Category Archives: Transhuman News

A vaccination volunteer is vaccinating a frontline worker during COVID-19 vaccine dry run. COVID-19 vaccine dry run is happening in all over west Bengal with three sites in Kolkata, 69 in West Bengal. (Photo by Dipayan Bose / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

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When Dr. Carrie Madej took the stage at the MAGA Freedom Rally D.C. on Wednesday, police sirens wailed as pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol. The presidents guest speaker told the crowd, a mix of QAnon supporters and far-right MAGA fans, her thoughts on the COVID vaccine: that it contains bio-sensing nanomachines designed to alter human DNA and control peoples minds.

This is not your normal flu vaccine, Madej said. This is something totally different. This is a witches brew. Ive never seen anything like this in science or medicine.

Theres many ways it can be taken up into our genome, she continued. So when this gets into the genome, if its permanent, guess what? You, as a human, can be patented and ownedlook it up!

Madej describes herself as an osteopathic doctor and a child of God and a believer in Jesus Christ. Shes also a QAnon believer who questions why COVID-19 has been a bigger story than what she describes as a global elite pedophile ring and reposts byzantine diagrams supposedly revealing Bill Gates as the mastermind behind the global pandemic.

This past summer, she was convinced that a long-debunked website advertising the Cannibal Club restaurant in Los Angeles was in fact a real eatery serving human flesh. We taste like pork, she tweeted. Dear Godhelp us change this world for the better!

To many, Madej successfully passes herself off as a medical expert, but she operates at the intersection of QAnon conspiracy theories and anti-vaxxer science, with a dollop of Christian fundamentalism and Trump-worship added to the mix. Yet the unfounded ideas she promotesthat coronavirus vaccines are part of a global effort to change the human genome and control the populationare spreading and have already had an effect. Last month, a pharmacist attempted to destroy 500 doses of Modernas COVID vaccines because he believed they were going to change peoples DNA.

This is not your normal flu vaccine. This is something totally different. This is a witches brew. Ive never seen anything like this in science or medicine.

The specter of DNA-altering vaccines didnt originate with Madej, but shes helped popularize it to the extent that its now just taken as a given in many right-wing spheres, without the need for citation or proof. While Madej has been banned from YouTube, she still has tens of thousands of followers across other social media, like Twitter, Instagram, and Parler. And thousands more heard her unfounded conspiracies on Wednesday when she spoke as a featured guest at the Freedom Rally, alongside the president and several other big names on Team Trump.

Guys, listen, that is the ulterior motive, that is one of the agendas of this: the ultimate enslavement of humanity, she said, Wake up! Wake up! Do your due diligence. Look this up. This is real.

Needless to say, the idea that a coronavirus vaccine contains spying, mind-controlling nanomachines has been debunked. They do not affect or interact with our DNA in any way, the CDC writes, in no uncertain terms, about the shots.

Madej says she started studying vaccines as a teenager, when she first came to doubt the tetanus vaccine. (She claims to be unable to find anyone who ever actually died from tetanus.) After earning her doctorate of osteopathic medicine from the Kansas City University of Medical Biosciences, she went on to practice in Georgia.

She currently lives in the Dominican Republic, she says, because its not safe for whistleblowers like her in the United Statesher long-standing skepticism about vaccines, after all, is dangerous knowledge when elites are pushing coronavirus vaccinations for their own agenda.

Madej first began sounding the alarm about supposed gene-altering vaccines in June on YouTube. The site eventually pulled her video for being misleading and blocked her account, but you can still easily find her video titled Human 2.0 Warning - Doctor Issues Wake Up Call to the World.

Wearing a labcoat and a cross around her neck, Madej appears as a talking head on a soft blue backdrop. Over the course of 20 minutes, she focuses on Modernas vaccine, which uses messenger ribonucleic acid, or mRNA, to produce an immune response in humans. Although theyve been researched for decades, COVID-19 vaccines are the first mRNA vaccines approved by the FDA.

Most people are familiar with injecting a piece of weakened or inactivated germ into the body for inoculation, like the flu vaccine. The COVID vaccines work differently: They contain a piece of the coronavirus mRNA that, once inside the body, provokes cells to produce a distinctive (but harmless) part of the virusa spike protein. The immune system, in turn, learns to defend against this protein, thereby creating antibodies that can protect from actual COVID infection.

Madej claims that process changes a recipients DNA, making them a genetically modified organism thats subject to patent law. Further, she contends, the vaccines use nanotechnologya word that simply describes extremely small tools but is often associated with tiny computers. Those tiny computers, she claims, can be used to both monitor everything happening inside our bodies and possibly remote-control our thoughts and emotions.

