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Tue Dec 8
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Having grown up in Michigan, the U.P. for me means the Upper Peninsula. So for a minute there I thought maybe the Canadians had finally invaded. #sfanarchists
@Chip Skylark of Space: Actually I was originally a Yooper (small town in the Eastern U.P.). But I went to school in Ann Arbor and have lived in that area for nearly as long as I lived in the U.P. So I'm not sure if I'm officially a Troll now or what. #sfanarchists
@Sean Keller: F or the Yoopers, here's the other hand. We drive from 'Sconsin across the UP to Alpena every summer- I love the UP, especially the last 90 minutes before the bridge, when you drive along the dunes and beaches of Lake Michigan. I loves my fudge, too. #sfanarchists
@Chip Skylark of Space: Oh, no, a fudgie! I used to live/work in the lower northern and while the tourists were welcome for their dollars, we were always glad to see the season end. :) #sfanarchists
@YanaH: Yeah, I could see why. By the way, I was wearing my Mac Bridge sweatshirt (bought in St. Ignace, in the joint with the crappy/dangerous tower) when I wrote my comment yesterday. I'd imagine that the area would be a lot nicer/quieter without the tourists and the burger wrappers. Of course, they're followed by the hunters, this time of year, and then the snow mobilers.. #sfanarchists
@Chip Skylark of Space: I just got back from up north visiting the relatives for Thanksgiving. It is too quiet. The poor economy is really killing the tourist/hunting season. I only saw two deer in trucks on the way back.
@Guang:
Here's Common Action's recommended reading list distributed to attendees:
Zainab Amadahy: The Moons of Palmares
MT Anderson: Feed
Iain M. Banks: Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, Use of Weapons
Octavia Butler: Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents
Samuel R. Delany: Triton
Cory Doctorow: Little Brother, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
L. Timmel Duchamp: Alanya to Alanya, Renegade, Tsunami, Blood in the
Fruit, Stretto
Eileen Gunn: Stable Strategies and Others
Nalo Hopkinson: Midnight Robber, So Long Been Dreaming (Ed.)
Ursula K. LeGuin: The Dispossessed, Always Coming Home, Four Ways to
Forgiveness
Saab Lofton: A.D.
Ken MacLeod: The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal, The Cassini Division
China Mieville: Iron Council, Un Lun Dun, Perdido Street Station
Alan Moore: V for Vendetta
Grant Morrison: The Invisibles
Pat Murphy: The City, Not Long After
Chris Newport: The White Bones of Truth
Marge Piercy: Woman on the Edge of Time, He She and It
Philip Pullman: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass
Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, Antarctica
Joanna Russ: The Female Man
Nisi Shawl: Filter House
Starhawk: The Fifth Sacred Thing
Charles Stross: Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise
Michael Swanwick: The Iron Dragon's Daughter
Amy Thompson: The Color of Distance
Brian K. Vaughan: Y The Last Man
Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchelli: DMZ #sfanarchists
just a comment from an urbanist: there's a difference between built environment and the society that inhibits it (although you can see it as combine function) - the social aspects are reflections of the built environment (and vice versa) but one should be careful to correlate them in a one-dimensional way. seeing either or both together as technology is a singular viewpoint; it's an engineer's viewpoint. for others, cities are anything from artifact to, well, text, and can be "read" in different ways. interesting to see that bruce uses the past tense in the sentence i'm referring to. in any case, one core idea of the city is proximity, and people will need that in the future too, even if it takes on other, new shapes. or they'll cease being people. my two cents. love the future metro series!
Well, Jeff VanderMeer knows what he's talking about. His Ambergris, the City of Saints and Madmen is one of the most fascinating cities I've seen in speculative fiction. It's at the same time infuriating and pleasant to know that he'll probably never reveal all its secrets.
I think that there is a lack of historical buildings in future city-scapes. So many old buildings gain that vaunted "historical" status that they can never be torn down/modified in exterior appearance.
I can't imagine a Coruscant type city-scape, that totally displaces these structures. A group of 10 citizens will stop it from happening.
@Ruthless, If you let me: In the case of Coruscant it seems stranger that there are no *new* buildings. The Jedi Temple is apparently thousands of years old, yet its architecture doesn't seem significantly different from the rest of the city. The implication seems to be that now new buildings have been made in a millennia.
@Ruthless, If you let me: Those sorts of cities really only appear after wars. Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, was essentially flattened by the Nazis. With no historical sites to work around, the city is almost surreal in the quantity of glass and modern architecture it contains. It's not that any one building is notably exceptional, although there are a few. Instead, the unremitting expanse of skyscrapers, plazas and modern art make walking through the city unlike any other I've been to.
