Category Archives: Transhuman

July 11, 2020December 13, 2020

+++ Unfortunately, the exhibition can no longer be visited due to the closure of the museum until at least 20 December 2020 as a result of corona-related measures to contain the pandemic. Due to a lack of planning security, loan contracts and logistical reasons, we are unfortunately unable to extend the exhibition beyond the official end of the exhibition on 13 December 2020. We regret this very much and ask for your understanding.

We also need the exhibition rooms for the rebuilding of our upcoming large annual exhibition 2021 A Woodstock of Ideas Joseph Beuys, Achberg and the German South which is to be shown in the Museum Ulm from 23 January 2021 until 6 June 2021.

What remains. More than little consolation. The beautiful, rich, worth reading and worth seeing exhibition publication designed by our graphic artist Eva Hocke bibliophile and exclusively available in our museum shop.+++

On 24 June 2020, he celebrates his 250th birthday, an inventor who is as brilliant as he is risk-taking: Albrecht Ludwig Berblinger. Better known as Schneider von Ulm, he went down in history with his flight attempt in 1811. The anniversary celebrations under the title Berblinger 2020 will not only pay tribute to his work, but will also focus on innovation, inventiveness, courage and an open urban society.

Almost everyone today is familiar with Albrecht Ludwig Berlingers flight test. However, another invention by the famous inventor is largely unknown: Albrecht Ludwig Berblinger developed movable prostheses for the injured soldiers of the Napoleonic Wars and thus invented the basic design for modern leg prostheses.

This medical-historical success story is the occasion for the Museum Ulm, in the context of the 250th anniversary of the birth of Albrecht Ludwig Berblinger, to devote itself to the complementation, imitation and improvement of human nature, the desirable body and the artificial human being in an exhibition on the history of art, culture and technology.

Historical prostheses and pictorial representations of their applications are juxtaposed with contemporary interpretations and visions of overcoming our physiological limitations through scientific, technological and design disciplines.

In the face of technological progress, current contemporary artistic positions also reflect prosthetics up to the cyborg; the exhibition presents works by:

Kader Attia I Sophie de Oliveira Barata I Anna Blumenkranz I Renaud Jerez I Mari Katayama I Alexander Kluge I Erika Mondria I Aimee Mullins I Miguel Angel Rojas I Martha Rosler I Keisuke Shimakage I Igor Simi I Stelarc

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication (German/English, 264 pages, numerous illustrations, 20 ).

In cooperation with the

Funded by the

German Federal Cultural Foundation

With friendly support

On the anniversary of

Visit link:
Transhuman | Museum Ulm

English[edit]Etymology[edit]

trans- + human, also attested as trans-human in the 1950s. Attributed to Teilhard de Chardin, as French trans-humain (noun, sometimes capitalised as (le) Trans-humain), who used it alongside ultra-humain ("the ultra-human"). As a countable English noun (plural transhumans) introduced by F. M. Esfandiary in the 1960s (here trans- is short for transitional).

transhuman (comparative more transhuman, superlative most transhuman)

Turning fallible human foot soldiers into transhuman machines who need neither sleep nor food, and are incapable of resistance and independent thought, is a Napoleonic dream .

A template for those who will become transhuman.

I believe that this is important, because taken in isolation the kind of enhancements portrayed by transhuman philosophers might seem relatively innocuous.

The transhuman ideal is based upon a reconception of evolution, a perfecting and transcending of the human race through the next step in progress: not through biological mutation but through science and technology.

In a study of transhumanists and video games, fully twothirds of the participants claimed that video games incline players toward a transhuman sense of self.

This "other world" is transcendent because the experience of the sacredan encounter with a reality transcending immanent lifegives birth to the idea that there are absolute, that is, transhuman, realities.

Thus, regardless of whether one prefers to replace the father symbol with other human symbols like mother and maternalor with transhuman and transsexual symbols like first/last realitynone of these images or symbols are really integral to the message of the Gospels.

