. Event two: Packer’s daily medical examination turns up a peculiar (and contextually funny) problem that I won’t spoil for you… but both problems revolve around the incursion of irregularity into his smooth world.

Here we have the Quantified Life at its apotheosis.  Even in the midst of sexual encounters, there are conversations that seek information about the nature of the business and sexual relationships and — during the peak of one sex scene — his female partner reports on her successful jogging routine and provides a statistical particular about her fat-to-muscle ratio.

In mixed reviews, much has been made of Cronenberg taking on Wall Street capitalism (and let’s remember that all this is based on the critically underrated DeLillo 2003 novel of the same name) in a biting satire that’s not at all a comedy. There is that. But the critics miss the larger undercurrent, which should have clarified for them during the last scene (and I will spare you any further spoilers).  Several shocking scenes (yes, this is Cronenberg), including the finale, bring home for us that Packer is seeking some experience — any experience — that is not quantifiable.  Whether he finds it or not, I’ll leave for you to sort out.

Oscar Wilde famously said of his countrymen, “They know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”  But he was thinking of craggy old industrialists who actually traded in things. For Packer, price and value are both de-prioritized by the ersatz bliss of those baptized in dataflow.  It’s a cold but pleasurably high, until something unsmooth, like a poor person or a bodily peculiarity, makes an unpredicted intervention.

A small excerpt from an interview with Terence McKenna from the 1^st issue of High Frontiers, the magazine that would eventually become MONDO 2000.

hf) …I saw a quote which I had copied down from you, which said that “the future is leading toward the interiorization of the body and the exteriorization to the mind.” What do you mean?

tm) Through electronic circuitry and the building of a global information-system, we are essentially exteriorizing our nervous system, so that it is becoming a patina or a skin around the planet. And when you telephone people, and when you watch TV, when you do all these things, you’re essentially projecting your consciousness over great distances. And as technology becomes more miniaturized, less physically and spatially obtrusive, we are going to naturally lose the distinction between the body image, and the technical projection of the body image, which is all this information transfer technology. I think eventually there will come into being a kind of globalized state of informational oneness which will be experientially available as an alternative to ordinary ego-consciousness. In other words, people will have the option of experiencing a true mass-mind, a global mass-mind. And phenomena like group drug taking and rock-and-roll concerts and this sort of thing… these are simply cultural anticipations of this coming age of electronic pooling of identity which will become a viable alternative. It’s an extension of the sexual revolution, the information revolution, all of these things. When it’s finally realized, we will live in the human imagination. The human imagination will have been erected in a dimension of electronic circuitry.  That’s what I mean by interiorizing the body and exteriorizing the mind, turning it around so the body is thought of as the locus of being, the way we now think of the mind as the ground of being. But the vehicle of being will no longer be the body. It will be the mind and the imagination. Switching these two roles from base to vehicle will completely change mans’ conception of himself and the space which he inhabits.

About twenty years ago, way back when I was taking my courses in electronic repair, I got interested in MEMs, Micro Electro-Mechanical devices. They were at a very early stage then, barely even out of the lab, but the potential was so enormous that I spent considerable time thinking about ways that they could be used to create unbelievable amounts of change in our daily lives without ever invoking nanotechnology. I really wish I still had all the notes I wrote down, but sadly they got lost over the course of a couple of hard drive crashes and moves.

I’ve already introduced two of the concepts I had contemplated on H+ magazine and here on Acceler8or —I discussed the Camera/Display MEMs in my article on Quantum Dots, and cloth composed of synthetic muscle fibers in my article on “dirty” uses for technology. These are two of the multiple items I collectively called “Active cloths” because they were all basically types of cloth that did something rather than merely set there. “Display cloth” and “Muscle cloth” were the simplest of the four, followed by “Cling cloth” which used static fields like a Gecko’s foot to cling to any surface, and the last and most complex, “Armor Cloth.”

