The NYT writes about the decline of buddhism in Japan. Within the article is an aside about buddhist priests for hire via the internet:

It was partly to dispel this bad image that Kazuma Hayashi, 41, a Buddhist priest without a temple of his own, said he founded a company, Obohsan.com (obohsan means priest), three years ago in a Tokyo suburb. The company dispatches freelance Buddhist priests to funerals and other services, cutting out funeral homes and other middlemen.

Prices, which are at least a third lower than the average, are listed clearly on the company’s Web site. A 10 percent discount is available for members.

“We even give out receipts,” Mr. Hayashi said.

Mr. Hayashi argued that instead of divorcing Japanese Buddhism further from its spiritual roots, his business attracted more people with its lower prices. The highest-ranking posthumous name went for about $1,500, a rock-bottom price.

“I know that, originally, that’s not what Buddhism was about,” Mr. Hayashi said of the top name. “But it’s a brand that our customers choose. Some really want it, so that means there’s a strong desire there, and we have to respond to it.”

After apologizing for straying from Buddhism’s ideals, Mr. Hayashi said he offered his customers the highest-ranking name, albeit with a warning: “In short, that this is different from going to a shop in town and buying a handbag, you know, a Gucci bag.” Read more…

Interview with Davis during Loris Gréaud’s Cellar Door installation.

I want to watch A&E’s remake of Andromeda Strain… However, the digital cable god won’t give it to me. Why is this? I keep thinking it’s somehow related to the rain.

Is this the moment when technology becomes a part of our religious environment? When we suspect it is affected by numinous forces like weather and the hand of nature or gods or weather systems? Why would my digital cable be at all affected by the weather? Why not? I’m affected by the weather.

The little arrows on the screen chase one another round and round never ending or beginning…the screen says “Your program is now being accessed and will begin shortly.” But nothing happens. There is a large eye in the graphic behind the spinning arrows, an eye with a spiral in it. The whole thing concludes with the phrase:

“One moment please…”

Take a look at Gregory Donovan’s brilliant research blog - he’s re-launched. What a code master!

Devices are always watching us - and feeding data into the network. This OS X screensaver by Michael Zoellner searches for CCTV feeds and displays them. Very eerie.

ZDnet posts an article called “Mac OS X Leopard installation as a spiritual practice“. I’m engaging in that practice right now - preparing my various Macs for the upgrade, the archive and install and the clean install. But it’s more than the installation that is spiritual.

To retrieve the software, I walked through the rain to wait in line at the Apple Store on 59th and 5th. A huge illuminated glass cube rising out of the midtown/central park architecture, the flagship Apple store can only be described as a temple.

After waiting in line, I was greeted by a collection of Apple store ‘evangelists’ standing by the entrance cheering and clapping for us. Upon entering the store, I was handed a “Leopard” t-shirt and encouraged to use the “Leopard only” purchasing line. Holographic DVD box in hand, I proceeded down a long path with ropes on either side to a special cashier who took my electronic form of payment for this virtual environment in a box I have been religiously anticipating for months…

The operating system on the hill… has arrived.

Dr. Mala Htun discusses the crucial role that electronic communication plays in the social justice movement for Burma.

riseup.net has a great collection of tech activism listserves.

Highlights include:

nomesh-tech New Orleans Mesh Networking - Technical Support & Discussion

farma Renewable energy sources campaign for the Zapatista communities

leftistpython Leftist and combative object oriented programming

fpl-fbv Forum on the Patenting of Life - Forum sur le brevetage du vivant

vgranjeros List for the farmers who tend the fields of the vfarm

techne technology and democracy

Action by the Iraq Veterans Against the War

In his research blog, Gregory Donovan constructs a definition of his neologism “cyberenvironmentalism.” Donovan writes that “cyberenvironmentalism aims to develop ecologically informed environmental practice for the information age through interdisciplinary examination of cyborg ecology.” He further defines his new field as follows: “Pragmatic in its approach, constructive forms of relationship between cyborg and cyberenvironment are negotiated and re-negotiated through sustained scientific research.”

