Tupac’s Using Instagram?

At first I didn’t understand. Everyone kept talking about Tupac and something ‘gram. I thought they were saying Tupac’s using Instagram. But that didn’t make sense. How can you use social media if you’re dead?

Then I realized they were referring to the hologram of the deceased rapper Tupac Shakur displayed alongside Snoop Dog at this year’s Coachella music festival. By now virtually everyone’s heard of this and it’s spreading like a nerdcore meme wildfire across the Internet. And rightly so. It’s pretty darn neat. Some would say mind-blowing. I would say ‘just the beginning.’

Already people are calling out their lists of dead celebrities who they’d like to see resurrected by the new hologram technology. Sinatra. Elvis. Mozart. John Candy….? The Beatles sons’ may not be needed to reanimate the Fab Four anymore—we’ve got holograms!

What most people aren’t quite connecting the dots on yet is the full implication of what we’ve seen. The incredible ease with which groundbreaking technological innovations—Watson, exoplanet detection, augmented reality, nanotechnology, etc—are now streaming into our daily lives may blind us from seeing that the Tupac hologram represents more than just the ability to project the digital likeness of someone for entertainment purposes. It represents the ability of technology to essentially recreate someone.

The company that created the Tupac hologram, the Digital Domain Media Group, did so by piecing together video recordings of Tupac performing during his life. Advanced computer graphics were used to reanimate not only his mannerisms, movements, and voice but smaller details like jewelry and tattoos.

Prominent transhuman scholars and Singularitarians, such as Ray Kurzweil, maintain that a vastly more complex form of simulation will be possible in the future, in which not only our likeness but our subjective existence will be able to be resurrected. This would entail uploading our minds onto software and instantiating them onto an entirely non-biological substrate. Once our physical bodies die our minds would then be projected into a virtual universe, which by then will probably be the village square of choice. In this sense, I guess I’ve answered my initial question of how a dead person could use social media.

We may look back on this year’s Coachella as more than just the birth of a mainstream consumer love affair with holograms. This could go down as an oddly pop culture-friendly watershed moment in transhumanism.

Sale of the Century: Marketing the Singularity With Insane Clown Posse

Guerilla Marketing And The Singularity

Could we find there’s no limit to the reach of guerilla marketing? As we hurl ourselves toward a future of sentient nanobots and global AI networks, what will become of advertising and its sneaky, drug-addled step-brother, marketing? I found myself thinking about this at the 2011 Singularity Summit, when filmmaker Jason Silva (a self-described “techno-optimist transhumanist wunderkind”) presented a film in the vein of his “The Immortalist”, a work of ‘art’ that feels more like Ashton Kutcher describing quantum mechanics at a poetry slam. This film, and in fact Silva’s entire presentation, felt curiously out of place. Smacking of hackneyed Hollywood orchestration, the film wielded roughly the intellectual curiosity of Insane Clown Posse’s “Miracles” video.

Roland Emmerich Likes The Singularity

What makes this guerilla marketing? Well, Jason Silva’s presence there, and his presentation itself, was being filmed by a documentary film crew embedded by director Roland Emmerich, who is in development on a 2013 feature film called Singularity, which has reportedly tapped Ray Kurzweil as its top consultant. My theory is that Jason Silva will play a naïve proponent who cheerleads the positive possibilities behind the singularity before being killed off by either rampant self-replicating nanotechnology or malevolent artificial intelligence. I submit that his short films and his appearance at the Summit will be featured in the film, as a fictional cautionary tale. Speaking of fictional cautionary tales, the fact that Silva is dating Heather Graham, who was present at the Summit and appeared in some of the shots, bodes well for my theory. If it turns out Graham is in Singularity you can be sure Silva’s appearance at the Summit was a cunningly leveraged marketing ploy by Emmerich that will pay off big time in 2013.

