“…so I says to him, I says, if this is the Singularity, why are all the cyberpunks gray-hairs?”
Every few moments, someone looks around and, after a little deliberation on the state of affairs, expresses the notion: “The world is going crazy.”
I’ve been that person more and more often these days. I hear the term ‘cybershaman’ in reference to the Kinect Hacks and I can actually take it without laughing. More about the world is communicated to me in 140-character snippets than in any kind of sound bite or video clip. ‘Maker’, ‘hacktivist’, ‘grinder’, neologisms which I’m sure Bruce Sterling has fancied more than once, all showing up on the fronts of magazines at the local Barnes & Noble. What can a poor, inexperienced college student do in the face of all this ‘change’? Is this really change, or is it just the global elite gushing over yet more new toys?
First, let me make one thing clear. This is going to be an essay (maybe a series of essays?) from a distinct perspective, and to that end my readers should know a little more about their author. I am indeed a poor college student, surviving off scholarship, family, and what money I can make from odd jobs. My time is spent being a consummate music enthusiast, part-time gamer, subculture dilettante, journalist and, mostly, a bum. I desperately want to be part of all the things I read and consume. My position is not unique. I am unskilled, untrained, unemployed, and yet well educated. Does that even make sense? In middle-upper class America, very much so.
This seems to be, while not a singular condition, a special one. As referenced in the somewhat dated (within four days, your writing can be dated now) Charlie Huston post, ‘young, educated, and unemployed’ is normally a recipe for revolt. Unlike my Middle Eastern counterparts, I don’t have any violence or hunger at hand- so all I really want to do is be part of something. The existing infrastructure doesn’t seem to work to that end, sadly. The same applies to a lot of college students nowadays. Drop-outs too. My home town is full of them. I have never seen a group of people with a greater propensity towards using so much energy on so little. WoW. Facebook. Video games, music, and general complacency. My generation has a strange stagger to it- you can find so many of us doing amazing things with the changes around us, and then entire towns of us working at Wendy’s and playing Call of Duty.
So that’s where I’m writing from. The Community College Fringe.
Having established that, let’s take a look at what we’ll be talking about. Y’know, so everyone is on the same page. This’ll be the stuff you can read frequently on grinding.be, coilhouse.net, WIRED, etc. You get the idea. The available media is telling us that we can be new things. We can be Makers, we can change our cultural agenda, we have places to go. Transhumanism is a possibility, not just a future. Meanwhile, twenty-somethings fail to finish degrees and the only real ‘transhumans’ are either super-rich or distinctly un-rich near outlaws (for the latter, good ol’ lepht is a good example) and we’re wondering how the fuck anyone actual gets to be involved in this revolution.
Let’s explore the list here.
1. What the hell is a Maker?
Well, first of all, there’s the general case, and then there’s some specific cases that get a little detail-oriented. In general, we have the DIY- you know, where you take an item or verb and append -hack to the end of it, something like a cousin or stepbrother of the whole -punk thing. This kind is generally found on MAKE Magazine and can range from the “ooh, that’s a cool doohicky” to the “well… aren’t you clever for fitting that bit to that other bit”. A lot of the cooler stuff has to do with Arduino, which is essentially a microcontroller board meant to make physical computing and making interesting computer-run devices easily accessible to the hobbyist. Essentially, the general case Maker is someone who seizes the means of production and does shit that might show up on Etsy. Right now? Not really social revolution so much as kitschy.
The specific cases get into MakerBots and variations thereon, 3D printing and suchlike, which will have you locked deeply in the bowels of the thingiverse. Also interesting, but also not yet as economically topsy-turvying as some might make it out to be. First barrier of entry? The stock Thing-o-Matic, the basic tool of the trade, is the price of a high-end laptop. Admittedly, that’s what you get for buying retail in a DIY community. Having acquired your basic tool, you also need knowledge of AutoCAD and a large amount of workspace for your printer. It’s all exciting when you read up and watch videos, but in the end… you get to print plastic stuff, which takes a lot of creativity and a lot of enthusiasm to turn into a world-changing movement.
2. Hacktivist? Isn’t that what old people say?
First, emphatic Yes. Second, I use it because at least it’s recognizable. Like ‘cyberpunk’, hacktivist is one of the paleoneologisms- a new-ish word made by old people to describe something that they thought sounded interesting. Like that Fox report on ‘Anonymous’, any piece involving the word ‘hacktivist’ is probably filled with misinformation and intentionally conjures up images of super elite doodz mastering the cyberwaves or what have you. Really what we’re referring to is people that use the internet, more commonly the social network portions of said á la le twittre, for their movement or community. All too often we have people that are working desperately to communicate with the outside world- in Libya, Egypt, in Haiti or India, in Japan- being grouped in with the clearly evil-sounding term ‘hacktivists’.
Now some of us are wondering, where’s the in? What is there to be involved in in this, and how can I do it? Well, it’s a special case. Bruce Sterling, in his interview at SXSW, hit the nail on the head here. ‘Hacktivist’ movements are usually just around six people who are really involved, with a large population who can be generally lumped in as benefiting from their actions. There’s no real movement or organization to join. It really just sometimes happens. WikiLeaks is a good example of this- There’s a small, very mobile and active group being watched by a global audience. The key to these small, active groups is they are also hardcore groups. Tightly knit- very little room to squeeze in an unskilled college undergrad.
3. Grinder
A concept most obviously coined by Warren Ellis. I like it so I use it, though I’m sure it’s not super popular or well-known. Here it really means “practical transhumanist”- someone who works to improve their body using technological means, for a purpose. As mentioned above, this isn’t really… a thing so much as a hobbyist blog-topic and something that WIRED might mentioned once an issue or so. There’s a far-out fringe of people who do it, but really, when the first barrier of entry is some form of experimental surgery, the vast majority of people are out. The closest you can get to a mainstream form of this is the incredibly strong acceptance of technology as an expressive extension of the self- it’s arguable that more of us communicate via smart phone-related tech and navigate with said more than the analog analogues.
Is there anything to DO with this? Other than be kind of interesting and be excited about words like “biohacking” and “Singularity”, it doesn’t seem so. Can you get a job as a transhuman? Is there an employable skillset involved in it? Yes and no, one could say. Yes, being a surgeon or an electrician would be a good skillset to have. However, the DIY/illicit nature of transhumanism usually means being a self-taught surgeon. Does that really sound like something to put on a resumé? Not quite.
Surely there’s more keywords to hit down the line, but the sum up (for the moment) is that this transhumanist/futurist life is a somewhat unassailable enigma. There’s no channel to follow or beaten trail. Is this ‘movement’ a hobby for the elite or an olive branch for the favela chic? It’s at times like this, when there seems to be no valid thing to do, that it’s important to realize: it’s entirely valid to (cribbing off of Ellis here) Do Anything.
For as long as I can keep it going, I’ll be reporting back here on my attempts to do exactly that (or observe those who are).
