From many different angles I’ve been confronted with a guilt-laden invective against the use of my handheld computer (i.e. iPhone) for ongoing communiques, most usually via Twitter.

Human traditionalists: I see your argument. I could go with it. But I don’t. You can go your way; I’m happy going mine.

What I experience goes beyond criticism, however. It generally breaches undercurrents of anger and fear (arguably the same thing), bringing implications of threat: that to fail to attack the exuberantly transhumanist (such as myself) constitutes tacit acceptance of subservience to technology and a rejection of such ideals as the purity of meatspace serendpity and community.

Well how about this: What if mastering a form of instantaneous global communication within a network of social peers of my own choosing isn’t dehumanizing — it’s extrahumanizing.

What if this quasi-Luddite conservatism of the everyday is nothing but quaint, irrelevant glorification of meatspace-exclusive experience, no more valid than drug war prudishness?

I honestly feel as though I’m sensing the newest incarnation of cultural backlash, a trend of discrimination against the hyperconnected that will amplify as we continue the inexorable march towards a post-human future of technological symbiosis.

I see the neuroplasticity of the brain and I disregard the Old World attitude of optimization for onboard memory; offloading to peripherals to allow for optimization of more uniquely human strengths such as pattern-matching, semiotics, and intuition makes sense.

I choose memes; cyberneticism; techgnosis.

Technology is not “it”. But neither is humanity “it”.

Addendum: I frequently exhibit cries of frustration with my gadgetry. But make no mistake: it’s their lack of efficacy and clumsy “integration” with the everyday that irritates me.  I’ll be the first in line for the Google Maps overlay implant in my retina.

Technorati Tags: experience, memetics, philosophy, post-human, transhuman, twitter

“Professor McGrath,

While I have no doubt that your personal experience of God is very dear to you, and in your mind, as you’ve made clear by restating many and various times over, this concept makes the world make a lot of sense, could you please perhaps elucidate for me, and for all of us, why it you think that this constitutes a good argument for the existence of God?

Or, if you don’t think of it as an argument you are putting forth, could you please fill us in on why you insist on repeating it over and over again in debates, often times spending valuable minutes on it that you could be using for actual arguments or display of evidence?

Thanks a bunch, cheers.”

I could go on, and in fact my essay-writing impulse is urging me to insert more of a preamble to the question to set up the “So What” a lot more bitingly.

Or I could step outside and participate in some bicycle jousting going on outside of one of the units in my building.  Something tells me — and I feel this to be true — it would be a serious mismanagement of priorities not to step outside.

–

Apparently I’m more interested in listening to Sue Blackmore, some more, than in hanging out with a crowd of East Oakland bike-jousting scrapsters.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s funny stuff and good people.  But it’s just not enough.

Technorati Tags: blackmore, jousting, mcgrath, memetics, oakland, roll-up bazaar, vulcan