Advertising In An Accelerating Future

I found myself shocked that even a community as savvy and future-shocked as the Singularity Institute could let themselves be infiltrated by a Hollywood guerilla marketing team. While some analysts have speculated that the actual Singularity will make human endeavors such as advertising and marketing obsolete—as this staggering schism in history will surely render new industries and modalities that will fundamentally change the nature of capitalism—I have to respectfully disagree. The global economy relies on advertising and consumerism as its bone marrow. In the coming decades I see us likely to descend even further into a technocratic nightmare fueled by a savvy corporatocracy that harvests consumers like an abbatoir to lifestock, using new technologies to vacuum away the noxious fumes.

“Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?”

-Jake Anderson

Occupy the Singularity

Over the weekend I attended the 2011 Singularity Summit in New York to assist my friends, filmmakers Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado, who are shooting a documentary, The Methuselah Generation, about the science of life extension. Along the way, we filmed a lively conversation between life extensionist Aubrey de Grey and economist Robin Hanson about the implications and probability of extending the human lifespan through biotechnology and cryonics. And I was lucky enough meet science fiction author David Brin (creator of the Uplift series), who agreed to give my short story about an AI charter city a shake.

Ray Kurzweil started up the Summit with a presentation about how accelerating computational powers and AI technologies will lead to the Singularity sometime during the 2040′s. Perhaps to his chagrin, Kurweil has become somewhat of a guru for technophiles who wish to herald a “Rapture for the Nerds”. To his credit, Kurzweil fans this fire only with scrupulous research and a fairly remarkable track record for predicting trends in technology. Much has been said in recent years about Kurzweil shaping the timeline of the Singularity to coincide with his lifespan (the man has openly said he does not expect to die), and there is probably some truth to this—the part not in parentheses, that is. But as far as delightful ruminations and thought experiments, backed up by hard science, Kurzweil’s a powerful force in the world of futurism.

Other presenters included Peter Thiel, Sonia Arrison, Jason Silva (who I believe was doing guerilla marketing for a Roland Emmerich 2013 feature about the Singularity—more about this theory in future blog), David Brin, and Ken Jennings, former Jeapordy champion who recently lost to IBM’s Watson. Elizier Yudkowsky presented research pertaining to problems we are encountering in trying to program friendly AI. Max Tegmark attempted to explain why he thinks we’re alone in the universe and why it will be up to humans to allow for the meaningful dissemination of intelligence throughout the universe.

Mix that in with interviewing a 16 year old cryonics customer who fully expects to be amphibious someday, screening the trailer for The Methuselah Generation (parts of which will be in 3D!), and taking an inside tour of the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zucati Park—thanks to my new friend Sage—and I’d have to say my first trip to New York was one big miraculous mind-fuck.

Curiously enough, I saw the same meme presented at both the Singularity Summit and Occupy–”The Beginning is Near”. It seems as though both advocates of transhumanism and protesters against rabid economic inequality share subtle religious undertones: the faith in vaguely defined concepts bringing clarity to a chaotic and unjust world that is in dire need of planetary evolution. Part of me still fears that the Singularity may end up exponentially fueling the very Corporatocracy that Occupy and myself fear is currently strangling the life out of our mental and physical environments. Though, perhaps it’s nothing a few nanobots can’t fix.

-Jake Anderson

Future Movie Review of a movie called Future Dead

Every once in a while a film comes along that is so ground-breaking, so cinematically revolutionary, so awe-inspiringly vital that all you can do is sit back, take a deep breath, and say “wow.” The Future Dead is not one of those films. Despite the fever pitch fanfare and sociological hysteria accompanying the release of the first artificial intelligence-directed feature film, the payload delivered was about as enticing as a sack of mealy apples. If this is the kind of cinema we have to look forward to with the arrival of the Singularity, voices calling for technological relinquishment may have cause to turn up the volume.

The story starts appealingly enough—Sarah Plume (played by a ravishing Janet Ashara), awakens in only her panties and a bra to the sound of a siren echoing through the streets of suburban Chicago. She will come to learn that a secret government project has turned a chunk of the human population into red-eyed brain-hungry derelicts. The president has declared martial law and is evacuating the citizens to an underground facility. It is here she meets intrepid molecular biologist Reese Ryans (Dale Reinhart), who believes the entire situation was actually caused on purpose in order to weed out the weaker genes in the human blood-pool. This idea of evolution-by-zombie-uprising is perhaps the one resonant note in an otherwise quacking duck of a script.