Although the COVID vaccines do use nanotechnology, its not computersits simply extremely small droplets that carry the mRNA into the body. Theres no massive DNA reprogramming and nanobot-insertion program designed as a part of a transhumanist push to "Human 2.0.

Nevertheless, Madejs story found an audienceand continues to. As of late July, her YouTube video had 300,000 views, according to BBC, and archives suggest her videos were still available under her name on the platform in late August, with tens of thousands of subscribers and millions of views. Even now, supporters try to sneak her videos past YouTubes safeguards.

The idea that the COVID vaccine will alter a recipient's DNA even recently led to criminal charges. Last month, Steven Brandenburg, a 46-year-old pharmacist from Grafton, Wisconsin, attempted to destroy more than 500 doses of coronavirus vaccine because he reportedly thought it could hurt people by changing their DNA," according to the detective who took his probable cause statement. Its unclear whether Brandenburg was directly exposed to Madejs content, but it doesnt matterher ideas are in the ether now, carried on the winds of right-wing social platforms and media.

Since being banned from YouTube, Madej has made her home on BitChute, where she has more than 2,000 subscribers. Shes on Parler, too, with 2,800 followers; she follows lawyer and Trump conspiracist Lin Wood, the Daily Caller, Breitbart, Ron and Rand Paul, and Bongino Report. And on Twitter, she emphasizes her medical credentials (her Twitter handle is @DrMadej and her avatar features her with a stethoscope around her neck) while encouraging her more than 26,000 followers to resist vaccination.

Our genome should not be played with like a Fisher-Price playset, she tweeted on Tuesday. Say No to being in these dangerous experiments. Say No to the Va$$i&e.

Her Instagram account with 6,500 followers is a constant feed of vaccine conspiracy theories. Alongside one meme showing The Munsters, with one normal, smiling blonde family member, is the caption, That one family member who refused the vaccine. She also once posted a screenshot of the CDCs tongue-in-cheek guide to zombie preparedness and asked with no apparent irony, Why is this on the CDC website?

Of course, Madej has chatted with Alex Jones, still the semi-tarnished king of conspiracy mongering, and he opened his interview by saluting her for her courage. Farther afield, shes appeared on the podcast of anti-vaxxer Robyn Openshaw. She joined Christian preacher Bradlee Dean, whom Popular Information calls a super-spreader of health misinformation, on Facebook Live, likely violating any number of Facebook rules while telling viewers that the coronavirus vaccine is also causing HIV. Bradlee Dean has almost 800,000 followers.

Madej is also a mutual Twitter follower of Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, the radical anti-vaxxer who has called out the impending transhumanist plot, saying Bill Gates is behind it all and is working toward blocking out the sun. Dr. Ben Tapper similarly trades on his medical authority, while telling his 15 thousand Twitter followers that the vaccine will change their DNA.

In other words, the belief in gene-altering, nanobot-spying, mind-controlling vaccines is now bigger than Madej, one of its earliest, most persuasive, and prominent proponents. And with people like her stoking paranoia, next time it might not be the Capitol thats besieged by angry MAGA-hat wearing believersbut a stockpile of life-saving vaccines instead.

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The more AI gets established, the more likely it will be forgotten that decisions can ultimately only be made by humans, says the psychiatrist-philosopher

Thomas Fuchs is a psychiatrist and philosopher who lives and practises in Heidelberg, Germany. He holds the prestigious Karl Jaspers Chair for philosophical foundations of psychiatry and psychotherapy at Heidelberg University, where he is a senior physician in the psychiatric unit and heads the department of Phenomenological Psychopathology. In this exclusive interview, he talks about AI, data-driven societies, and contests the transhumanist notion that human beings are fundamentally imperfect and need to be reshaped and enhanced.

What I think needs a defence today is the humanistic image of man. At the centre of this image is the human person as a physical or embodied being, as a free, self-determining being, and ultimately as an essentially social being connected with others. The definitions that constitute a humanistic, personal image of humanity culminate in the concept of human dignity, understood as the claim to recognition that human beings raise through their bodily existence and co-existence. To what extent is this self-image of man currently under challenge?

In his book Homo Deus (2017), historian Yuval Noah Harari has sketched out a gloomy scenario for the future, according to which scientific and technological progress will gradually render the liberal and humanistic view of humanity obsolete. According to Harari, we will increasingly surrender to the algorithms, data analyses, and forecasts of artificial intelligence, as they can already provide better information about the future than our limited human intelligence: Homo sapiens is an obsolete algorithm, he says.