I propose that the current threats to human rights and social justice in cyberspace warrant not only a “pragmatic approach…negotiated and re-negotiated through sustained scientific research” as Donovan proposes but also a revolutionary theory as David Harvey demands, one “validated through revolutionary practice.”

This revolutionary practice is cyberenvironmental activism. Cyberenvironmental activism is the pursuit of social justice within cyberspaces using not only the tools of theory but also drawing on the rich history of radical actions outside of cyberenvironments (by groups such as the SDS, the Weathermen, FARC, The Black Panther Party, etc.) Online protesting brings to mind mobilization through list-serves and email or web sites such as Meetup or MoveOn, but these are usually just a method of communicating about a solidspace action to prepare for the ‘real’ protest, when the people assemble in a physical space together. But there is an arsenal of tools available to the online online-radical to engage the cyberenvironment.

Just as is true with the solidspace equivalents, many of the methods used in this sort of ‘virtual protesting’ are considered acts of terrorism or crime by authoritarian structures. (It is worth noting that most web sites and cyberspaces have ‘free speech zones’ where expression of certain kinds is allowed, the actions described here deny the restriction of those spaces and reclaim the cyberspace as a public forum.) The tools of cyberenvironmental activism include:

Civil Disobedience: refusal to participate in online activities, refusal to follow unjust rules online.

Sit-ins, aka “denial-of-service-attack”: visiting and refreshing a site en mass to the point of crashing it or preventing other visitors from accessing the site.

Graffiti: hacking sites and posting political messages.

Boycott, aka the “auction attack”: negative rating attacks on cybermarketplace sellers to prevent commerce.

Letter Writing: Email flooding, sending more email than the recipients inbox can handle.

What distinguishes cyberenvironmental activism from cyberenvironmentalism? Cyber-Activism does not rely on scientific research or a pragmatic approach, but rather on that aspect of the human spirit that demands immediate action when we witness injustice. Cyberenvironmentalism might serve to “agitate, educate and organize,” while Cyber-Activism takes direct ‘violent’ or ‘non-violent’ action against the barriers to social justice in cyberspace.

Why does the human spirit demand we engage in cyberenvironmental activism? Religion. Socialist theologian Paul Tillich defines Religion as that which is ultimate, infinite and unconditional in our spiritual life; ultimate concern. Tillich proposes this ultimate concern manifests as the unconditional seriousness of the moral demand. Activism is a religious practice, we engage in activism because we MUST. The “schizophrenic split” between theologians and scientists that Tillich examines can be a source of creative potential - within that chaotic area exists an opportunity for revolution.

Reading William Gibson’s blog and thinking about his discussion of ATMs as part of his extended nervous system, I decided to start mapping mine. I began with the interface I spend most of the day with, my Mac - then to the WiFi router, then the cable modem, then the cloud, then the servers and the ‘others’. There’s so much more to add… And strange that it really did come out looking so hierarchical - I was expecting it to be more rhizomatic. Perhaps I’m not representing it correctly - or maybe that which was born of ARPANET actually IS more hierarchical than it seems. After all, the military designed it…

(If you visit Gibson’s blog - take note of the strange structure of the interactivity - rather than allowing comments on the blog, there is a separate message board which he clearly reads and comments on in his blog. Any thoughts on this?)

How much storage do you have on you right now?

This is something I’ve always noticed with the change from a generation who couldn’t imagine how they would sound recorded or look on film to the current generation who live as though they are on television - the hyper-mediated state of mind.

Simon Haiduk created this “interactive permaculture learning module” reflecting the work of GaiaCraft.

In 2005, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori issued a brief article, On Uncanny Valley, which proposes an amendment to his original graph of familiarity vs. appearance (human likeness). He adds “something more attractive and amiable than human beings in the further right-hand side of the valley.” I’ve created this figure as a sketch of this expanded notion of Mori’s valley.