Where Future Dead fails as a horror film—or even as an utterance of creative expression—is it’s auto-populated cache of characters. Even Ashara seems stale and awkward in her role as heroine-turned-investigator. We won’t even address the love scene between Ashara and Reinhart, which was about as steamy as a donkey in a sauna. In his attempt to create compassion for the side characters, director Art 5 seems to have gone embarrassingly overboard. Case in point, the sequence in which Sarah must rescue a room full of blind, handicapped children seems excruciatingly desperate, and not in a way that is beneficial to the narrative. Blind or handicapped alone for one kid would have been enough to build dramatic tension. Both for a room-full of kids is just funny. Which is not to say I laughed. The only time I even cracked a smile during this film (even though there are numerous attempts at lowest common denominator gallows humor) was when one of the 3D holographic zombies stumbled a little too close to an elderly woman in the front row and she swung her purse irritably into the light.

In perhaps Art 5’s only overt reference to the heritage of advanced technologies predicating the film’s release, Janet Ashara’s character is seen wielding a virtual reality cypher that allows her to lead the blind (literally) in a daring escape from the horde of post-humans. There’s little else to imply that this film was helmed by a non-human entity, which is perhaps a call for both shame and a joy to  humankind and artificial intelligence alike.

If you believe the industry gossip rags one of the early conflicts during pre-production of the film centered around whether Art 5 should inhabit an android body or simply reside in studio mainframe, issuing directives through his assistants and producers. Executives opted for the latter, and it is easy to see how the actors’ inability to interact with their director played into a general atmosphere of confusion and disconnect on the set.  To make matters worse, all reports point to Art 5 losing the faith of his crew early in the production.

With Hollywood gripped by paranoia over “the new workforce”, the conversation over humanity’s dying monopoly over creative industries may be overhead by more than a view ticketholders leaving the theater after Future’s credits roll. Now it’s not only digital doubles threatening to fleece jobs from the once recession-proof entertainment industry, but powerfully trained artilects with the very real ability to replace Hollywood’s writers and directors too. We’ll need more than an uncanny valley to stop this uprising, we’re going to need an impossible canyon.

While Art 5 may have attempted to tap into the human fear of reanimating the dead, he may have unwittingly tapped into a much bigger fear. Some critics have said he embraced that fear and that the movie itself can be read as a satire, with a pro-sentient rights agenda built in. Unfortunately, if there was an agenda here it was buried under a million feet of bad film and a production budget equaling some countries GDP. Though the film saved money by using nanotechnology to reconfigure the sets, the final price tag (upwards to a billion dollars by some tallies) doesn’t seem to mash well with the Sentient Filmmakers Union’s assertion just last week that artificial intelligence will restore financial parity to America in a time of economic hardship.

Tall order for a horror movie marketed to the already frightened. But with so much of the film’s box office take supplied by moviegoers who are simply too scared to not see it (lest they offend their AI boss or neighbor), the world’s first feature film written and directed by artificial intelligence is set to make a killing.

This reviewer finds the tongue-in-cheek cuteness of the whole thing a little hackneyed for an event billed as the most significant cinematic movement in history. In this age of exponential irony (when futurist Ray Kurzweil can die just hours before the invention of mind uploading), it seems worth noting that perhaps we should feel uncomfortable with the idea of humans assisting machines on a movie set.

The day a computer sent a human on a mail run was the day irony passed from this earth and was reborn—reanimated, so to speak, from the dead.

-Jake Anderson

eXistenZ: Biological Video Games and New Arousal

Are moviegoers and entertainment seekers bound to gradually incorporate more and more computer technology into their daily life until they are indistinguishable from a mutated piece of software? Well, yes. The transformation has begun: digital technology is everywhere and it mediates everything, work and leisure, from telecommunications to interactive video games. Is a convergence between digital computation and human consciousness banished to the realm of science fiction? Ray Kurzweil answers in the negative.

