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In the sandbox you can '''play''' with ''wiki syntax'' and more.
In the sandbox you can '''play''' with ''wiki syntax'' and more.


What's wrong with the Singularity as possible strategy


The role of contemporary spiritual communities in the Post-Industrial reinvention of the Pre-Industrial past


The following is from an interesting discussion by Eric Hunting on the role played by religious or spiritual communities in developing alternative forms of production.
Below are excerpts from Eric Hunting in a recent email discussion. I think this is a valuable insight that transcends any critique of transhumanism, but can be applied to similar cultural memes, like the expectation of a fundamental spiritual transformation of the world by 2012. Utopian or apocalyptic visions can actually demobilize because of their stress on inevitability.


I just want to add that of course this does not imply of a particular path, nor of of the presence of authoritarian elements within a particular community (for example, it seems that in Daimanhur http://www.wie.org/j36/damanhur.asp?ecp=WIEN-0704, if you do not want to follow the lead of the founder, you're out, which means the 'democratic federation infrastructure has definite limits).
Eric Hunting:


I would also briefly like to mention another lead I' following, that of neo-traditional economics http://delicious.com/mbauwens/Neotraditionalism, i.e. the economic theories of religious traditions before industrialization, where the logic of economic life was geared towards the immaterial (salvation, enlightenment). My hypothesis is that, as we are moving to a similar focus on the non-material, there are things that we could learn from these approaches.
Eric Hunting:


I actually first heard about Damanhur through Fortean Times magazine many years ago, long before the story seemed to break on the mainstream media in the US this year. I've had their original pre-tourist-board-push web site bookmarked for a long time. (http://www.tempio.it/) I put little stock in their mash-up of New Age beliefs and their pursuit of psuedo-scientific psychotronic technologies. But, though it tends to look in style like a secret lair for the Abominable Dr. Phibes, I do think their temple is one of the great works of contemporary art and architecture and an excellent example of the potential of excavated architecture, which I have used as an example in discussions of practical strategies of lunar and planetary settlement. And it's another good example of how people are cultivating images of the future derived from the ancient past.


What's most intriguing about Damanhur, though, is the subversive nature of its culture. In ancient times it was common for cults, alchemists, herbalists, and early scientists to rely on encryption as a means of securing their research and knowledge from competitors or from exposure to authorities. But with Damanhur we have this situation -and still pre-Internet at the start, mind you- of a community of about 1000 people who effectively cultivated an encrypted culture flying under the radar of European authorities for decades! They even had their own secret currency, and yet somehow managed to avoid the 'Waco Treatment' long enough to secretly construct one of the largest and most sophisticated works of architecture ever created by such a tiny religious community in modern times. It's like the plot of a science fiction story where the descendants of ancient astronauts are drawn together into a secret tribe with a secret racial language and pool together bits and pieces of the plans for a starship extracted out of their own DNA and then construct it in a secret underground hangar. It's an amazing demonstration of the potential of small groups of people systematically cultivating surplus productivity through community structures and then applying that to a shared goal. This is the sort of amplifying effect I have anticipated for things like cultivating post-industrial technology within a community setting -though, of course, with Damanhur there's the factor of religious fervor as well. We squander a lot of our lives to other people's profit in exchange for cash. Though I wouldn't consider it a model to follow, this is definitely a good picture of just how much that lost productivity amounts to. If 1000 determined people could build this in their spare time, what could a million do?
There's nothing wrong with speculating about the future as long as you have established a specific path from the present and therefore have defined likely courses of action. That's the line between futurism and science fiction. You are using the trends of the present to anticipate possible paths into the future, paths which can become plans of action or intervention. What bothers me about speculation on the Singularity are the presumptions of inevitability and imminence without any defined paths from the present and thus no proposed course of action. So, like the Rapture, it has to be perpetually imminent to have any meaning since there's nothing the average person can do about it beyond guessing on investment in the right stock, waiting in hopeful anticipation, or attempting to will it into existence through some sort of communal form of neurolinguistic programming.


Another religious community that has impressed with their sophistication is Auroville in southern India. (http://www.auroville.com/  This site used to be more about the community but had since gone more commercial, the community info apparently moved to auroville.org but the site down at the moment. However, the Auroville Earth Institute page has a good overview of the community architecture) I learned of them through my study of earth block architecture for use in non-toxic MCS-adaptive housing. They have produced some of the most sophisticated earthen architecture in the world and developed what I think is the most advanced form of Cinva Ram ever created; the Auram 3000. They may even hold the world record for the largest span earth block vaults and domes ever built and the largest solar oven kitchen. Unlike other religious communities, they are very public and involved in a broad spectrum of industries.
Such a shallow focus on the idealized end-result and the most advanced end-forms of technology can actually be detrimental to the goal of its realization because exaggerated expectations cause people to ignore or overlook the necessary near-term developments that need their support and participation. The more we focus exclusively on the post-Singularity the longer Singularity will take to accomplish because technology does NOT spontaneously advance by itself. This has been one of the key problems with space advocacy. Many NASA people curse Star Trek and science fiction in general for creating unrealistic expectations in an American population with a poor science education and a poor grasp of the line between reality and fantasy, thus making it that much harder for them to make a case for the relevance of what's possible to do today. (not that NASA itself is entirely blameless in this itself, mind you...) Too much science fiction is just fantasy with machines because a lot of writers just don't care about scientific plausibility or realistic visions of the future. Like the rest of the culture, it abandoned the actual future a long time ago. But the association with 'science' compels many to assume it must be more than mere fantasy. So far too many people expect the starship Enterprise and see anything less than that to be pointless folly or even part of some conspiracy of technology suppression. Certainly NASA may not be the most efficient at space development -their priorities in research are often irrational because of politics and aerospace industry nepotism- but they actually routinely get accused of conspiring to keep the warp drives, flying saucers, and antigravity under-wraps for the exclusive use of some secrete elite. I've encountered this kind of problem frequently with TMP. It's very hard to relate in relevance the necessary lower-tech long-period activities one must do now to goals as lofty as wholesale solar-system settlement. It's hard to get people to comprehend how starting a media production company, doing real estate development, or engaging in open source artifact development has any relevance to getting to space. And when reality can't meet expectations -particularly the expectation of personally living in space in their lifetime- many people have no compulsion in adopting psuedo-scientific nonsense as a short-cut.