Subjectivity, as a paradoxically transhuman phenomenon of awareness renderred only in ecologies, is rendered into inscriptions and images even as no self is adequate to the report.

transhuman (countable and uncountable, plural transhumans)

In the same way that a transhuman is a transitional human, Christians are also humans in transition, living in a kingdom that has come and yet is coming, strangers in the world.

On the coffee table rested a sculpture of the fundamental, recombinant DNA of the present transhumans.

In practice, this technological transhumation would wreak havoc on the earth. While modern transhumans are meant to come into being through technology, Augustine offers two models of transhumans made by a divine rather than a human creator -- Adam and Eve in Eden and the resurrected saints in heaven.

Will it happaen again if we transition from human to transhuman?

I bet every critter that thinks it thinkseven the transhumansworry about how to do right for themselves and the ones they love.

Imagine a living computer running a simulation where math functions within the simulation think. Then consider an implication of anthrocosmology: if human consciousness created reality and transhumans can simulate any reality they can imagine, that suggest the physical universe has no special status above any other virtual reality.

Now ask yourself a question, don't these transhumans have as much a right in killing us for food as we do in killing cows?

More here:
transhuman - Wiktionary

The X-Men are really big into combining their powers now, something Deadpool uses when it's time to smash invading symbiotes.

Having a country seems to be all the rage in comics these days. After all, in addition to traditional mainstays like Black Panther's Wakanda and Doctor Doom's Latveria, the X-Men now have the mutant nation of Krakoa, and Deadpool, of all people, has found himself the monarch of the Monster Nation. With countries come culture, and there seems to be some cultural cross-pollination going on in the pages of Marvel Comics. In Deadpool #10, written by Kelly Thompson and illustrated by Gerardo Sandoval, the Merc with a Mouth seems to have borrowed a page from X-Men to combine the powers of his constituents into a fearsome symbiote-smashing giant robot! But what precedent does this increasing common occurrence set, and what implications does it have going forward?

Combining powers is nothing new in comics. Perhaps is the most famous example is "the Fastball special" which would see Colossus launch Wolverine at their adversaries. However, Krakoa has taken this concept to a whole new level, developing much more intricate - and potentially dangerous - combinations. After all, some mutants wield various elements, controlled by sheer force of will. Any emotional instability could spell disaster. Fortunately, most mutants in Krakoa have an insurance policy in the form of their resurrection through psychic downloads.

Related: Deadpool Just Saved Captain America and Cyclops in the Most Ridiculous Way

On the pages of Deadpool, the titular monarch is using the powers of former enemy Jelby to create a massive gelatinous body to house his team, and then use their individual powers against the symbiotes threatening his nation and the world at large. Jelby also captures Deadpool's pet, Jeff the Landshark, who had been infected by a symbiote, and by the end of the adventure, even helps capture a massive symbiote dragon. Ultimately, the move to combine powers - which Deadpool fittingly refers to as "Plan X" - pays off.

Still, from a storytelling perspective, there are potential pitfalls for power combination. Its possible power combination could become nothing more than a plot device, or worse, a deus ex machina. After all, Krakoa is a blossoming transhumanist state, and it's possible no individual situation poses much of a threat thanks to the sheer number of power combinations at the mutants' disposal now. Ultimately, the story could suffer, especially if the emphasis falls on the "wow factor" of power combination instead of the character dynamics working behind the scenes.

Of course, this new mutant culture could be a way of raising the stakes. After all, would the mutants be so willing to engage in these dynamics if they didn't have resurrection pods? Cheating death typically doesn't end well. If or when Krakoa loses its resurrection capability, mutants could put themselves in considerable danger performing these maneuvers. The comics have already explored how vulnerable clones feel in the face of uncertain resurrection. What if the mutants had to perform these literally death-defying moves without a safety net?

