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Futures Podcast #1: Cyborg Experiments, with Professor Kevin Warwick

Humans, we’re pret­ty lim­it­ed in what we can do, let’s face it, men­tal­ly par­tic­u­lar­ly. We just have a bunch of brain cells. And the pos­si­bil­i­ty of enhanc­ing our brain, our men­tal capa­bil­i­ties, I think is enormous.

Biohackers Die

So grinders are a com­mu­ni­ty com­mit­ted to rad­i­cal­ly alter­ing the body. And so some­times it’s treat­ments like tran­scra­nial mag­net­ic, or direct cur­rent stim­u­la­tion. It could be through the use of pre­vi­ous­ly untest­ed chem­i­cals like VIP. Often it takes the form of implant­ed devices. All these approach­es come with risks. What I’m going to focus on today is why despite all the risks being tak­en, a grinder has­n’t died yet.

Biohacking: The Moral Imperative to Build a Better You

I think that we have a moral imper­a­tive to change the human being, giv­en the fact that we are built so flawed and built for a time that we no longer live in. There’s a pret­ty per­va­sive belief that we kind of stopped evolv­ing from the neck up. And that we don’t have behav­iors that are actu­al­ly stuck inside the human being, and ways in which we’re in this sort of evo­lu­tion­ary lock­step with what we used to be, and not what we are and what we’ve become.

Grinder Perspective on Gene Editing Tech

I think when you start using this tech­nol­o­gy for enhance­ment, that’s when you start to get into the domain of bio­hack­ing and kind of human aug­men­ta­tion. Well, I believe that this is a very fer­tile ground for peo­ple to explore, and I think that this involves will­ing par­tic­i­pants who are try­ing to find out more about the world around them and try­ing to enhance the human expe­ri­ence. And I think we need to allow that inno­va­tion to take place.

Mindful Cyborgs #55 — Magick & the Occult with­in the Internet and Corporations with Damien Williams

We can see the hid­den, occult oper­a­tions of pro­gram­mers, of peo­ple who are seek­ing to get very spe­cif­ic out­comes by oper­at­ing on very par­tic­u­lar com­po­nents, rit­u­al­ly oper­at­ing with­in very par­tic­u­lar sym­bol­ic frame­works. People who are using par­tic­u­lar cod­ing lan­guages, peo­ple who are using par­tic­u­lar setups of hard­ware because for their pur­pos­es, for their end goals, these are the things that get the job done. These are the things that have the res­o­nance and the capa­bil­i­ty, the pow­er, the effi­ca­cy, to do the work. 

Mindful Cyborgs #69 — Materials Science & Plastic-making Bees with Deb Chachra

Designers do spend a fair bit of time think­ing about what mate­ri­als to use, but they don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly think about why those mate­ri­als have the prop­er­ties that they have.

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