I think it's important to remember, too, how economic realities affect the organization of a city--the banks are here because they want to be near the marketplace which is here, which is where it is for god only knows what reason, probably because it was the flattest part of the are six hundred years ago, and it's where all the cows stopped to graze.
@Defendant: I know. She didn't get uploaded or cyborged, she just had something bad happen, and most of her brain died, and eventually (after a lot of bullshit) they let her body stop being artificially stimulated.
She was a person, then she died, like people have done for thousands of years.
@Evil Tortie's Mom: That moment of death was delayed significantly by machinery, which took over on operating her body when Schiavo no longer could. So she was cyborged, in a manner of speaking.
In her case that was a mistake, because what was lost we have no machines to bring back (yet?), but that doesn't change the point. Her organism was enhanced by technological addition. It is not what one thinks of when thinking posthumanism, but it fits the basic template.
Actually when it comes to transhumanist stuff, I'm less interested in the pontifications about media (I mean McLuhan pretty much covered this already right?), than I am about a genuine revolution in education. I mean the world is full of computers now and I'm still a lazy unmotivated dabbler in everything.
Screw the jet packs, where's my damn Mandarin language course in pill form?! Science fiction has been promising us a pedagogical revolution for decades. Nothing yet.
@corpore-metal: I don't recall MacLuhan ever actually talking about the "trans"-human though. His whole thing was discussing the effects of media on actual, existing societies of humans.
This reminds me of an article I read that claimed people who grew up with black and white TV had black and white dreams. Those of us that grew up with color TV have color dreams. If mass media has that sort of fundamental control over our subconscious, personality authoring is not far behind.
So a huge mishmash of a scandalous media-mongering disability case, attention-grabbing and preposterous claims about the "end of culture". Ridiculous, unsupported theories about personalities being constructed by media....
Sounds like a futurist conference to me. The problem is that all the futurist theories I ever hear are actually quite pedestrian theories hatched long ago, but dressed up somehow in the language of technology.
Just look at the idea that we're "compiling" our personalities from moment to moment? That sounds very much like an argument that could have been hatched two hundred years ago, but jazzed up by the use of the computer-lingo term "compiling" which then suggests that maybe we're all programmed!..... WHOAHHHHH. DUUUUUUDE. MY MIND....
Quite frankly, I think all the futurist conferences that have ever taken place are of less value to actual human thinking than 5 pages of Baudrillard.
Its one where we share an augmented reality world, we have far less physical products, and (most importantly) we act as a collective hive-mind but only in so far that we are each individuals constantly contributing knowledge and answers.
Which are already doing (Google, Wikipedia etc).
I see the future just as am more instant, structured, form of that.
A semanticaly linked knowledge and preposal database, to be exact.
(A "preposal" is any suggested or arguement of something that could or should be done or made...which can be broken down into smaller goals needed to achieve it....many of the smaller goals could also help different preposals, of course...so it becomes clear whats the most usefull things to work on)
Individualy is a strength that we can use systematicaly.
I strongly believe for every problem in the world someone...somewhere...has an answer. We just gota link the questions to the answers.
oh and;
"only speculative fiction novels really put the individual's choices at the center of the story"
Am I the only one that thinks this is rather arrogant?
Because it seems to me the choices and power of an individual is a common theme in novels accross all genre's.
@twDarkflame: It's not just you: it seems to me that a large volume of mainstream literature is about an individual's choices and how they lead him or her to better, or worse, outcome.
I strongly believe for every problem in the world someone...somewhere...has an answer.
The problem is that for every problem, there are a million different versions of 'the problem', and therefore a million different answers. Have you ever tried to get several people to agree on a pizza order? It's like that, but x1000. Oh, and no matter how you order the pizza people die.
Sounds like somebody doesn't know what "culture" is. Hey jackass, if you've got technology, you've got culture. Technology is part of the material and adaptive manifestation of culture. Technology doesn't occur in a vacuum.
Oh, and if being "post-human" means being Terri Schiavo brain-dead--uh, no thanks.
@cletar: i took the terri schiavo 'post-human' comparison to be a reference to the mediation of her situation through the media without any direct input on this mediation by her.
10/25/09
10/25/09
10/26/09
@The Architect of Tartaros: Holding up your right hand, point to where you're from.