In his writings he imagines a 21st century world in which quantum computers and nanotechnology change mankind’s proscriptions for the mind and the body. Foreseeing an age of neural implants, he predicted that by 2007 “haptic” interface technology would provide the human mind with alternative sources of sensory input, drawn from virtual reality environments. Well, he was a little off–but still maintains that in the near future there will be computer displays built into eyeglasses and digital “objects”, like movies, video games, and music, distributed as data files through the wireless network. The real world will gradually become fused with virtual reality, and human subjectivity will grow increasingly integrated with technology.

Surely, the moviegoer pleads, somewhere in the cinema’s vast annals of science fiction reels there are forewarnings of such a mind boggling transformation. Indeed, there are many (far more than the following list): Blade Runner, 2001, Alphaville, Tron, Johnny Mnemonic, The Fifth Element, Strange Days, Minority Report, A.I, The Matrix, and existenZ all confront aspects of cyborg culture, or the human-computer interface.

eXistenZ approaches near-future speculation from a different avenue: the video game industry. Directed by David Cronenburg, whose scripts often dabble in bio-technology, the film depicts a world in which video game and virtual reality technologies biologically converge. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Allegra, the “game pod goddess”, a VR game designer and guru for the company Antenna. The first scene introduces Allegra’s latest game, eXistenZ, and situates its first test enclave, whom she will provide with 12 prototype meta-flesh game pods. The game pods– through she which she downloads eXistenZ into each player– look like rubber fetuses, fidgeting and whining. They are virtual animals, “grown from fertilized amphibian eggs stuffed with DNA” and charged by the gameplayer’s body.

Before the test enclave can begin its game, an assailant (whom we will later learn is a ‘Realist’) attacks Allegra. She escapes with Ted Pikul (Jude Law), a marketing trainee, who rushes her to a car and out into the countryside. We are to assume this is part of reality. Soon, Allegra convinces Ted , who has never played one of her games before, to be fitted for a bio-port (it takes some work, for Ted has a phobia of being penetrated). Afterward, they lube up one another’s bio-ports, which pucker excitedly, and insert the umbilical cord-like firewire.

Throughout the film, the process of downloading a game takes on an overtly sexual nature, culminating when Ted performs fellatio on Allegra’s bio-port. eXistenZ imagines a game world of polymorphously altered bodies, in which the bio-port has become both an invitation to play out fictional romances, as well as a new organ, subject to arousal and penetration.

By game’s end, the film, having supposedly disengaged from the interwoven game sub-plot, reveals that the entire test enclave scene was not even grounded in reality, but was actually part of the eXistenZ game. And Allegra is not the true game designer. That was her particular game avatar. In whatever ‘game-reality’ of eXistenZ the film started off in, Allegra and Ted work for the Realist cause, seeking to destroy eXistenZ before it bleeds into reality. As the film draws to a close, the final question– ultimately left unanswered– is whether the characters are still playing the game. The characters can no longer decipher what is real and what is game-based.

Cronnenburg’s sub-textual implication is that the film itself evolves into a version of the game, a blueprint for an interactive virtual reality game. Its gamers (film viewers) are left free to draw their own conclusions as to where fiction ends and reality begins. Of course, just as in the game, Cronnenburg provides “just enough [free will] to make it interesting.”

-Jake Anderson

Benford’s Flies

A few weeks ago I met science fiction author Gregory Benford. My friends Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado were shooting for their documentary about radical life extension, so I tagged along and went with them to Irvine for the interview with Benford regarding the work of his company Genescient. My copy of In the Ocean of Night tucked into my jacket pocket, I relished the opportunity to chew the fat with a major juggernaut of the sci-fi world.

Benford’s biotechnology company, Genescient, researches and develops a new field of science known as Genomics 2.0. More specifically they’ve been testing proprietary gene sequencing on a strain of Drosophila fruit flies, known as the “Methuselah flies.” Three decades of selective breeding has created reproductive longevity and optimal health in these buggers. Benford sees a way to parlay the knowledge gleaned from the fly experiments to fashion lines of pharmacogenomics that may greatly increase the human lifespan. Ultimately Benford envisions a future of advanced gene therapy that allows humans to regularly live to over 150 years-old.

