The strange thing about writing a headstone is that you’re simultaneously writing a conclusion, and an introduction.
As a person who’s been criminalized and arrested for the sole act of being poor in the US, it’s probably something I’m always walking with, speaking on, and trying to effectively change just by…in some ways not so much raising awareness, which seems very passive to be, but more about sparking people’s understanding and change.
I suspect that when many of you think about neuroscience, the first things that come to mind are medical applications: mental disorders, pharmaceuticals. But what I’m going to try and argue today is that the stakes are much greater in the year 2015.
There’s a lot of beautiful things. And I think if there’s one thing I’m most deeply disquiet about it’s…power. Why are we doing almost nothing about climate change? It’s because despite the fact that most people on earth and many government on Earth do, the oil corporations and the governments most closely allied to the oil corporations, notably ours, don’t want to do anything.
Lack of attachment…does not mean disconnection from the world and others, but ability to control what can be controlled: the self, rather than consequences. It is about detaching our motivation from the results of an action so we do not lose sight of what else is important: a sense of perspective.
We have even in the United States serious and growing water scarcity challenges. We have contamination problems with chemicals that we have not adequately regulated here in the United States. We have conflicts between states in the United States about who gets to use what water to do what. We have evidence that climate change is already influencing water demand, affecting water availability, changing extreme events. There are a whole suite of water-related problems, here, unrelated to these basic human need challenges that’re pressing in other parts of the world.
I vacillate…between thinking that we’re doomed because we have given ourselves over to a stupid system that’s now backed up by guns. And then a much more utopian view that we’ve always lived in stupid systems and that we’re always making them better.
If you were to ask me what the crisis in the present is, as an evolutionary biologist I have to go back millions of years and try to connect all the dots, going back to man as a single-celled organism to present time, and saying what is it that is causing modern consternation? More importantly, is there a pattern? Has this happened before? Were there some ordinary people like you and I, shopkeepers in Rome, who were standing around and saying, “You know, our leaders don’t seem to be on top of our problems. They seem to be getting worse one generation after another.”
As we’ve moved into increasingly digital spaces, so online worlds, we’re moving away from your traditional physical spaces where you have public streets; where you have public squares; where people can go to protest, and into areas, if you would call them that, that are entirely controlled by corporations.
Hype only has power in its illusion and if more people started from a mindset of critical thinking, hype wouldn't have its power. Read more →
What we're trying to think about now is, take the sort of venerable light bulb and recast it as a computational appliance. So, how do we take something that's been so remarkably successful and infuse it with computational abilities? Read more →
I was lucky enough to start off as one of the first ISPs in Hong Kong back in 1995. I was heading up the Internet service providers association locally. And that kind of led us to have a central or organized body to discuss with the government on Internet regulations or telecommunications issues among us. And that kind of opened the door to many of the issues that we are facing today like copyright, privacy, security, and even just Internet accessibility. Read more →
Full Surrogacy Now means two dialectically opposed things. It is simultaneously a utopian cry for the queer gestational commune, and a description of what's going on right now, which is very much not that. The dystopian structure of planetary reality in the present. Indentured service, subalternity, crowdfunding, outsourcing, neofeudalism, civil strifes, invisiblized sub-sub-contracting, and above all—to use the phrase of Shellee Colen—reproductive stratification. Read more →
What I hope we can do in this panel is have a slightly more literary discussion to try to answer well why were those the stories that we were telling and what has been the point of telling those stories even though they don’t now necessarily always align with the policy problems that we’re having. Read more →