Armor cloth was inspired by several Sci-fi novels that described “spacesuits” that could harden on impact to prevent penetration of blades or projectiles, then return to cloth-like softness. My concept revolved around cubical MEMS, each about a micron on a side, joined to each other by telescoping links — essentially ball joints at the ends of a shaft that could extend about 3 microns or collapse to less than one. This would allow each cube to connect to six other cubes in a network that would allow the entire structure to act like cloth on a human scale. As I planned to make these cubes out of carbon, as well as the shafts connecting them, it seemed reasonable to assume nearly diamond-like strength for any individual unit, and with multiple layers of thickness, an overall toughness likely to withstand impacts sufficient to protect an individual from most forms of combat weaponry short of anti-tank rounds. Under normal circumstances, the “blocks” would use small magnetic fields to repel one another and remain extended, giving the cloth-like effect. However, at the moment of impact, these fields would reverse, causing the “links” to collapse as each cube snapped against their neighbors, creating a “solid”. As I had oriented these blocks to be in a diagonal mesh with the corners pointed outwards, the impact would push the outer layer of blocks against their neighbors in a manner that would divert the force along the cloth rather than through it, allowing the wearer of such cloth to avoid the majority of impact, and prevent damage. While Shear-Thickening Fluids can perform similarly, the advantage to armor cloth is it’s a controllable process. A tiny microprocessor in each cube would be able to control the magnetic fields that either repulse or attract each neighbor, and the strength of those fields. As each cube could identify where it was in the grid, such control would allow a given item composed of armor cloth to be as hard or as flexible as it was programmed to be, even allowing different regions of the same cloth to have different properties.

In other words, this is the “cloth” that Batman is using in his new cloak in the Christian Bale movies. Cloth with a controllable hardness could allow for such things as tables that are strong enough to support an elephant, but that collapse to the hardness of rubber when you trip and crash face first into it. Or a “parachute” that can snap out into a pair of wings like Batman’s cape. I had several hundred pages of concepts that use the properties of armor cloth, from children’s “safe furniture” to full body “Ironman” armor suits designed to protect police and firefighters in dangerous environments and even combat armor for troops. In fact, one of the items I lost is my copy of the letter I sent to the Army’s research division working on combat suits outlining the concept.

The point is that by using armor cloth, you could do some very radical things. Hollow shells of cloth could act like entire pieces of furniture, be it an ottoman or a desk. My wings could be composed entirely of armor cloth, the “arms” programmed to mimic bone, with the membranes as pliable as rubber. Toss in some “muscle cloth” to enable me to control them like wings and, viola, lightweight succubus wings that I can collapse down when not in use.

Now, I’m sure some of you more astute readers will likely realize that “Armor Cloth” is merely a simplified form of “Utility Fog” at the micro scale rather than the nano scale. In other words, it’s a form of Claytronics or Programmable Matter. And I’m sure that many of you are also dismissing this concept as “impossible” or “wishful thinking”. Don’t worry, I’ve been getting that response for nearly 20 years.

Pity is that you are not merely wrong, but in denial. In fact, MIT is already pretty far along in making it a reality. Aside from the telescoping arms connecting each “block”, their “Smart Sand” is virtually identical to the “Armor Cloth” concept. Each block connects to every other block via controlled magnetic fields. Each has a tiny computer able to determine its place in the whole and vary its “magneticness” according to a program. And they can assume any shape that can be broken down into a 3D grid.

Smart Sand. It might be the size of pebbles now, but the concept has been proven, and it’s only a matter of time until it gets smaller. Before very many more years have passed, we might be seeing thousands of products whose “existence” consists of nothing more than a computer file that tells a pile of “Smart Sand” what shape to assume and what properties to have.

So, if I were you, I’d get busy playing Minecraft. Those are going to be some valuable jobs skills in the near future.

Do you almost cum from taking a piss?  Is “retard” the most used word in your vocabulary, second only to “tard,” “fucktard,” and “vag”? Do you have a passion for the drug name “Aciphex”?  Do you purple-sharpie your walls with letters to Francis Bacon when you’re not revering emissaries of woefully worn pop culture and adding “oid” to the end of most every word?  Do you believe adolescence is where your whole life happens?  Do you communicate with Ashton Kutcheresque text-speak?  Do you think dicks smell like hot dogs?  Do you never change your creamed underoos?  Do you like stupid books?

If you’ve answered yes to two or more of the above, then you’d like Dora: A Headcase by Lidia Yuknavitch… who failed to respond to my email about an interview regarding her book, which is fine considering I’m about to slam it like “hot girl on man mind fuck.”