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He’s hardly the only one who believes in life extension. A vast panoply of futurists now maintain it is more than possible that 21^st century humans will use the overlapping bridges of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and mind uploading to not only reverse the effects of aging but to evolve to new, machine-based, substrates of consciousness entirely. Once buoyed by artificial intelligence, these efforts will reach the point at which technology is progressing so exponentially the future will be unpredictable and incomprehensible. This is known as the Singularity.

My friends’ documentary, The Methuselah Generation, will delve headlong into these theories, primarily investigating biotechnological methods to life extension. Other futurists, like economist Robin Hanson and the world renown Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Foundation, will present rousing thought experiments pertaining to the future of human life. The documentary, which the filmmakers are shooting in both 3D and 2D codecs, will also explore the social, economic, judicial, and emotional impacts of extended lifespans. For example, does a person convicted of a life sentence get to live forever in prison, eternally sapping taxpayer dollars? Will poor people be able to come along for the ride, or will the future be a rich-and-privileged only society? Say your friends and family can’t afford the life extension therapies. How appealing is a future in which everyone you know is dead?

Gregory Benford’s interview took place at his home in Irvine. Though I made a conscious effort not to be nosey I couldn’t help but notice that beside his 1975 Nebula Award (one of the two he claimed) lay a Big Bang Theory DVD nestled in it’s Netflix sleeve. I was currently writing a spec script for the show and thought about querying Benford about what he thought about the pop nerd sci sitcom. Instead I asked him about the original Chesley Bonestell paintings bedecking his office.

They sell well now, he said. “Death is good for art sales.”

“I guess life extension is bad for art,” Jason quipped.

During his interview, Benford touched upon the Methuselah flies, biotechnology, intersections between science and science fiction, the death of his first wife, which motivated him to create Genescient in the first place, and the Singularity. With the “Rapture of the nerds” becoming so conversationally popular these days–what with Ray Kurzweil’s Transcendent Man release, Patton Oswalt’s #Etewaf meme in Wired, and Time Magazine’s recent state-of-the-singularity piece–it was simply too tempting not to ask the man who first created the computer virus what he thought the Singularity would be like. The answer, which I’ll remember until the day I die (or, in the event I don’t die, for several hundred years), was rather simple:

A day after the Singularity you won’t be able to read the newspaper.

If that’s the case, the human economy itself will be up for grabs. Who knows how capital will be generated in an age of immortality and abundance? But Genescient will always have its flies. And if the whole biotechnology thing doesn’t work out they can always sell a new line of the fake ice cubes with dead flies in their centers.

After all, we’ll still need practical jokes after the Singularity.

-Jake Anderson

Secret Societies and The New World Order: a comedy

image by A78

To return to conspiracy theories, our discussion wouldn’t be complete without talking about secret societies and their sinister plot to forge a one-world government.

One of the first historically significant secret societies was the Knights Templar, a Western Christian military order who amassed an enormous fortune and used it to wield political influence in Europe in the later Middle Ages. Around 1307 King Philip IV of France, who owed the Templars money, declared the group enemies of the state and eventually burned them at the stake. Conspiracists claim this wasn’t the end, that the Templars, or what remained of them, absconded to England where they created the first Grand Masonic Lodge, new home to what would become one of history’s most notorious secret societies, the Freemasons.

The Freemasons prided themselves on embodying the ideals of the Enlightenment, claiming to be benevolent do-gooders. Yet history has found them hated and feared time and time again. Autocratic kings and fascistic regimes alike condemn their secrecy and subversive ways; Britons gripe about the corrupt political and judicial influence the group has wielded in collusion with the Royal family; religious groups, especially Catholics and evangelical Christians, routinely indict the Masons as being part of a Satanic conspiracy; secular conspiracists say the Freemasons seek to bring about the New World Order.

Inside the Grand Masonic Lodge, circa unknown

They’re even accused of orchestrating the French Revolution. Of course the latter claim is made by catty Frenchmen who still feel awkward about having decapitated whole families in broad daylight.

