Category Archives: Transhuman News

As ever, Paul Kingsnorth's Substack is one of the most important Substacks in the world, and it's not even close. In his latest essay, Kingsnorth talks about how the public controversy over transgenderism is not really about male and female. It's about human nature itself. The beginning of the essay is a reminder about how insane -- honestly, insane -- the public dialogue is around trans today, and how fast it got there. Five years ago, if you had said that a Berkeley law professor would have testified contentiously before Congress that women aren't the only people who give birth, people would have thought you were bonkers. But it happened this week. Excerpts from Kingsnorth's latest:

Back in America - now ground-zero for the abolition of biology - thousands of girls are undergoing double mastectomies, and teenage boys are being given puberty-blocking drugs designed tochemically castrate rapists.Eleven year old girls aretaughtthat if you feel uncomfortable in your body, it means you are transgender - which may explain why, in some classrooms,a quarter of the childrenidentify as precisely that. The concept oftrans kids- a notion that would have been inconceivably baffling to most people even a few years back, and for many still is - is now beingpushedso hard that it starts to look less like the liberation of an oppressed minority than an agenda to reprogramme society with an entirely new conception of the human body - and thus of nature itself.

Kingsnorth gets into The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl Trueman's invaluable book (now out in an abridged, reader-friendly version) about the roots of the West's falling apart, which, as PK points out, began with Trueman trying to answer the question of how it is the phrase "I am a woman trapped in a man's body" came to be meaningful. Kingsnorth:

Meanwhile Nietzsche and Darwin both helped, wittingly or unwittingly, to undermine the foundational assumptions of Western Christianity, thus unmooring the culture from its spiritual roots. Finally, figures such as Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich provided the justification for the removal of sexual taboos which exploded in the sixties counterculture and brought us into the pornified present.

It is this latter development, suggests Trueman, that may prove to be most significant. Identity in the contemporary West is now cored around sex and sexuality - a situation which he believes is arguably unprecedented in history. Trueman identifies Wilhelm Reich and his countercultural successors as prime movers in this culture shift. Sexual liberation, to Reich, represented the latest stage of the ongoing liberation of the individual from both nature and culture.

In his 1936 bookThe Sexual Revolution, Reich argued that sexual repression had been imposed and weaponised by governments and churches for centuries as a means of controlling the masses. Liberation of the individual was thus intimately tied up with liberated sexuality:

The existence of strict moral principles has invariably signified that the biological, and specifically the sexual, needs of man were not being satisfied. Every moral regulation is in itself sex-negating, and all compulsory morality is life-negating. The social revolution has no more important task than finally to enable human beings to realise their full potentialities and find gratification in life.

Sexual freedom is human freedom.

It doesn't take much to move from that point to accepting that one's "true self" is not a self that is given, or a self that is shaped by limits, but a self that is fully chosen, against the bounds presented by nature or society. Transgenderism is just the next phase in humankind's revolt against nature, says Kingsnorth. More:

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What does a transhumanist billionaire [Martine Rothblatt -- RD] who wants to make God have to do with a teenage boy who feels uncomfortable in his body? The answer is that Rothblatt isfar from the only personwho believes that the path to a disembodied, posthuman and post-natural future leads directly through the shattered gender binary. Looked at this way, the question of what pronouns to use, or who should be allowed into which bathroom, suddenly starts to look a lot more momentous than the newspapers are telling us. The unifying driver is the desire fortrans-cendence: the latest stage in what another transhumanist,Kevin Kelly, calls our ongoing liberation from matter.

I dont mean to suggest that the activists currently beavering away to queer the gender binary all have this end in mind, let alone that everyyone who considers themselves to be transgender buys into this worldview, or has even heard about it. But this is the direction of travel. People with gender dysphoria, girls with short hair, boys who play with dolls, people whose sexualities differ from the norm: they are not, in fact, the real issue.

The real issue is that a young generation of hyper-urbanised, always-on young people, increasingly divorced from nature and growing up in a psychologised, inward-looking anticulture, is being led towards the conclusion that biology is a problem to be overcome, that their body is a form of oppression and that the solution to their pain may go beyond a new set of pronouns, or even invasive surgery, towards nanotechnology, cyberconsciousness software and perhaps, ultimately, the end of their physical embodiment altogether.

