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…

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…”

Read more…

(Posted about Bike Blessing on Drunk and In Charge of a Bicycle.)

Thousands of South Korean students, mainly networking through the Internet, immediately took to the streets, followed by a broader uproar.

The uprisings and protest in South Korea are a great example of the power Cyberactivism to affect and infect people (who may or may not have access to technology) with the call to action for social justice.

This is from the introduction to my paper in progress “Cyberactivism and The Courage to Be: Resisting Institutional Power in the Network Society”:

Technologies of resistance are manifold. The mythologies and histories of resistance are transmitted between actors, tribes, nations and networks through technologies as diverse as writing, dancing and uploading. Such means of transmission, information technologies, are foundational components of the cognitive spaces where we describe the indescribable, make the finite infinite and explore and expose the internal. These cognitive spaces are dreamplaces, realms of imagination and spiritual depth, where resistance is born from belief in
social justice and the possibility of a different, or even better, world. From the archaic to the advanced – information technologies are, as Davis (2004) describes them, “technocultural hybrids” (p. 7). These hybrid technologies are the revelatory vision, the pictograph and petroglyph, the smoke, the alphabet, the printing
press, the electronic signal, the telephone, radio, television, fax and satellite.

Along with the rise of networked information communication technologies emerges a potential new depth and scope for dreams of social justice. These are not only new means of resisting power but also new spaces for institutional power; technology is always the trickster, a coyote of the network society.

However, when used as a means to resist institutional power, information technologies can mediate the expression of what Tillich (1959) calls “ultimate concern.” When information technologies are engaged to communicate what Tillich (1959) calls “ultimate meaning” in answer to the “moral demands” of
“ultimate concern,” technology mediated communication becomes a religious practice.

“Many researchers now worry that the enthusiasm for Buddhist practice will run so far ahead of the science that this promising psychological tool could turn into another fad.”

Yes, another 5,000 year old fad. Of course, western “psychotherapy” was around long before that… Whatever you want to believe. The article is particularly troubling for it’s use of the word Buddha and phrase Buddha-like as a synonym for about 5 completely unrelated concepts. The author even goes so far as to describe what “Buddhist meditation” is “useful” for, i.e. what it can treat. Yes, a prescription for meditation, but only until you feel better…

http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/

Discerning Brute is right on here - it’s the trend toward cruelty based shock art that is so disturbing. Let’s modify the old art school adage to reflect this trend:

“If you can’t do it well, do it big.
If you can’t do it big do it red.
If you can’t do it red, do it in multiples.
If you can’t do it in multiples, add animal cruelty for shock value and you’ll be right on your way to some Biennial or another”.

“Natural Charcoal”

I contributed a little story about a food producer and their sugar refinery to The Discerning Brute. You can read it here.

I verified that the Domino refinery in question does not use cow bones. I read something recently that claimed it takes something like 7,800 cows to produce the ‘bone char’ for one industrial sugar filter. The sugar industry calls it “Natural Charcoal.” Right, like “Healthy Forests” and “No Child Left Behind.”

From: Susan Norrell
Date: Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 8:48 AM
Subject: RE: Industrial products

Hello Michael,

Our Yonkers refinery has never used natural charcoal filter (also known
to some as the bone char). They use a carbon filter process. If you
have any other questions, feel free to email me.

Regards,

Sue Norrell
Consumer Affairs
Domino Foods

We are entering the era of total surveillance. Every movement will soon be tracked - every cell phone call will enable location tracking - with clear line of sight, this technology will mean that you can be watched, from space, by your government.

Every time we tag a photo in facebook, we’re contributing to the facial recognition database. And every time we walk down the street our faces are captured by CCTV. Every book we list on myspace is entered into the matrix and one day, soon - perhaps you will have engaged in the requisite activities to be considered an enemy.

Will we see a movement toward wearing hoods and masks in public at all times? And will there be an attempt to regulate this? What if the hoods are worn for religious reasons? Will the face covering practice of fundamentalist Islam become the last refuge of the revolutionaries?

It’s the feeling you get when you see it slipping. Gizmodo describes it as “It feels so “animal” that I almost feel bad when they hit it to demonstrate how it regains balance on its own.”

God’s Eye View (Ark)

“The chicken scratch of Sumerian bureaucrats had blossomed into an oracular delivery mechanism for the Word of God, one powerful enough to trigger the speck of essence within — and to prove that humble infotech may, in time, boot up the sacred self.” Pg 42

Related earlier section: “In Preface to Plato, the scholar Eric A. Havelock argues that the realm of the forms may also have revealed itself to Plato through the alphabet. Havelock points out that the etymological root of the term idea, which also gives us the word video, has a visual connotation.” Pg 34

Etymology of “idea” is idein, Greek: to see.
So, what if you can ’show’ more directly? Do video and image have a greater ability to “boot up the sacred self?”

