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    An inside joke. A blog. A revolution in the making.
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Part 4: The Worm Earns (or it can fuck off and die)

Oct 21

Cut to a Singularity Summit that same year, also down in the sainted city of San Jose.  During one of the talks, the speaker, Marshall Brain, at that time the host of the TV Show Factory Floor and author of Robotic Nation spoke about the exponential acceleration of robot technology that the conference was, in its essence, about. He noted that the degree of automation that was soon to arrive would lead to such a loss of jobs that it would be necessary to start providing people with a guaranteed income.

This time, it wasn’t a slight groan that arose from the gathered transhumanoids. There was actual hissing from a substantial segment of the audience.  It was the first and only time I ever heard this kind of response at one of these gatherings. (Transhumanoids tend to pride themselves on a Spock-like calm logic. They are not rowdy sorts.)

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Part 5: There’ll Be Pie in the Sky When You Don’t Die… or We Don’t Need No Steenkin’ Steal This Singularity

Oct 21

The conservative or apolitical transhumanist/singularitarian argument against the Steal This Singularity approach is, fundamentally, that it’s unnecessary. The tech will produce democratized abundance and liberties beyond our wildest imaginings and all we need to do is hang on tight and support science and technology and, generally, not stir too much shit up. I call this the “there’ll be pie in the sky when you don’t die” argument, which is a play off of a Woody Guthrie satire, which is, in turn, about 40 times more obscure to young 21st Century Americans than even an Abbie Hoffman reference.

Basically, the narrative goes that we’re going from home/desktop media, which gave all of us the equivalent of a printing press and broadcast studio from which to have a voice in the world to 3d home printing i.e. manufacturing. If we get molecular technology and tie that in with 3D manufacturing, every man and woman can make what they need from very little in their homes. Of course, that assumes homes, but that’s one brief example of a path to democratized abundance that seemingly doesn’t require any political activism.

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Part 7: A Special Naughty Hipster’s Steal This Singularity

Oct 21
http://youtu.be/tgp4hdg2qF4

“This is all well and good,” I hear some of you say.  “But it’s a bit self righteous, dontcha think? I mean, what ever happened to that good ol’ MONDO  2000 amorality; the trashed hipster excess; the Sadean/Burroughsian polymorphis perversity; the winking chic naughtiness; the”… oh stop!

OK. For you and only you, I present the Special Hipster’s Steal This Singularity video, organized and directed by my wicked brother Hassan I Sirius. Upon abandoning his mountain retreat and his nefarious plans for the terrible night of the DMT assassins when he was forced to admit that the Tea Party had utterly poisoned the anarchist narrative, he formed an advertising company with Gilles de Rais and Donald Trump, who he met at the Punk: Chaos to Coture afterparty. Anyway, they have been kind enough to organize this beautiful advertisment for Steal This Singularity. Ciao Ciao!

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Neil Gaiman Has Lost His Clothes

Oct 20

Neil Gaiman didn’t arrive naked when he graced our MondoGlobo studio on Sunday, October 1. But according to a post on his website, he had lost most of his clothes. “What are the odds that, if I was sent a box of clean clothes to wear, a box that was waiting for me in New York, I would somehow manage to pack most of the clothes that were inside back up in the box along with the awards and books and CDs I’d been given, not to mention the already-worn UK-trip clothes, and then send that box with my clean clothes in it home, and that I would only discover the awful reason why my suitcase was so light on a Sunday morning in San Francisco?”

Rest assured, Mr. Gaiman didn’t smell like several days sweat, and he looked pretty much like you’d expect a comic writer and fantastical novelist to look: all in black, including the leather jacket. And if he felt like he was in the middle of one of the most common types of nightmares, he didn’t seem disoriented.

In fact, he didn’t even tell us about his travails and he pretty much carried the interview (along with my co-host, Diana Brown), while your humble host (that’s me) was in something of a somnambulant fog brought on by that day’s health issues (I’ll spare you.)

And then there was the presence of Paul McEnery, who had interviewed Gaiman for MONDO 2000 back in the mid-1990s. “We broke him in America,” he assured me. I had ignored his pleas to participate in the program, not wanting to crowd the show with too many cooks, but there he was, and so he was invited to kibbutz.

All in all, it worked. This is a damned fine Neil Gaiman interview.

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