I strongly urge you to read the whole thing -- and to subscribe. Unless we rise against these elite controllers, the day is coming when these writings will be outlawed.

This is all profoundly Luciferian. You know that, right? You should. Does anybody at your church ever talk about this stuff? If not, why not? If your church isn't talking about this stuff, it is not preparing you for the present that's here and the future that's coming.

Excerpt from:
What Is A Human? - The American Conservative

Okay, this one may not technically be a furry game. If the late Fred Patten were to start this review off, he may have asked something along the lines that if you as a player moves around the world as a cat with a robot companion augmenting their ability to interpret the society around them, is that game actually anthropomorphic? Perhaps its more in line with transhumanism, but in this case more transfelinism, where your feline character is augmented by their technological companion.

And like Adam Jensen of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the cat you play certainly didnt ask for this.

The opening of the game reminded me of Milo and Otis, an old movie of a dog and a cat that end up getting lost in the woods and need to make their way back home. Basically it was the predecessor of Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey. In this case, the unnamed feline protagonist you play as is just catting around with other cats when you find yourself in trouble and are separated from your companions and fall down into a strange lost society of automatons.

You go on your own heros journey through this strange world that has established itself under what appears to be a giant blast shield facility. In order to return to the surface youll need to help your new robot friends, while avoiding the perils of an invasive species that has taken root in the darkness of this underworld.

While the game has been noted to be on the shorter side, it is very much a complete and contained experience. It has moments of tension and balances it well with a cathartic sense of discovery and exploration. I noted while playing that the designer definitely took inspiration from Valve works, and this includes their understanding of Battle Fatigue.

Things can work their way to a bit of an intensity when dealing with the headcrab like creatures that want to chew on your cat hide, but your moments of fleeing and fighting are spaced out where it doesnt become fatiguing.

The world is fun and immersive and the robot characters are interesting. There are certain embellishments that were fun, such as a fully functioning pool table in the bars that you can bat the ball around with your paws. Desks are littered with items to knock down, though disappointingly it doesnt cause frustrations if the owner of said desk watches you knock things off like the true feline you are.

I would recommend this game if you are a curious sort, you know, like a cat. You like to explore places and enjoy the story of a exotic society. If youre the kind that likes a more visceral or reaction based game of skill, you may not enjoy it so much. Take your time and take in the environment around you and youll get the most out of it. Talk to as many folks as you can and do the tasks they ask of you to get the most out of it. Heck, you can even nap around and take in the world as the camera pans out. Because cats like their naps.

Not much to say, its a short game and its mostly the story which I cant go into without spoiling things. Its a nice and contained experience that should you enjoy its premise enough, youll come back to experience it again like a film or a book. Its sometimes refreshing to experience a game that is a contained experience rather than one that expects to be a service it sells to you for the next decade.

To me, I would rather pay 30 bucks for a complete and enjoyable experience even if it is short, then to get it for free and go through a bunch of immersion breaking microtransactions. If that is too pricey for you for a seven hour experience, then you can feel free to wait for the price point to come down.

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Stray - A simple and focused game in a world of games that go astray - Flayrah

St. Louis County Republicans last week surely feel they dodged a bullet with the exit from the November ballot of Katherine Pinner, who was briefly the partys nominee for St. Louis County executive. Whatever issues shed hoped to focus on in her campaign, the real issue would have been the lawsuit she filed against her former employer alleging that its mask mandate was satanic and that getting vaccinated displeases God.

Pinner thus took her place among a long line of loons in elective politics these days. Not all, but most, hail from the rightward side of the political spectrum. Which invites some legitimate questions about what has happened to the once-sober conservative movement.

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Pinner is the 55-year-old political novice who emerged from out of nowhere this month to win the Republican nomination for the countys top political post. Online, she had voiced beliefs consistent with QAnon, the culty crowd that thinks a dark world of all-encompassing conspiracies hums just beyond plain sight a good-versus-evil epic that casts Donald Trump, improbably, as the former.

