lifeisbrutallyunfair.com - pinhole vision

pinhole vision

_POSTED_BY desik

Wednesday, 08 October 2008

whatever happened to david hemmings? by autotelic

Whatever our fears are of a traditional Orwellian 'Big Brother' -like regime suddenly imposing itself against our will its a fact that the widespread availability of cheap and portable digital cameras and recording devices has rapidly propelled us into a Self Surveilance Society and created a new pressing need to become the publicly shared Spectacle of our own lives . This is particularly true of the Y generation born in the late 80's and 90's who have grown up with digital technology and the YouTuberisation of mass culture who now, as my friend puts it, make and share movies of themselves fucking, gang banging , fighting and falling down drunk on their mobile phones more or less as the norm. Generation X-ers and the Babyboomers dabble too albeit much more self consciously, but its a safe bet that Generation Z , whose vanguard will teen out as the Class of 2012 , will have every aspect of their lives digitally recorded from the cradle to the grave again with very little thought of how all this self produced content will be used in the longterm

How about it being used to document the death of humanity?

If the technologists are right and we do soon reach the point where “everything that can be known, will be known, and anything that is possible within the laws of physics will be achievable” the sheer volume of self -produced content out there – the tedious home movies of family life and the more racous stuff including that movie of gran doing coke and being doubled by a couple of guys in Vegas last Easter weekend - isnt going to stay secure on any networked resource for too long - and everything is going to be networked sooner or later - its just going to be primary source material for some bot designed to seek out this data to analyse what the fuck we were about as we hurtled blindly into the post human era smiling or waving our dicks to camera.

It starts with that first exposure

Camera obscura

Those low resolution embryonic stills of fragile life

Captured images of cowering in the womb...

Comments

Greil

|2008-10-08 22:49:19

What I'd give for a snapshot of the future!

fist in the face

|2008-10-09 02:36:50

yes, generation z needs to document the death of humanity, what a fucking joke,
well at least people are already capturing footage that explains why humanity is
dying, again, what a fucking joke.

anon	\|2008-10-09 09:54:30

This Singularity concept worries me. I keep thinking its a joke and hoping
that Greil Marcus will debunk it but it truly does seem that we are moving away
from ourselves on a crash course with technology as we've created systems we
depend on that have become way too complex for us to understand.

J	\|2008-10-09 04:29:48

what's up with all the cock shots anyways? seems like everyone wants to be a
porn star now too.

How many ways can you spell redundant?

Will the penis
become obsolete with the advent of the singularity?

Jodi - redundant cock shock

|2008-10-09 21:24:29

It's a good question . Last century, reproductive technology , contraceptive and
assisted reproductive technology (ART) , fueled massive social change and
created serious confusion and redundancy issues around male roles . This century
rapid technological advances will lead to the evolution of a new branch of
the species and that's going to create real fucking problems for guys who arent
packing a supra genetically enhanced load.

Males are going to be the first
casualty of the post human age.

dom	\|2008-10-09 11:37:40

Lord knows I'm suffering already and desperately need to be relieved of my load.

habib - bias

|2008-10-10 00:46:17

There is blind opposition here to seeking technological mastery over human
nature as if only bad could come from it! Where does this fearful
bioconservatism come from? God?

A	\|2008-10-10 03:28:45

Habib: I can't see beyond my intense loneliness, I don't understand what you're
talking about, elaborate.

anna - the vanity of mortals

|2008-10-10 13:34:33

Habib probably believes that rapid technological advances will soon enable us
to genetically modify or use nanontechnology or AI implants to augment human
beings to massively increase their intelligence and longevity and place them in
complete control of their emotions, including feelings like loneliness .

To
me this ' scientific 'quest to master human nature as a design and engineering
problem is depressingly paradoxical as its also based on mortal fears - these
people dont want to suffer , age or die - and its also one of the reasons it is
so terribly difficult and lonely to be alive in this age .

But Habib would
probably say ' Ah but such objections usually derive from a belief in a
supernatural being or nature wagging its finger at us for tinkering with its
work or a fear of social conflict arising from creating a new type of human .'
and taunt ' why should we not improve on the basic human design to engineer
greater intelligence , longevity and happiness and design out hatred , fear and
disease.'

I'm a lonely old woman I want to die in peace not live forever.

DChopra

|2008-10-11 07:08:22

If we were genetically tweaked to live forever I'd not only be eternally lonely
I'd be eternally pissed as I've spent a great deal of time preparing myself and
others for the afterlife.

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