World Transhumanist Association

I probably shouldn't be getting all crazy about how special I am now with my eye implant, but it has started me down the road toward total subsumption with the global machine mass. I kid. I kid.

In my college days I was into this magazine called Mondo2000. It really changed my life. I read a couple issues and was completely hooked on the future. There were a number of things in my environment (punk, acid) that turned me away from the backwards-looking classic-rock-listening cold-war-thinking generally-anything-as-it-is-done or-was-done retro-prison stuff that regular people believed in. But it was Mondo2000 that gave tendrils to all these new awakenings. It was a clearing house for all manner of nuts and I latched on to their ideas rather forcefully.

I came to the website of the World Transhumanist Association because a guy there was discussing the work of Paul W. Ewald on that site. (There are precious few places where it is discussed, sadly.) Those lovable fruit cakes, the Transhumanists, who use words like ‘superhuman’ that scientists have to stay away from, are kind of like having a smart inventor uncle that I admire but is a little too wacky to hang out with full time.

From STELARC's website:

Bodies are both Zombies and Cyborgs. We have never had a mind of our own and we often perform involuntarily conditioned and externally prompted. Ever since we evolved as hominids and developed bipedal locomotion, two limbs became manipulators and we constructed artifacts, instruments and machines. In other words we have always been coupled with technology. We have always been prosthetic bodies. We fear the involuntary and we are becoming increasingly automated and extended. But we fear what we have always been and what we have already become—Zombies and Cyborgs.

Cool. But it turns out now I’m more into medically-related scientific speculation. Evolutionary biology is so hot.

And Paul W. Ewald got me going on it with his article, “Mastering Disease” In The Next Fifty Years (listening on my iPod at the hospital because I could no longer see text on paper) and now I’m going to read Plague Time: How Stealth Infections Cause Cancer, Heart Disease, and Other Deadly Ailments. It’s what all disease sufferers do I guess. Read about the perfect future to help deal with the not-so-perfect present.