Pinners posts pointed out that if you replaced each B in President Bidens Build Back Better legislation with 6, youd end up with the mark of the devil. As voters started catching onto this plan of 6uild 6ack 6etter, the democrats quickly changed their slogan, she wrote. (Shes right. I remember the memo from headquarters.)

She suggested that coronavirus vaccines were laced with nanotechnology designed to bar code nine billion people in order to inventory them.

Its all connected, she warned.

Because, yknow, its always all connected.

After winning the Aug. 2 primary, Pinner apparently got some good advice and did some online house cleaning to remove indications that she is, well, crackers. But it seems she couldnt rein in her demons for long. The $1.2 million lawsuit Pinner filed last week against her former employer, the American Association of Orthodontists, for its pandemic policies, alleges that vaccines prompt transhumanism changes in the body that can lead to being barred from Gods graces. And it claims mask-wearing is associated with dehumanization and satanic ritual abuse.

In the latest head-spinning twist, Pinner late Thursday told the county Republican chair she plans to drop out of the race, without explaining why. Its a welcome if undeserved reprieve for the party, which can now put someone less demonstrably loopy on the ballot.

But the question remains: Why do Republicans, here and around America, keep nominating candidates who, if they approached them on the sidewalk, would prompt them to cross the street?

The poster-child for this phenomenon, of course, is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia. Evidence of her psychosis is too voluminous to detail here, so lets leave it at her suggestion that Californias wildfires were caused by space-based lasers controlled by a cabal of Jewish overlords.

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colorado, hasnt achieved quite that level of bonkers, but its not for lack of effort. Among her litany of lunacy was a speech in June declaring, The church is supposed to direct the government Im tired of this separation of church and state junk thats not in the Constitution. (Narrator: Except in the very first words of the very first amendment in the Bill of Rights.)

Republican candidates coming up through this years congressional primaries promise more of this derangement. Even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who has more motive than anyone to get Republicans seated, no matter the details recently worried aloud that his party might fail to take back the Senate because of what he diplomatically called candidate quality issues.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, Pennsylvanias Republican Senate nominee, has pushed such quack remedies that it prompted an essay in the normally staid Scientific American headlined: Dr. Oz Shouldnt Be a Senator or a Doctor. Arizona Republicans have nominated to the Senate 36-year-old Blake Masters, who has praised the anti-tech manifesto of Ted Unabomber Kaczynski. In Georgia, GOP Senate nominee Herschel Walker the former NFL star who has already been in the politically awkward position of having to issue clarifications to the media regarding how many children he has fathered by how many women bashed Bidens new climate law last week by asking, Dont we have enough trees around here?

Then (as always) theres Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who last week lambasted Dr. Anthony Fauci at a fundraising event. Fauci, the federal governments top infectious-disease expert, is retiring in the face of conservative fury over his allegiance to science instead of Trump. But thats not good enough for DeSantis, who told the crowd that someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac. Its worth noting that this elevated rhetoric comes from the man who many Republicans view as the more-sane alternative to Trump for the GOPs 2024 presidential nomination.

Despite the controversy surrounding Pinners brief presence on the St. Louis County ballot, she perhaps shouldnt completely discount a future in the GOP. At the rate its going, todays Republican Party will likely have a place for people like her for a long time to come.

Kevin McDermott is a Post-Dispatch columnist and Editorial Board member. On Twitter: @kevinmcdermott Email: kmcdermott@post-dispatch.com

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McDermott: Pinner may have been crackers, but in today's GOP, she was practically normal - St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Fans eagerly anticipated solo developer Thomas Happs follow-up game after the original Axiom Verges 2015 release for the PlayStation 4 to much critical acclaim. In 2021, Axiom Verge 2 was exclusively made available on the Epic Games Store for the PC and PS4, and it is now available on the PS5 and Steam. Many of the elements that fans of the first Axiom Verge gameplay loved to see in the follow-up, such as the abundance of collectibles, power-ups, and weapons, are present in the sequel. Still, it also differs drastically from the original in several ways.

