@H+ :: Anarcho-Transhumanism

FYI to folks in the Midwest, the annual Finding Our Roots anarchist conference is going on in Chicago this weekend. This year’s focus is on anarchist organizing. The list of workshops can be found here.

Antisocialite and I may throw together an impromptu guerrilla workshop on Sunday to talk about issues relating to @ organizing and technology — stuff like:

– technology and security culture (surveillance, sousveillance, crypto, etc)

– internet organizing, open source models, new media, hacktivism

– organizing around tech issues, universal access to tech, subverting authoritarian tech for libertarian purposes

In the off chance that you happen to be in the Chicago area, there’s going to be a transhumanist meetup this weekend:

Date: Saturday March 22nd
When: 3pm until ?
Location: Mercury Cafe, 1505 W. Chicago Ave., Chicago

It’s an open gathering, with the purpose of meeting each other, talking about H+-related issues, and possible setting this up as a monthly event.

As a quick follow-up to Antisocialite’s post about Anonymous vs. Scientology (he tells me part 2 is coming soon), this brief over at Global Guerrillas summarizes Project Chanology in the context of an open source insurgency. Even more interesting, however, is this reply from a member of Anonymous:

Firstly, Anonymous is an example of viral organisation - there is no centralised leadership, and although there are nodes of organisation, these are dynamic - if one goes down or is taken down, others compensate with little damage done to the utility of the network as a whole. Organisation and decisions are made through what I would term “viral consensus” - the facts, questions and opinions are disseminated throughout the network by it’s users, the most successful or popular of these possible courses of action are therefore repeated more often and gain traction - mutations to the idea occur and those that are popular flourish. As such, there are no leaders to attack - whilst there may be some individuals who are more visible (such as Mark Bunker) they are not essential-, no easily-accisble points of failure. Indeed, the only thing that would severely disrupt the insurgency as a whole is internal factional problems - which are near-impossible for an outsider to predict or cause due to the shibboleths John mentions; or a total disruption of the internet as a whole.

Secondly, the initial campaign of DDOS and internet insurgency can be seen as an example of the internet as an enabling force - most members of anonymous are not hackers or computer security experts, but the information available on how to conduct operations such as DDOS attacks etc is readily available on the internet, and can be spread concisely and practically throughout the group itself through other networking tools (IRC, message boards, forums, p2p). However, the interesting thing in particular about the methodology of anonymous is that it is intensely adaptable - when the opinions of Mark Bunker that the illegal aspects of anonymous actions (DDOS etc) were tactically efficient but strategically detrimental entered the viral consciousness, the methodology drastically changed - to real life protests organised over a number of countries, and to information dissemination tactics aimed at the public.

I’ve been telling Infomorph that I was going to write something about the planned 2/10 protests for something like three weeks now to the point where the protests have come and gone and I’m only now sitting down to hammer this out. At this point I think my thoughts fall into two separate entries so this is the first focusing on how what Anon has done and how it gives hope to radicals and anarchists of all types, but particularly those of us of a more pro-tech orientation. Read the rest of this entry »

Figured it was about time I piped up around here. I wanted to offer a recap of our presentation this past weekend at the Finding Our Roots conference in Chicago. Our session was very well attended (I’ve already apologized to Infomorph for pessimistically suggesting we only make 20 handouts) but I think we spent too long explaining concepts and not enough time talking about how these concepts relate to an activist agenda.

Fortunately we were able to hold a guerilla workshop a few hours later. While this was more sparsely attended (maybe 20 people total) it did result in more of a discussion and sharing of ideas and resources. Hopefully most of the attendees will find their way over here sooner of later. There was some talk of trying to get a more organized community started out of this, so if you’re interested leave us a comment and we’ll get that ball rolling.

I know Ben, Infomorph and I all have slightly different views regarding @h+ but I thought I’d take this chance to lay out my take on it in the wake of this past weekend.

I guess if I had to sum up the point we wanted to make it would be to stress that technology has taken an undeserved beating in many anarchist circles in the past few years. I’ve heard more than one activist posit that technology is a creature of the capitalist state. Bullshit. That’s like saying reading, writing and basic mathematics are tools of the state and we should reject them.

Technology is a tool. But it’s a tool we risk marginalizing ourselves from if we continue to take a rejectionist stance towards new and emerging technologies. Many of the technologies that loom on the horizon carry with them the possibility for radical social change and the ushering in of entirely new systems of social organizations. But it will be the hands that control them that decide the directions of these changes. And it seems to me that current stances among a variety of leftists advocate not just for a hands off policy but for the total amputation of the hands entirely.

The answer is not to go back, as some have suggested, to a more ‘ideal’ time. It was particularly disheartening to hear one of the keynote speakers advocate for just this sort of solution. It seems to me that this sort of sentiment is not just reactionary but puts us in dangerous territory. As was demonstrated by the discussion spawned by this keynote, issues such as population control (such a cute euphemism) and ‘migration’ rear their ugly heads and leave us having to take, at the very least, distasteful stances that compromise our ideals and undermine our overall project.

Instead it is far more preferable to forge forward and establish ourselves on the cutting edge as having a voice in the direction the future must go. To position ourselves in such debates as the responsible use of artificial intelligences, open and free access to biotech advances, and the freedom of information and creation of a more open society. These are issues that will face not just activists but entire populations in the coming decades, and having already developed a well thought out and reasoned approach to these issues will position us more centrally in the debates that are sure to rage around them.

We will be presenting a workshop on anarchism and transhumanism at the Finding Our Roots anarchist theory conference in Chicago, April 27-29. Here’s the workshop description:

Anarcho-Transhumanism
This discussion will start as a presentation about the accelerating pace of technological change and how these changes will be disruptive to society. It will cover advances in biotechnology, nanotechnology, cognitive science, and computer science, and how these will recursively interact and potentially lead us towards a technological “singularity.” Specific topics will include genetic engineering, longevity, communication networks, open source initiatives, nanofabrication, and the militarization of space. These technologies and inevitable changes pose many risks — both to our personal freedoms and to humanity and the Earth as a whole — but they might also provide anarchists with the tools and opportunities to undertake drastic social change *in our lifetimes*. After the presentation, we are interested in having a discussion on how pro-tech anarchists can best position ourselves to take advantage of these technologies/changes and use them to our advantage to establish a free, transhuman, post-scarcity society.

Here’s a list of the other workshops planned so far.
If all goes well, we hope to do similar workshops at the Version 07 festival (Chicago, April 19-May 6) and the Think GalactiCon left-wing sci-fi conference (Chicago, July 13-15). Add in the TransVision 07 conference (Chicago, July 23-25), and this will be a busy spring/summer.