Personally, I fucking hate teenagers. If anything’s a blight to this planet, it’s said demo.  And not because of their youth, but because of their directionless angst, inchoate imperatives, and fuck-off lack of self-security.  It’s really little more than an ineluctably shitty time in a person’s life, thus subject to relative empathy, and hopefully a phage the singularity might eradicate.  Or at least find some way harness all it’s wired, 20-seconds-to-climax energy for fuel.  Oh presidential hopeful cult-fuck Romney?  Does your platform indeed include incorporating teenagers into the engines of automobiles?  It should.  All their acne grease, ovulation, and spunk would certainly come in handy.

I don’t knock therapy.  Of course, it’s all dependent on your therapist and why you’re seeking psychotic remodeling, i.e.: “the sick daughter [of] a sick father, who has a sick mistress, who has a sick husband, who jumped the bones of the sick daughter.”  And that’s the tagline of the book, to be followed by my prior questionnaire.

Per Yuck:

Think about it.  Psychotherapists—they’re all hot for your deepest darkest secrets anyway, so the more you lie, the happier they are.  It gives them the chance to delve.  Penetrate.  Use weird hand gestures.  Write crap down.  And the whole set-up of this doctor/patient shit is completely porno.

I mean, it’s funny to a point.  Then it’s page 34 and you’ve got another 200 pages of “dude, seriously?”  To make a fetish about pissing is interesting.  A little rat-on-pleasure-dispenser stupid, or something.  Yeesh, too much of my exocortical-less cortex was siphoned through being required to read the phrase “saggy old man balls” about 800 times.  At least the [replete want of decent] story is consistent.

The author does deviate into an occasional reflection of taste.  Most notably, and influentially, when quoting Mantegazza’s Fisiologia dell’Amore (courtesy of the only likable character in this piece, a transsexual Rwandan man whose cock 17 year old Ida—alter-ego Dora and the main character—brags to have seen both erect and tucked):

To the daughters of Eve, that they may teach men that love is not lechery…but a joy that dwells in the highest and holiest regions of the terrestrial paradise, that they may make it the highest prize of virtue…the first force of human progress.

Yes, or to be more like IdaDora, DoraIda: “Yeah,” that’s a nice thought.  Not one for “pussies” and “fucktards” assuredly.  Albeit, Yuknavitch doesn’t exactly “motherfucking one-up” prior or other literary examples of such human progressive force with Dora.  Her “teenage” alter-ego’s response to the above quote:

Daughters of Eve.  Fuck yeah.  That’s me.  I don’t think of Eve as a twat that got tricked by a snake… I think she showed Adam what to do with his dick, and without her, he’d be sticking it in knotholes and goat butts and suckerfish. 

Mmhm.

I actually did manage to connect somewhat strongly to an implanted image of a self-shaved-headed IdaDora, as she drunkenly strips in a hooligans-vs-Nordstrom routine: “…there is a swarm of tan pasted guys with little black walkie talkies — some kind of Nordstrom tan pants team of thugs — and everyone scatters.  Everyone, of course, except me, the lone naked girl.  My skin stinging, I suck my bicep.  Vodkaskin.  Reborn.  Angry.  Neat.”  Later, our little cutter will carve a smiley face in her chin, among other mutilations.  None genital.

Yucks (Yuknavitch) will also fortune to burp such other all-too-sporadic and uber-hostile acuity: the proposition of an anti-god; seemingly mundane acts that “something between mesmerizing and shoot yourself,” or in describing teenagedom’s end as a single moment: “I see a girl leaving my own face, and someone I’ve never known replacing her.”

I can relate to Ida in the sense that I also feel better when angry, but — unlike Ida — I’m adult enough to know anger is not an ultimately satisfying dimension.  A smoked black crayon doused by faux-diner water smells like melted kid hope?  If that’s true, then this book tastes like a line of cocaine that didn’t make my nethers twitch just right.  Probably because it was mostly baking soda cut with cliche.

Then again, its a grown ass woman writing for a 17 year old girl whose competence for thrilling a reader fails to expand beyond: wah-wah, life is old man ball-sag is the suck is a Fellini movie is pukey monkey salty vag goo.  Actual terminology from the book.  The female fight club?  More like Sisterhood of the “let’s never change our underwear beneath our Skinny Jeans.”