More generally, with the progress of artificial intelligence, digitalisation of the life world, and the reduction of the mind to neuronal processes, the human being appears more and more a product of data and algorithms. Thus, we conceive ourselves in the image of our machines, and conversely, we elevate our machines and brains to new subjects. At the same time, demands for an enhancement of human nature culminate in transhumanist visions of taking human evolution to a new stage. Against this self-reification of the human being, my book defends a humanism of embodiment: our corporeality, aliveness, and embodied freedom are the foundations of a self-determined existence, which uses new technologies only as a means instead of submitting to them.

This is not an easy question to answer. Classical humanism is undoubtedly anthropocentric to a high degree, and this can no longer be sustained today. Its lack of consideration of our embeddedness in the earthly environment is all too palpable today in the ecological crisis. The post-humanist criticism of anthropocentrism, however, overshoots the mark. To radically question or even want to overcome man because of his misconduct towards nature is absurd humans are the only beings who can take responsibility for the world, there are no others. As I write in my introduction: Even an ecological redefinition of our relationship with the earthly environment will succeed only if our own embodiment and aliveness as connectedness or conviviality with our natural environment is at its centre. The death of the subject much invoked by postmodernism would also be the end of the collective effort to save the earth algorithms, cyborgs, or post-human beings will not do this in our place.

Apart from the many positive possibilities of digital technologies, one of their main dangers is that they provide forms of technocratic regulation and manipulation of society that push freedom further and further back. We will be increasingly willing to get rid of the burden of our own responsibility and hand it over to machines and their algorithms. In this way, international IT companies on the one hand, and authoritarian regimes and state apparatuses on the other, are increasingly taking control of our lives.

The more the idea of AI as a supposedly superior form of analysis, prediction, and evaluation becomes established, the more likely it will be forgotten that decisions, with all their imponderables, can ultimately only be made by humans. Responsibility is no technical category; it cannot be passed on to artificial systems. But if we conceive of ourselves as objects, be it as algorithms or as neuronally determined apparatuses, then we forget our fundamental capacity of freedom and responsibility, and we surrender ourselves to the rule of those who seek to manipulate such apparatuses and to control them socio-technologically.

The term intelligence is derived from the Latin intelligere to see, understand, comprehend. It, therefore, presupposes subjectivity, namely someone who sees or understands something; above all, someone able to see himself and his situation from a higher perspective, so that he can find creative solutions to problems based on an overview. For example, he who leaves signs on his way through a forest to find his way back later, acts intelligently.

So, if we use the term intelligence to describe the ability to grasp oneself or a situation from a superordinate perspective in order to solve problems, then we certainly cannot attribute such abilities to any apparatus that lacks consciousness. The term intelligent is used here only improperly, just as one does not assume that a smartphone is really smart it only blindly executes programs that can be described as cleverly developed. The supposed intelligence of AI is, therefore, only borrowed: each of these programs is only as smart or sophisticated as the programmer who designed it.

The transformation of our social interactions into a semi-virtual screen experience is a mass experiment and we do not yet know how it will affect our psyche and social life; nor do we know what the consequences of social isolation and gradual de-realisation will be. In any case, being bodily together in a real space is still the most effective form of presence. And touch and resistance are the primary test of reality. The increasing transformation of our relations with the world into images and virtual spaces is already undermining our shared reality. Research has shown that conspiracy theories (e.g. Trumps stolen election or COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs) are mostly spread among people with reduced or missing social contacts, who compensate their loneliness by means of Internet echo chambers. We should keep this in mind when singing the praises of digitalisation. Humans are social beings in need of bodily resonance and contact; they need the physical presence of other people, otherwise they will dry out like plants in the sand.

It is true that increasing digitisation is resulting in a disembodiment of social relationships, which is making some of the differences tied to the body, its appearance, its gender, etc. less meaningful or even eliminating them. Whether this will contribute to higher justice and equality of individuals, however, can be doubted. Because the lived body is ultimately also our principium individuationis if it is replaced by a digital pattern or cluster of information received through social media, we will be formally more equal, but at the cost of losing our bodily presence, our appearance, our charisma. That seems like a bad deal to me.

I think that it is only through intersubjectivity that we attain reality in a genuine sense: the experience of that which exists independently of our subjective, momentary perception. This experience requires transcending our subjective, egocentric relationship to the environment, which only becomes possible through the experience of an alien subjectivity. Only the other, and especially his gaze, breaks through my subjective horizon and forms a reality beyond my own. This also fundamentally changes space it is no longer just surrounding space or environment, but an intersubjective space.

As I like to say: Even Robinson Crusoe saw his island for 10 years through the eyes of others it belonged to a common world, although nobody else saw it. Only in dreams do we dive into a purely egocentric world, where everything refers only to ourselves.