Happ discussed Axiom Verge 2s new mechanics and influences in an interview. Due to this, despite sharing a Metroidvania history, the sequel takes a unique approach to exploration, fighting, and puzzles.

RELATED: Phantasy Star Online 2 Is Finally Coming To PC, Yet As A Microsoft Store Exclusive

The first Axiom Verge featured a high-concept science fiction story with elements of transhumanism, the fungibility of reality, and a dubious biomechanical alien race. Many of the ideas in Axiom Verge 2 are carried over from its predecessor, but it also finds some new sources of inspiration.

The connecting thread between both games can be found in the writings of Alastair Reynolds, a former astronomer, and physicist who now writes hard sci-fi and space opera. Huge time stretches, nearly omnipresent nanotechnology and space opera themes like those found in the Mass Effect franchise are all present in both Happs and Reynolds novels.

RELATED: Dark Moonlight Is An Upcoming Action Horror Adventure Announced For PC

Although they could be let down, players seeking clarification on Traces story might be. Even though the events of AV2 provide Axiom Verge with new context, it is not a straight sequel to the first games narrative, leaving numerous unsolved questions and room for other tales in the Axiom Verge universe.

The narrative of Axiom Verge 2 includes a tonal shift in terms of storytelling in addition to the new gameplay and influences.

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Axiom Verge 2 The Games Sole Creator, Thomas Happ, Discusses How Science Fiction Impacted Bot... - Happy Gamer

Tycho first heard about crypto back in the Silk Road days, calling the underground marketplace the coolest thing in the world at the time. Now, decidedly legit, hes launching his own Tycho Open Source Community using Polygon NFTs.

Tycho says he bought his first hardware wallet in 2011, but didnt put Bitcoin on it. In an interview with Decrypt, the artistalso known as Scott Hansen, or ISO50 from his blogging days in the aughtsshared the story of how he got into crypto and Web3.

In 2016, he bought Ethereum and vowed to never sell it, just to see what happened with it.

We should get this thing Ethereum, he recalled telling musician Jakub Alexander at the time while on tour. Bitcoin is old school but Ethereum, this things cool.

He then all but forgot about his crypto for years as he kept making music and visual art. Hansen designed all the graphics for his albums and engineered his distinct melodic, ethereal electronic soundmusic which earned him two Grammy nominations.

Our pact was that we should never sell any of it, and see what happens with it, he said of the ETH hes still hodling today.

In 2021, Hansen released some NFTs on Nifty Gateway and OpenSea, which he calls a learning experience. Inspired by the likes of Beeple, Justin Blau (3lau), and artist Reuben Wu, Hansen sees Web3 and crypto as a great fit for his community.

We knew each other from speaking at graphic design conferences back in the day, Hansen said of Beeple, who recently collaborated with Madonna on an NSFW NFT collection.

Tychos communitywhich he says includes VFX artists, musicians, and other graphic designerswas first formed in the blogosphere but has since spread to a token-gated Discord server.

Given its collaborative and professional members, its not unlike the one music producer Illmind is also building through NFTs with his Squad of Knights, which offers holders IRL perks like recording studio space and musical collaboration opportunities.

Hansen sees Web3 as a way for artists to get rid of the middleman of social media.

Web2 social media platforms came around and kind of hijacked this whole thing, Hansen said of how social media changed internet communities. It doesnt really feel like a two-way street anymore.

When he learned about Medallion, a full-service crypto platform, Hansen was intrigued. He said he started working with the company because he found their terms appealing.

What is interesting to me about the Web3 space and leveraging Web3 to this end is, with Patreon, youre just creating a login, Hansen said.

But with his Open Source community, which grants holders access to things like advance album listening parties, and livestreams, the artist owns the data.

Hansen said he always wants the NFTswhich act as access tokensto be free, while additional perks might cost money or crypto in the future.

I think this was the endgame, to create this kind of community space, this Web3 community, Hansen said.

As for whether Hansen will release any music NFTs under his Tycho alias in the future, its something he says hes exploring. Hansen told Decrypt he has a couple releases on the horizon that he might turn into music NFTs, but that he doesnt have concrete plans yet.