Yucks, are you trying to make the protagonist about as likable as a nose-picking to be rebellious, rotten-apple-cooch idiot?  Cause that’s what she is.  Only the kind that wants to bang her dad’s not-so-secret mistress-slash-wife of a man who raped her own mouth. Snap, I’ve never heard of boobs likened to “enormous pendulous orbs” before, and so many other original, arse-picked lines.  IdaDora/DoraIda is the kind of artsy-ass anti-character who has to document every part of her audio life because it’s that brilliant — when what she really needs is “a break-out from this dumb script of girl,” and me a strong fucking shot to not feel so brain-plowed.

Her ass buzzes and her vag spasms like an oxygen-charged Duracell and the ultimate statement she vomits to make with this adolescent quiff of a novel is a video featuring DoraIda’s “old saggy balls” therapist’s foray into an ER when she’s dosed him with Viagra to the extent the doc’s gotta bleed his willy.  Said episode went like this:

 …there it is — his high-rise wang—looking, I must say, much younger than I expected… kinda smells like hot dogs… I see blood suck up the throb of his cock and slowly travel into the hull of the syringe.  I pull my hair.  What. The. Fuck.  I’m all creamy.  Like need a new pair of panties.

Aforementioned video masterpiece, went like this:

…the visual metaphor of blow is important as an opening metaphor…  stock footage of experimental monkeys with electrodes in their heads and needles in their guts, extreme close ups of cigars or cuckoo clocks with mangled birds or black leather… nuclear explosions and Hiroshima burned up folks… Then the collage sort of breaks apart into abstract fragments sort of like a broken mirror, until the fragments become two buffalos fucking.  

Ok I love a buffalo; and I can appreciate that last bit for the randomness, sure.  But then our idiot teenager hero climaxes with her “art” with:

little shots of gigantic zoomed in women’s breasts, twats, and asses… Like Godzilla-sized tits and vag.  Like anti-porn.  I get a standing ovation.  

(Ugh.)

Sig and his sausage? He’s just a man-symbol.  It’s a movie about everything.  This world we live in.  The bodies we’re stuck with.  The lives we get whether we want them or not.  How hard you have to work just to get through a fucking day without killing yourself.   

Yucks, you’re not doing women any great feat here.  If anything, you have Eves catering to Adams’ wee-wees by speaking in wee-wee terms for the sole purpose of countering whateverthefuck message you seem grotesquely confused about imparting.  If I had to sum the book with a quote, it would be: “In my ear is the voice of the man whose dick I just filmed being drained.”  Nothing more special (in vulgarity or otherwise) than that.

“I’m a head and a body and technology.  I’m my own walking history”; “I text therefore I am.”  So why don’t “the sounds of hospital gadgets” appeal?  Do you prefer stunted denial or general contradiction?  Do to a mild autism, I also prefer texting as a medium for most human dialogue, but I don’t adhere to it as an argument for some modified Descartes ontology.

How do modern 17 year olds actually refer to technology?  What about the future 17 year olds, i.e., the modern 2 year olds who can operate iphones better than their motherpuddles?  I steal that word from Yucks, of course.  So much needs to be addressed and immediately in regards to the obstinate religulous and faux-contemporary somehow coexisting with the veritable contemporary of the Higgs Boson and other science.  Yucks didn’t intend Dora to advance the latter.  Fuck knows who she even intended to entertain. “Great waterfall of gushing piss”, was I glad when this book was over.

***SPOILER***

Dora: A Headcase, closes exactly as follows:

We live out our classic family romances and there’s no way around it.  On the otherhand, goddammit, is everything in life so fucking Oedipal?  Cause if it is, you know, shoot me.

Sorry antihero Viagra teen, but I haven’t tried your drugs yet, and because I don’t care to channel Sabina Spielrein, I’ll probably pass.

Probably being the key word, of course.

Dora: A Headcase  

Lidia Yuknavitch

Hawthorne Books,  2012

It’s naive.  It’s overoptimistic.  It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s the first segment of the first High Frontiers editorial!  High Frontiers, if you haven’t been paying attention to earlier posts here, was the grandfather of Mondo 2000, which was only slightly less naive and overoptimistic, before becoming mostly skeptical and not a little bit paranoid.   I’m most of all proud of my attempts to turn white hippies on to the funk.  Anyway, here it is…

Wake Up, It’s 1984!   