You know how that works, you've been doing it all your life. #sfanarchists
10/26/09
10/26/09
10/27/09
@Sean Keller: F or the Yoopers, here's the other hand. We drive from 'Sconsin across the UP to Alpena every summer- I love the UP, especially the last 90 minutes before the bridge, when you drive along the dunes and beaches of Lake Michigan. I loves my fudge, too. #sfanarchists
10/27/09
10/28/09
11/30/09
10/25/09
10/25/09
Here's Common Action's recommended reading list distributed to attendees:
Zainab Amadahy: The Moons of Palmares
MT Anderson: Feed
Iain M. Banks: Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, Use of Weapons
Octavia Butler: Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents
Samuel R. Delany: Triton
Cory Doctorow: Little Brother, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
L. Timmel Duchamp: Alanya to Alanya, Renegade, Tsunami, Blood in the
Fruit, Stretto
Eileen Gunn: Stable Strategies and Others
Nalo Hopkinson: Midnight Robber, So Long Been Dreaming (Ed.)
Ursula K. LeGuin: The Dispossessed, Always Coming Home, Four Ways to
Forgiveness
Saab Lofton: A.D.
Ken MacLeod: The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal, The Cassini Division
China Mieville: Iron Council, Un Lun Dun, Perdido Street Station
Alan Moore: V for Vendetta
Grant Morrison: The Invisibles
Pat Murphy: The City, Not Long After
Chris Newport: The White Bones of Truth
Marge Piercy: Woman on the Edge of Time, He She and It
Philip Pullman: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass
Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, Antarctica
Joanna Russ: The Female Man
Nisi Shawl: Filter House
Starhawk: The Fifth Sacred Thing
Charles Stross: Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise
Michael Swanwick: The Iron Dragon's Daughter
Amy Thompson: The Color of Distance
Brian K. Vaughan: Y The Last Man
Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchelli: DMZ #sfanarchists
10/26/09
09/17/09
09/17/09
09/17/09
09/17/09
I can't imagine a Coruscant type city-scape, that totally displaces these structures. A group of 10 citizens will stop it from happening.
09/17/09
09/17/09
09/17/09
09/17/09
09/17/09
09/17/09
09/17/09
Which explains the entire layout of Boston.
03/26/09
03/26/09
She was a person, then she died, like people have done for thousands of years.
03/26/09
In her case that was a mistake, because what was lost we have no machines to bring back (yet?), but that doesn't change the point. Her organism was enhanced by technological addition. It is not what one thinks of when thinking posthumanism, but it fits the basic template.
03/26/09
The machinery kept some cells alive for a while.
And she certainly wasn't the first person in this condition, just the most famous.
03/26/09
Screw the jet packs, where's my damn Mandarin language course in pill form?! Science fiction has been promising us a pedagogical revolution for decades. Nothing yet.
03/26/09
03/26/09
03/26/09
Sounds like a futurist conference to me. The problem is that all the futurist theories I ever hear are actually quite pedestrian theories hatched long ago, but dressed up somehow in the language of technology.
Just look at the idea that we're "compiling" our personalities from moment to moment? That sounds very much like an argument that could have been hatched two hundred years ago, but jazzed up by the use of the computer-lingo term "compiling" which then suggests that maybe we're all programmed!..... WHOAHHHHH. DUUUUUUDE. MY MIND....
Quite frankly, I think all the futurist conferences that have ever taken place are of less value to actual human thinking than 5 pages of Baudrillard.
03/26/09
Also kudos for clear thinking to cletar.
03/26/09
Its one where we share an augmented reality world, we have far less physical products, and (most importantly) we act as a collective hive-mind but only in so far that we are each individuals constantly contributing knowledge and answers.
Which are already doing (Google, Wikipedia etc).
I see the future just as am more instant, structured, form of that.
A semanticaly linked knowledge and preposal database, to be exact.
(A "preposal" is any suggested or arguement of something that could or should be done or made...which can be broken down into smaller goals needed to achieve it....many of the smaller goals could also help different preposals, of course...so it becomes clear whats the most usefull things to work on)
Individualy is a strength that we can use systematicaly.
I strongly believe for every problem in the world someone...somewhere...has an answer. We just gota link the questions to the answers.
oh and;
"only speculative fiction novels really put the individual's choices at the center of the story"
Am I the only one that thinks this is rather arrogant?
Because it seems to me the choices and power of an individual is a common theme in novels accross all genre's.
03/26/09
2)meh, I know the exact future.
3) you can't possibly be for real. Are you even out of high school?
03/26/09
03/26/09
I strongly believe for every problem in the world someone...somewhere...has an answer.
The problem is that for every problem, there are a million different versions of 'the problem', and therefore a million different answers. Have you ever tried to get several people to agree on a pizza order? It's like that, but x1000. Oh, and no matter how you order the pizza people die.
03/26/09
03/26/09
Oh, and if being "post-human" means being Terri Schiavo brain-dead--uh, no thanks.
03/26/09
03/26/09
03/26/09
03/26/09