Both quotes from TechGnosis.

The full paragraph:

“How do we reconcile the rationalism of utopian vision with the obvious irrationalism of postmodernism generally, and of cyberpunk/cyberfiction in particular? Gibson’s vision of cyberspace is dystopian, despite its desultory sensuality. How did American culture move so quickly from a postmodern vision of hell to a celebration of this technology not-yet-invented? It seems self-evident that utopian longings are part of a larger and more complex perception of massive change made imminent by a technological breakthrough. Every time culture succeeds in revolutionizing its cybernetic technologies, in massively widening the bandwidth of its thought-tech, it invites the creation of new gods. The invention of the phonological alphabet in the South Sinai in the fifteenth century b.c.e. almost certainly made the idea of an abstract monotheistic God thinkable for the first time. But along with such revolution comes inevitable apocalyptism, with its duality New World/End of the World. In other words, the utopianism of cyberspace predictions can only be understood as an attempt to tame, to rationalize, a more massively transcendent perception of metaphysical intrusion, the collision of the irrational future with the present.”

Porush, David
Hacking the Brainstem: Postmodern Metaphysics and Stephenson’s SnowCrash
Configurations - Volume 2, Number 3, Fall 1994, pp. 537-571

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.

The ‘’silent protest” began Monday and continued Tuesday, even when state television showed pictures of the Gambari-Than Shwe meeting, which included Deputy Senior Gen. Maung Aye, the No. 2 leader, and two other top generals.”

From The New York Times

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

Rev. Yearwood asked the listeners to go to youtube and watch the following video of Captiol police tackling him when he tried to enter the General BetrayUs testimony along with other activists.

Of course this is absurd and I can’t even begin to imagine who is deciding what would “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize” and how to apply these criteria. Surely the entire Jewish and Christian Bible must be excluded - or is the Bureau of Prisons just assuming that there is no advocating or discriminatory content in the Bible. If so, they clearly haven’t read it. The Koran and the Bible both advocate violence in parts and peace in others. And so I can only conclude that this is an attempt to remove material that might inspire prisoners to rise up against the illegal and immoral system that has locked them up.

I wonder how much access to the internet prisoners have, if any. Could a case be made that access to cyberspace is a right for prisoners just as occasional access to the outdoors is?

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.

(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?)

At the Humanoid Robotics Group at M.I.T., a robot’s “humanoid” qualities can include fallibility and whininess as much as physical traits like head, arms and torso. This is where our cultural images of robots as superhumans run headlong into the reality of motors, actuators and cold computer code.

the article…

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

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 23 paired volumes of your own genetic blueprint (plus your mitochondrial DNA), bringing you personal insight into ancestry, genealogy, and inherited traits.”

To make sense of our own genetic information. To see what the genotype under the phenotype is. Is this like choosing “view source” on your web browser? To those who wonder about the ‘great web developer in the sky’ and its intentions for them, viewing that source code might come as a shock. Even with the passage of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, how long will it be before a religious idea like “chosen people” becomes something verifiable through the revelation of ‘fact’?

“[this database adheres to] our perspective that the Internet is a fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy of swords into ploughshares”

The text referenced is: “And He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” (Isaih 2:4, Neviim, The Tanakh)

“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?”

(more…)

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.

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

“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.

THIMPHU, Bhutan — “Explore the World,” promised the signboard outside.

Inside Norling Cyberworld, in a second-floor corner of a busy shopping arcade, Dorji Wangchuk rolled up the sleeve of his Puma sweatshirt and offered a glimpse of his worldly explorations. Inscribed in blue-black ink on the pale inside of his left forearm was the image of a dragon, a tattoo that he had drawn himself, with instructions from the Internet.

…
(more…)

Ubiquitous computing (or “ubicomp”) is a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities. As opposed to the desktop paradigm, in which a single user consciously engages a single device for a specialized purpose, someone “using” ubiquitous computing engages many computational devices and systems simultaneously, in the course of ordinary activities, and may not necessarily even be aware that they are doing so.

From Wikipedia

One of the most compelling snares is the use of the term metaphor to describe a correspondence between what the users see on the screen and how they should think about what they are manipulating … There are clear connotations to the stage, theatrics, magic—all of which give much stronger hints as to the direction to be followed. For example, the screen as ‘paper to be marked on’ is a metaphor that suggests pencils, brushes, and typewriting….Should we transfer the paper metaphor so perfectly that the screen is as hard as paper to erase and change? Clearly not. If it is to be like magical paper, then it is the magical part that is all important…
—Alan Kay, “User Interface: A Personal View“