I’ve been working on completing a paper I began in Jenna Tiitsman’s Cinema and Religion course at Hunter College which explores the numinous potential of replicants in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner.

Cyborgs challenge the praxis that has traditionally divided human and machine (and companion/slave, animal/food, creator/creation, etc.). In doing so, they threaten to disrupt those “certain dualisms” that Donna Haraway suggests “have been persistent in Western traditions.” Like cyborgs, the replicants of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner are situated outside the human/machine polarity. By threatening binary systems and insisting on an identity of plurality, replicants and cyborgs are granted access to a sanctuary in which they can interface with the numinous place of origin; the place Jenna Tiitsman describes as the chaotic “territory of creation.”

The following paper in progress (and this research blog) is a journey of exploration to map the cyborg sanctuaries in that chaotic territory of Tiitsman’s “creative becoming.” To situate these emergent conceptual-crossroads within more familiar cognitive spaces with supernatural access, I refer to them as the temples of cyborgism.

Download a draft of the paper here: Mapping the Temples of Cyborgism

The following quote from Tiitsman’s article on destabilized spectatorship and the creative potential of chaos in Blade Runner suggests another cognitive space in which a Temple of Cyborgism emerges.

“Replicant identity can only be unequivocally determined by a test of involuntary pupil dilation in emotional response. However the viability of this test is thrown in to question as the replicants spontaneously develop human emotions on their own after a few years. For the genetic designers, this ability signals a facet of replicant development exceeding the control of their design — the emerging life of the robotic beast.”

As Tiitsman points out, the genetic designers see the development of ‘their creation’ exceeding the control, or original intention of their design. This is clearly a similar reaction to that seen in human parents when their children pursue a path that diverges from the expected. However, in this case, the replicants aren’t ‘getting a piercing’ they are getting ‘humanness,’ rising to a ‘higher’ level of sentience. This suggests they are a kind of emergent life form, they are coalescing in the way that microbial life may have become more than it was by “adding the uniqueness” of other life forms to its own (the quotes here indicate the borrowing of this phrase from Roddenberry’s ‘Borg’ concept).

Emergent, yes, but what kind of beast is this? The beast that swims the moat around the “territory of creation?”

continue reading "Emergent Robotic ‘Beast’"

O’Leary (1996) as quoted by Højsgaard & Warburg in “Religion and Cyberspace”

As we move from text-based transmissions into an era where the graphic user interface becomes the standard, and new generations of programs such as Netscape are developed which allow the transmission of images and music along with words, we can predict that [the available resources of] online religion will [expand beyond text to include] iconography, image, music, and sound — if not taste and smell…Surely computer rituals will be devised which exploit the new technologies to maximum symbolic effect.

Quote from metacritical.com:

Jesus is a computer.
Transubstantiation via silicon wafer.
We have declared the cyborg religion.
Mammon is God, born this day.

From a summary of the preceedings of the 2000 AAR meeting: “Models of God in Religion and Science”

“Cyborg religion” also came up at a Religion and the Social Sciences section devoted to, “The Moral Life of Cyborgs: Issues in Forging, Navigating, and Resisting Virtual Communities.” A foursome from Union Theological Seminary, including Rachel A. R. Bundang, Nancie Erhard, Davina C. Lopez, and Aana Marie Vigen, offered a fascinating exploration into this cutting-edge topic.

This Union Theological Seminary group argued that virtual technologies are profoundly re-mapping “the actual way in which human beings relate within the world.” Presenters situated cyberspace within the larger political-economic-cultural context of an emergent visual age. Four themes were discussed: (1) the impact of visual images upon people, (2) the impact of cyberspace upon ecological relationships in the non-human world, (3) issues of morality as they are related to the body and sacred community of life, and (4) the relationship between the proliferation of information technologies and changes in patterns of human labor within the internet economy.