Archive

Mindful Cyborgs #51 — Nordic Larp, Social Change, and Free-will Agency with Eleanor Saitta

Change is going to hap­pen. I guess in a lot of cas­es I see my role in the world as try­ing des­per­ate­ly to build enough tools, and enough under­stand­ing of how they work and how they can be used, and to get that stuff out into the world enough so that when stuff inevitably breaks and falls apart and explodes in our faces, we’ve got kind of a first aid kit that we can reach for.

Mindful Cyborgs #54 — A Positive Vision of Transhumanism and AI with Damien Williams

I don’t think it’s going to be nec­es­sar­i­ly a prob­lem with­in the next five to ten, fif­teen, to maybe even twen­ty years. But my per­spec­tive on it has always been, because I am more philo­soph­i­cal­ly focused in these things, why not try to address the issues before they arrive? Why not try to think about these ques­tions before they become prob­lems that we have to fix?

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.