People like to tell me that these are conservative times. After all, it is 1984, the far right has the White House, and the dollar is tighter than a cat’s asshole. On the other hand, people like to tell me that the rate of change is accelerating. In the last few years, for instance, we’ve changed from an industrial-based society, with the majority of people employed in industry, to an information-based society, with the majority of people employed in the information and service fields. Some forty years after its discovery and abuse, we’re beginning to come to grips with the meaning of atomic energy, in all its forms. Physics is exploding with new information and ideas about the nature of life, the universe, and everything, and the role which humanity and consciousness play in it. This “new” physics is emerging now largely as a result of physicists coming to grips with observations made by Einstein and Neils Bohr some sixty years ago. Computers, robotics, and other manifestations of accelerating technology are propelling us, kicking and screaming, into a leisure-based society. Hundreds of licensed therapies which have more to do with Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, Abraham Maslow, mysticism and gnosticism than with Freud or behaviorism, have taken over the psychology field en masse in California.

Kids whiz by on skateboards and rollerskates wearing purple mohawks and bizarre clothes brandishing anarchistic and nihilistic slogans… ho hum. MTV assaults American living rooms with extreme, alien, and surrealistic images twenty-four hours a day. All of it comes to us by bouncing signals off of a satellite in space… yawn. Gays, third world people, and feminists are accepted and established as powerful political forces…  wasn’t it always thus? The largest peace demonstration in American history takes place in 1980… no big fuss. Black funk music explodes with eccentricity and experimentation, creating a challenging, brash, and optimistic space-age party music… oh? I hadn’t noticed. Manned space stations and consumer space-shutt1es? Coming right up. An understanding of the genetic code; how the brain works, how the immune system works; how the universe started? Oh, sure. We’re going over the data right now. New methods of birthing and child rearing? You bet. Open discussions of sexuality? For sure. Go for it. Coming to grips with the implications and possibilities of experiences induced by mind-manifesting psychedelic substances? Uh oh!  

Rachel Haywire

Rachel Haywire is organizing the second Extreme Futurist Fest, scheduled to take place on the legendary date 12/21/2012.  In Rachel’s own words, “Extreme Futurist Fest is a 2 day arts and technology festival focusing on radical voices of the new evolution. Last year we had a great event and we were called ‘a TED conference for the counterculture’ by the LA Weekly.  This year we seek to make XFF an even more epic experience.”

RIKKI AUDAX:  I recall there was an issue with Kickstarter. What sparked the move to RocketHub?

RACHEL HAYWIRE:  RocketHub was a lot friendlier to me than Kickstarter and they were very understanding of my situation. They allowed me to block comments so my stalker could not harass me and my backers. They placed Extreme Futurist Festival on their front page and helped me promote it. They were focusing more on science and technology and I felt that their general vibe was very welcoming to people like me. It’s a really tight community of people working on projects related to science and the future. A project for NASA was just funded there.

RA: What is your vision for XFF?

RH:  Bringing together the best minds of my generation. I worked on this video with notthisbody which explains things pretty well:

Extreme Futurist Festival 2012 Trailer from H+ Worldwide on Vimeo.

RA:  What is your strategy for building this festival?

RH:  Kicking as much ass as possible. If XFF 2011 was the beginning of the new evolution XFF 2012 is the pulse of its formation. We have just started to book speakers and bands. Our first announced speaker is Aubrey de Grey and we will be announcing a lot more soon. Sniff Code will be designing our website and we’re currently raising funds at RocketHub so we can get a better venue than last time and make this a fully immersive experience. I want this to be an event that people talk about for years to come. You can check out the RocketHub page here: http://www.rockethub.com/projects/9220-extreme-futurist-festival-2012

RA:  What feedback have you received from Transhumanism community as well as the counterculture movement?

RH:  People seem to welcome me in the Transhumanist community more than they do in the counterculture. We are a tribe of leaders and visionaries who have a shared desire to improve humanity. Meanwhile I am bringing a lot of counterculture people into the Transhumanist movement who are sick of the counterculture and its usual cliches. Creative people on the fringes of society need a more intellectual world than the counterculture provides. What I am building is a reaction to the counterculture that maintains its cutting edge and risk-taking attitude yet rejects the status quo of what the counterculture has become.

RA: For people who want to get involved, how can they assist in helping XFF grow?

RH:  The main thing right now is to donate to the festival on RocketHub. We only have a few days left and every little bit is important. You can also email extremefuturistfest2012@gmail.com if you would like to speak or perform.