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Fall 2008

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31 #1 Fall 2008 e Sheep Shit Grass (or e End of Scarcity) with Cory Doctorow, SF writer and Boing Boing editor. RU Sirius DOCTOROW: It's not hard to think about a kind of nanotech future where virtually all objects are available on demand. In that kind of world, both the traditional Marxist and the traditional Keynesian analyses don't make a lot of sense. These are predicated first and foremost on the regulation of scarce and valuable objects. In a "Kazaa World" where every time someone expresses a market signal about the value of a song by downloading a copy of it, instead of there being one fewer copies of that song, there's now one more copy of that song, this is a really different economic proposition. And I talk about this as an alternative to the tragedy of the commons. This is a commons where the sheep shit grass. The more you graze the more you get. Botox Parties, Michael Jackson, and the Disillusioned Transhumanist with Christopher Dewdney, culture theorist and author of Last Flesh: Life in the Transhuman Era RU Sirius H+: Michael Jackson seems to reflect various trans-mutant themes. DEWDNEY: For me, Michael Jackson represents a sort of pioneer of self-trans- formation. Aside from whatever question- able personal motives are impelling him, he is using cosmetic surgery to achieve a look that is definitely transhuman. He has taken us by proxy to the frontier of what is currently possible with cosmetic surgery and he has even escaped the constraints of race by lightening his skin color. This last aspect is perhaps the most controver- sial and disconcerting, but the freedom to choose all your "inherited" features, both familial and racial, will probably become an intrinsic part of the transhuman era. H+: He reflects, although perhaps not fully consciously, a pursuit of oth- erness, alienation, and mutation that runs through many contrasting sub- cultures from psychedelicists to goths to UFO nuts, to early transhumanists, SF fanatics, ad infinitum. And now middle-aged, middle-class ladies have parties to shoot up Botox. Does the mainstream culture show signs of un- derstanding itself as evolving into a mutant breed and do those who need to be different or avant garde have any new avenues opening up to keep them ahead of the hoi polloi? DEWDNEY: The corollary to the Botox craze is the predicament of disillusion- ment, nay, misanthropism, that I have found myself immersed in the last couple of years. Perhaps the real ground of my disillusionment is my hard-lost benevo- lence. I'm an optimist; I like people. Yet when I asked a lot of "average" people — people who weren't part of my circle — what they would do with the kind of self-transformative power that may per- haps be ours to wield, I was increasingly appalled. The jocks I talked to wanted to be bigger and stronger so they could beat the shit out of everybody else; the wom- en wanted to morph into their ideal role models. I began to realize that what most people wanted was conformity; their "ide- als" would turn us into a world of under- achieving Nicole Kidmans and eight-foot Brad Pitts, identical cut-outs with no indi- vidualism. My previous rather naive notion that biotechnology would free us from the tyranny of "normalcy," that we could become anything we wanted, morph ourselves into elongated, blue-skinned, orange-haired, sixteen-fingered geniuses or perhaps flying ribbons of sensual bliss that performed acrobatic choreographies above the sunset, was a very utopian and, as it turns out, unpopular dream. Indi- viduality or creative improvisation is the last thing most people want. So Botox is really a dreadful symptom of a new, radi- cal mundanity enabled by biotechnology. And that's disillusioning. Inter view MINI

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