The Freemasons are often linked together with the Templars, the Jews, and the Illuminati in a worldwide conspiracy. Oh yeah, the Illuminati. Don’t ever forget about them: they watch you while you poop. The secret society of the Illuminated Ones was founded by a mercurial Bavarian named Adam Weishaupt in 1776, an otherwise uneventful year. Not only did this secret society boast the coolest name ever, they sought to abolish the Christian church and overthrow all European monarchies, believing such a purifying sweep to be capable of bringing about happiness for the entire human race. Unfortunately, in 1784 a butt-hurt King Karl Theodor of Bavaria excommunicated both the Freemasons and the Illuminati, cracking down on all secret societies.

If you believe the conspiracies, this wasn’t the end to either group. In fact, they still operate behind the scenes of today’s society, controlling our wars, finances, and toilet paper manufacturing.

In addition to charges of Satanism and promulgation of the New World Order, the aforementioned groups have also been accused of practicing the occult, or black magic. Especially the Jews, so mystifyingly clever with money!

Historical revisionism breaks the seams with these secret societies. For example, if you believe what the conspiracists yell in your ear, there was no other purpose to World War 2 except to enrich the banking cartels, who hedged their bets by funding both sides of the conflict. In fact, throw out everything you know about the dangers of nationalism and ideological extremism: the wars of human history were waged merely to benefit bankers.

Scene—World War 2 reconstruction—whiny, war-torn countries coalesce into a beleaguered League of Nations, which, in 1945, forms the United Nations. Together with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, international regulatory bodies become the backbone of a new generation of conspiracy theories—the consolidation of financial institutions into a one-world government. Add to that the Federal Reserve! Those….b-bastards!

Which then leads us to the Mother Superior of secret societies: the Bilderberg Group. This clandestine cabal of royal leaders, political power brokers, industrial titans, and media magnates meets every 4 years to calibrate the world itinerary—conspiring to orchestrate everything from the war on Iraq to hikes on oil prices to the Trans Texas Corridor. That is, if you believe the conspiracists. But, I mean, members from both the Rockefellar and Rothchild families are perennial attendees. Doesn’t that fact alone prove something insidious is going on? Can I get a witness??

The basic plot behind the New World Order is that a group of elite masterminds is slowly but irrevocably centralizing power by carving the regions of the world into unions: the European Union, another post-WW2 League of Nations creation; the North American Union, consisting of the US, Canada, and Mexico, which is noodling ever closer to finalization; and eventually the Asian and African Unions. The purpose behind these mergers is to break down national borders and make the world’s populations subject to international law. The masterminds behind it all—the Bilderbergs, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Rockefellars and Rothchilds, the CEO’s of Taco Bell and Subway—ultimately seek to reduce the Earth’s population to somewhere around 500 million. This will allow them to more effectively control the infrastructure of the planet.

In the meantime, they must keep the masses preoccupied, ignorant and innocuous. So they brainwash and poison us into subservience by spraying our skies with chemtrails, fluoridizing our water and toothpaste, and wilting our minds with pills and advertising.

Now, let’s face it, mind control on the scale of 6 billion is hard work, so to let off steam once a year the elite masterminds convene at the Bohemian Grove to get drunk, worship Satan, and piss on redwoods. They get to squeeze in some R&R while they take over the world.

Conspiracists who champion the the New World Order theory in its many permutations range from Zeitgeist left to right wing conservative televangelists and libertarians, such as Pat Robertson and Alex Jones. Even futurist Ray Kurzweil buys into the idea of a one-world government, albeit in the form of an advanced technocracy.

Notably, many of the New World Order theories are suspicious of and outright hostile to Jews. The anti-Semitic bent, while certainly owing to mankind’s historical legacy of Jewish oppression, may also have something to do with the heavy religious undertones, as the New World Order seems to represent the inception of the Christian apocalypse. Now, many evangelicals are supportive of Jews, as manifested by their obsessive nurturing of Israel, the latter being ground zero for the second coming of Christ, which, incidentally, might well be the oldest and wackiest conspiracy theory of them all.

-Jake Anderson