Another interesting community that's not exactly a religious community but was founded, if memory serves, by a catholic priest after the Spanish Civil War, is Mondragon in Arrasata Spain. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragón_Cooperative_Corporation) You've probably already heard of this one. It is based on a workers cooperative that was founded as a trades apprenticeship school for disadvantaged youth whose graduates turned entrepreneurs and formed a coop that just kept getting progressively more industrially sophisticated until if became a multinational multi-industry coop and could compete with other European technology centers. I've considered it a possible model for the GreenStar Industrial Cooperative that I've proposed in TMP2. This is a good example of a pre-Internet P2P economic system cultivated in a community setting -exploiting community nepotism in a progressive way. it seems to incorporate many of the characteristics of the systems proposed by economist Louis Kelso, though with more of a traditional early 20th century socialist bent to it.
Now, it's not fair to generalize here. A lot of people in the transhumanism community are indeed trying to define a specific path into the future, especially those who have a real grasp of actual science and technology. But there are others who, because they have no means to actually participate in advanced technology development in any practical way and have only a rudimentary understanding of it, just engage in that game of speculative fantasy for its own sake. Still, I'd rather see people thinking and talking about a positive future in any fashion than wallowing in the compulsive nostalgia, fantasy, cultural narcissism, and dystopianism that has marked the popular culture in the west for the past half a century.

Revision as of 05:11, 14 August 2008

In the sandbox you can play with wiki syntax and more.

What's wrong with the Singularity as possible strategy


Below are excerpts from Eric Hunting in a recent email discussion. I think this is a valuable insight that transcends any critique of transhumanism, but can be applied to similar cultural memes, like the expectation of a fundamental spiritual transformation of the world by 2012. Utopian or apocalyptic visions can actually demobilize because of their stress on inevitability.

Eric Hunting:


There's nothing wrong with speculating about the future as long as you have established a specific path from the present and therefore have defined likely courses of action. That's the line between futurism and science fiction. You are using the trends of the present to anticipate possible paths into the future, paths which can become plans of action or intervention. What bothers me about speculation on the Singularity are the presumptions of inevitability and imminence without any defined paths from the present and thus no proposed course of action. So, like the Rapture, it has to be perpetually imminent to have any meaning since there's nothing the average person can do about it beyond guessing on investment in the right stock, waiting in hopeful anticipation, or attempting to will it into existence through some sort of communal form of neurolinguistic programming.

Such a shallow focus on the idealized end-result and the most advanced end-forms of technology can actually be detrimental to the goal of its realization because exaggerated expectations cause people to ignore or overlook the necessary near-term developments that need their support and participation. The more we focus exclusively on the post-Singularity the longer Singularity will take to accomplish because technology does NOT spontaneously advance by itself. This has been one of the key problems with space advocacy. Many NASA people curse Star Trek and science fiction in general for creating unrealistic expectations in an American population with a poor science education and a poor grasp of the line between reality and fantasy, thus making it that much harder for them to make a case for the relevance of what's possible to do today. (not that NASA itself is entirely blameless in this itself, mind you...) Too much science fiction is just fantasy with machines because a lot of writers just don't care about scientific plausibility or realistic visions of the future. Like the rest of the culture, it abandoned the actual future a long time ago. But the association with 'science' compels many to assume it must be more than mere fantasy. So far too many people expect the starship Enterprise and see anything less than that to be pointless folly or even part of some conspiracy of technology suppression. Certainly NASA may not be the most efficient at space development -their priorities in research are often irrational because of politics and aerospace industry nepotism- but they actually routinely get accused of conspiring to keep the warp drives, flying saucers, and antigravity under-wraps for the exclusive use of some secrete elite. I've encountered this kind of problem frequently with TMP. It's very hard to relate in relevance the necessary lower-tech long-period activities one must do now to goals as lofty as wholesale solar-system settlement. It's hard to get people to comprehend how starting a media production company, doing real estate development, or engaging in open source artifact development has any relevance to getting to space. And when reality can't meet expectations -particularly the expectation of personally living in space in their lifetime- many people have no compulsion in adopting psuedo-scientific nonsense as a short-cut.

Now, it's not fair to generalize here. A lot of people in the transhumanism community are indeed trying to define a specific path into the future, especially those who have a real grasp of actual science and technology. But there are others who, because they have no means to actually participate in advanced technology development in any practical way and have only a rudimentary understanding of it, just engage in that game of speculative fantasy for its own sake. Still, I'd rather see people thinking and talking about a positive future in any fashion than wallowing in the compulsive nostalgia, fantasy, cultural narcissism, and dystopianism that has marked the popular culture in the west for the past half a century.

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