Technological Metastasization

CELL PHONES CAUSE CANCER! Or not. Or maybe.

10 Year Cell Phone/Cancer study is inconclusive.

The interesting thing about this is not whether or not cell phones are putting the daemon-seed in your dome-piece, the interesting thing is that it takes TEN YEARS to get an inconclusive study.

What if there was some amazing new piece of technology that just happened to be latently deadly? What if the new retina-control i-EYE-Pads cause measurable blindness over, say, fifteen years of use? That's fifteen years of an amazingly influential piece of technology burrowing into our culture, economy, and our-very-structure-of-language, before we realize we are all going to be blind in another five? Technology moves at such a fast pace, we could kill ourselves off with a hype new gizmo before we can even diagnose ourselves.

And where the hell do you find a control group for this sort of study, anyway? Where do you find a measurable slice of humanity that doesn't use cell phones or isn't around cell phone use for a significant amount of years? Not the third world. The higher Andes? Monks in Tibet? People who have lifestyles and nutrition and genetics totally different from us? Is such a study even possible?

Or is technology so enmeshed into our lives, that it is not even separable from our body systems? Is this like, wondering if having blonde hair makes you live longer, but more like wondering if walking upright makes you live longer? If consciousness drives you crazy? How can we tell if this evolutionary mutation is a good one, or a bad one? Or is there no way to tell?

Can we not predict our health, if we don't even know what product Apple is going to release within a year? What happens to our deductive modeling of our future based on empirical evidence? What happens to science, as progress? Is science just a symbol of our own mutation? Is science a new virus, introducing some unimaginable majority of our current DNA, and therefore, distorting our destiny-as-species based on such anti-progress economics like infection and global pandemics, rather than the scientific method ?

Hari Seldon, where are you?

Why Would ANYONE Read Science Fiction?

If you've read more that two of my posts, you will probably have encountered me talking about science-fiction (SF, as I've recently discovered is the appropriate abbreviation, not Sci-Fi).

So what's up with SF, anyway? Nerdy, yes; bizarre, sometimes; misunderstood; probably.

It's not just that I'm defending the particular genre I find appealing (although that is the case). I think there is a lot more to it than most conceptions of the genre, and also a lot more to it than the majority of the genre probably offers in literary value.

The key to SF is a lot more than the original idea of "science" fiction connotes. The first proto-science-fiction literature speculated as to future possibilities in scientific technology. Hence the genre's name, and the casual expectations for the possibilities of the literature. Scientific concepts, technology, space, and the future all play a role; this is not an unliked group of concepts either. The myriad Star Trek and Star Wars novels show that if you simply work within a concept of those four aspects, you can probably find someone to read the book.

But the key to my simplistic description is "speculative". A wider genrefication of literature is Speculative Literature, and maybe this is more ideal for what I think crucial to the concept of SF. This breaks it out of the box of "rockets, aliens, and lasers," and makes it possible to explore really interesting ideas through the media of literature.

As the tried-and-true SF writer Philip K. Dick put it: "What an sf story really requires is the initial premise which cuts it off entirely from our present world. This break must be made in the reading of, and the writing of, all good fiction... a made up world must be presented."

With most literature, the break is fairly simple: this story is fictional--any similarity between any of these characters and events to anything real is not intended and entirely inconsequential. This allows the reader to be drawn into the events as the reader and not try and relate the story to his/her understanding of the real world, as a history or science text would explicitly seek to do.

But with SF, the initial premise is much more conceptual. The so-called "hard" SF deals with the effects of scientific conceptual premises, like time travel, robotics, etc. But "soft" SF can include any sort of conceptual "break" as a premise, often taking on academic, yet more directly applicable themes like political systems, social orders, and human nature. This makes the literature very powerful, because in the same way that Jules Verne started us thinking and dreaming of flight to the moon and submarines, authors like Ursula K. Le Guin may start us dreaming of actually functioning anarchistic/communistic societies, or at any rate, what a unified planetary society might be like. Are we necessarily close to any of these speculative universes? Not necessarily. But, before anything is made someone must think and speculate about it.

This is not to say that I think all SF is political, or has an ethical compunction to be political. But it is the practice of thinking in this way, and reading and writing in this way, that is really progressive. No action or theory is necessarily progressive unless it is a creative approach that differs from current paradigms.

But it's also fun, and doesn't always have to be "thinking ahead". Some creativity takes the form of daydreaming or fantasies, and is simply self-satisfying. That's why I like cartoon SF shows.

But when I write, I always think about this concept of Speculative Fiction, and it plays very heavily in what I think literature in general is about.

Web TV, Now For Real

It's a lovely day in the Interdome when something that wasn't working then gets updating and becomes pretty sweet. You might even call it progress.

Joost let me beta-test their program, so I might as well treat them with a positive review. Because now it deserves one.

I bounced into the beta test at 0.9, and it was so slow as to be more aggrevating that entertaining. A lot of jitters. But now I'm watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force at TV quality in a window while I'm writing this. It works a lot better, even though I'm running wireless with a not very good connection. There are still some stutters when I try and run the widgets (there are built in widgets for chatting, instant messaging, etc.) and scan other channels while watching. But I'm sure progress will only continue.

There are twenty-seven channels, with on demand programming. Obviously not everything that the channels really offer, but the program still isn't officially released. Still, more than enough to keep my brain occupied.

Now I'm watching sexual hip thrusts in Eric Prydz's Music Video "Call on Me". So sexual! So aerobic! I can only imagine this takes off big. I'm excited about it, not only because I can waste time with it, but because I'm pretty sure it will eventually put an end to cable, because it's free! Considering I don't have these channels on my regular TV, I'm pretty down with the program.

I guess you can't download it freely yet, but you can invite friends. If you want to be my friend, you can get invited! Let me know. Now I'm watching National Geographic videos. Long live brainless entertainment.