When asked why electronic artists like Steve Aoki, 3lau, deadmau5, Dillon Francis, and himself are so open to Web3 compared to artists in other genres, Hansen has a few ideas.

Electronic musicians in general [] have to be somewhat technically adept to even be able to get into it, and I think youre probably pretty interested in technology just as a general concept anyways if youre getting into this kind of music, he said.

As someone with a background in computer science, digital graphic design, and electronic music, Web3 and crypto felt like a natural thing for Hansen to explore.

In his view, Web3 hasnt leveled the playing fieldits still hard for new musicians to find successbut he believes Web3 will eventually become the norm.

Im not looking at it [...] as this like utopian vision that it kind of was being touted as at the beginning, he said. But I definitely think its another tool in the toolkit of artists, so anytime we have any other kind of leverage I think that is going to shift [the] power dynamic in some way.

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Excerpt from:
From Silk Road to NFTs: Why Musician and Artist Tycho Sees Web3 as the Endgame - Decrypt

But today there is a third city affecting the other two. Silicon Valley, this third city, is not governed primarily by reason (it is practically the mark of a great entrepreneur to not be reasonable), nor by the things of the soul (the dominant belief seems to be a form of materialism). It is a place, rather, governed by the creation of value. And a large component of value is utilitywhether something is useful, or is at least perceived as good or beneficial.

I realize that some people in Silicon Valley think of themselves as building rationalist enterprises. Some of them might be. The citys guiding spirit, however, is summed up by investor and podcast host Shane Parris, popular among the Silicon Valley set, when he says: The real test of an idea isnt whether its true, but whether its useful. In other words, utility trumps truth or reason.

Our new centurythe world from 2000 to the present dayis dominated by Silicon Valleys technological influence. This city has produced world-changing products and services (instantaneous search results, next-day delivery of millions of products, constant connectivity to thousands of friends) that create and shape new desires. This new city and the new forces it has unleashed are affecting humanity more than anything Tertullian could have imagined.

And this new city is growing in power. Never before have the questions of Athens and the questions of Jerusalem been mediated to us by such a great variety of things that vie for our attention and our desires. Silicon Valley, this third city, has altered the nature of the problem that Tertullian was wrestling with. The questions of what is true and what is good for the soul are now mostly subordinated to technological progressor, at the very least, the questions of Athens and Jerusalem are now so bound up with this progress that its creating confusion.

It is hard to escape the utilitarian logic of Silicon Valley, and we lie to ourselves when we rationalize our motivations. The most interesting thing about the cryptocurrency craze was the ubiquity of white papersthe framing of every new product in purely rational terms, or the need to present it as a product of Athens. And then there was Dogecoin.

Were not living in a world of pure reason or religious enchantment, but something entirely new.

Reason, religion, and the technology-driven quest to create value at any cost are now interacting in ways we scarcely understand, but which have vast influence over our everyday lives. Our two-decades-long experiment with social media has already shown the extent to which reason, or Athens, is being flooded with so much content that many have referred to it as a post-truth environment. Some social psychologists, like Jonathan Haidt, believe its making us crazy and undermining our democracy. Humanity is at a crossroads. We are trying to reconcile various needsfor rationality, for worship, for productivityand the tension of this pursuit shows up in the things we create. Because the three cities are interacting, we are now living with technology-mediated religion (online church services) and technology-mediated reason (280-character Twitter debates); religiously adopted technology (bitcoin) and religiously observed reason (Covid-19 cathedrals of safety); rational religion (effective altruism) and rational technology (3D-printed assisted-suicide pods).

If Tertullian were alive today, I believe he would ask: What does Athens have to do with Jerusalemand what do either have to do with Silicon Valley? In other words, how do the domains of reason and religion relate to the domain of technological innovation and its financiers in Silicon Valley? If the Enlightenment champion Steven Pinker (a resident of Athens) walked into a bar with a Trappist monk (Jerusalem) and Elon Musk (Silicon Valley) with the goal of solving a problem, would they ever be able to arrive at a consensus?

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The Three-City Problem of Modern Life - WIRED