I dont know Agambens critique in detail. I have only read that he doubted at the beginning whether the pandemic was not just an invention, which was, of course, nonsense. That the state of emergency must always remain a temporary state in need of clear justification is, however, essential for a democracy on this, we probably agree.

Seralathan teaches German at Goethe Institut Chennai and Milind teaches German language and literature at IIT-Madras.

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Humans are the only beings who can take responsibility for the world, there are no others: Thomas Fuchs - The Hindu

There may be no more definitively 2021 musical artist than PinkPantheress. Huge on TikTok, just barely past her teens, drenched in nostalgia for Y2K-era dance music, founded on overt sampling, intersecting with prevailing movements like bedroom pop and hyperpop and the pop-punk revival this still mostly anonymous 20-year-old university student from South London could not be more zeitgeisty if she tried. And with the release of her debut mixtape to hell with it this Friday, she becomes the latest organic viral sensation to be swept up into the major-label machine.

Although the oldest post on PinkPantheress TikTok account dates back to last Christmas, its the second video the one posted Jan. 29, captioned day 11 of posting a song every day bc i have nothing else to do that marks the proper beginning of her story. The 12-second clip found her with her face obscured singing over a sample of Flowers, UK garage duo Sweet Female Attitudes Erik Satie-inspired classic from 2000 (the year before PinkPantheress was born in Bath). Its 8 oclock in the morning, now Im entering my bed/ Had a few dreams about you, I cant tell you what we did, she sang, before collapsing into playful la la las that belied the heartache and longing on display in the lyrics. From its woozy, almost vaporwave-like keyboard loop to its airy singsong vocal, the track resembled Clairos bedroom-pop staple Pretty Girl reborn for the dance floor. Pain quickly took off on the platform, and with that, the PinkPantheress hype train had left the station.

Within days she had shared another song built on an instantly recognizable UK garage sample: Attracted To You flipped Just Jacks ska-infused 2007 smash Starz In Their Eyes into dreamy dance music that could almost slot into the Avalanches Since I Left You without missing a beat. More sample-based tracks ensued. Break It Off deployed Adam Fs drum n bass classic Circles as the canvas for a playfully flirtatious melodic flutter. Last Valentines turned a churning, translucent break from the early Linkin Park deep cut Forgotten into breathy, spidery dance-tinged rock.

Soon she was singing over original production that continued to evoke classic drum n bass and garage sounds. Those frenetic digital drums coursed through Noticed I Cried, produced by indie striver turned studio mainstay Oscar Scheller. Helmed by IZCO and Jkarri, Passion laced similar beats with soft acoustic guitars out of a pop-R&B ballad from the same era. Produced by Mura Masa, Just For Me topped off further acoustic textures with an android-like hyperpop vocal; its my favorite PinkPantheress track to date, one that most clearly affirms her potential to be a paradigm-shifting figure.

By spring Pain was on Spotify and rapidly climbing various viral charts. By summer the first round of interviews was popping up, with PinkPantheress repeatedly describing her sound as new nostalgic and citing the influence of Lily Allen and Hayley Williams. Just as quickly backlash arose, mostly from listeners old enough to recognize the source material. Critics have derided PinkPantheress for defiling the classics, reignited debates about obvious samples that date back to the height of No Way Out and Big Willie Style. Ive seen questions about whether anyone beyond Gen Z is too old to listen to PinkPantheress (echoing similar ridiculous discourse about Olivia Rodrigo this year) and speculation about when Drake will inevitably jump on one of her tracks. She has become a controversial figure before ever dropping an album.

Not that shes really releasing an album this week either. Out Friday on Parlophone, to hell with it compiles most of PinkPantheress early hits into a breezy 18-minute introductory statement. As a mixtape its kind of slight, which is in keeping with its TikTok origins and far preferable to a bloated tracklist full of cool-hunting guest-star interlopers. This is a collection you might find yourself running back from the top several times over. And anyhow, 10 quick tracks is more than enough to establish PinkPantheress talent for breathy, fragile, tender-but-chilly topline melodies. On tracks like Nineteen she reminds me quite a bit of Grimes, her predecessor in polarizing hyper-online pop stardom, with a coy British accent and none of the transhumanist sci-fi tendencies. Its a compelling voice, and the samples and originals behind it cohere into a distinct and pleasing sonic template that tweaks those retro dance styles just enough to make them feel hypermodern. PinkPantheress may not have pioneered this aesthetic, but for better or worse it belongs to her now. Im excited to see where she takes it.

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PinkPantheress 'to hell with it' Review: The TikTok Phenom's Debut Mixtape - Stereogum