Ultimately, the question is moot in Deadpool's case, as his Monster Nation is shown to be almost everything Krakoa is not - a rag-tag mix of monsters, aliens, villains, and even regular humans working together. If Deadpool can duplicate a key mutant technology without much effort, it's possible Krakoa might not be as innovative - or even stable - as they believe. All of this suggests Krakoa's recent breakthrough might really be leading the mutant nation down a path with very fragile feet of clay.

Next: The Wu-Tang Clan Just Entered Marvel's Fight Against Marvel's King in Black

The Most Heroic Titan Just Turned Evil in DC Comics

Read more here:
Deadpool's Monster Army and the X-Men's Nation Share a Surprising Tactic - Screen Rant

The poet Richard Brautigan said that one day we would all be watched over by "machines of loving grace". It was a nice sentiment at the time. But I surmise Brautigan might have done a quick 180 if he was alive today. He would see how intelligent machines in general and AI in particular were being semi-weaponized or otherwise appropriated for purposes of a new kind of social engineering. He would also likely note how this process is usually positioned as something "good for humanity" in vague ways that never seem to be fully explained.

As both a technologist and a journalist, I find it very difficult to think of transhumanism and what I'll call the New Eugenics as anything less than deeply and literally dehumanizing.

The hits, as they say, just keep on coming. Recently I ran across an article advising recent college graduates looking for jobs that they had better be prepared to have their facial expressions scanned and evaluated by artificial intelligence programs during and after interviews.

An article in the publication "Higher Ed" warned that: "Getting a job increasingly requires going through an interview on an AI platformIf the proprietary technology [used to ] to evaluate the recordings concludes that a candidate does well in matching the demeanor, enthusiasm, facial expressions or word choice of current employees of the company, it recommends the candidate for the next round. If the candidate is judged by the software to be out of step, that candidate is not likely to move on."

If this were happening in China, of course, it would be much less surprising. You don't have to be a Harvard-trained psychiatrist to see that this kind of technology is violating some very basic human boundaries: how we think and feel and our innermost and private thoughts. And you don't have to be a political scientist to see that totalitarian societies are in the business of breaking down these boundaries for purposes of social and political control.

Facial recognition has already been implemented by some law enforcement agencies. Other technology being used for social control starts out in the corporate world and then migrates. Given the melding of corporate and government power that's taken place in the U.S. over the last few decades, what's impermissible in government now can get fully implemented in the corporate world and then in the course of time bleeds over to government use via outsourcing and other mechanisms. It's a nifty little shell game. This was the case with the overt collection of certain types of data on citizens which was expressly forbidden by federal law. The way around it was to have corporations to do the dirty work and then turn around and sell the data to various government entities. Will we see the same thing happen with artificial intelligence and its ability to pry into our lives in unprecedented ways?

There is a kind of quasi-worship of technology as a force majeure in humanity's evolution that puts AI at the center of human existence. This line of thinking is now linked to the principles of transhumanism, a set of values and goals being pushed by Silicon Valley elites. This warped vision of techno-utopianism assures us that sophisticated computers are inherently superior to humans. Implicit in this view is the notion that intelligence (and one kind of intelligence at that) is the most important quality in the vast array of attributes that are the essential qualities of our collective humanity and longstanding cultural legacies.

The corporate PR frontage for these "breakthroughs" is always the same: they will only be used for the highest purposes like getting rid of plastics in the oceans. But still the question remains: who will control or regulate the use of these man-made creatures?

The most hardcore transhumanists believe that our role is simply to step aside and assist in the creation of new life forms made possible by hooking up human brains to computers and the Internet, what they consider to be an evolutionary quantum leap. Unfortunately, people in powerful corporate positions like Ray Kurzweil, Google's Director of Engineering, and Elon Musk, founder of Neuralink, actually believe in these convoluted superhero mythologies. This line of thinking is also beginning to creep into the mainstream thanks to the corporate-driven hype put forth by powerful Silicon Valley companies who are pushing these ideas for profit and to maintain technology's ineluctable "more, better, faster" momentum.

The transhumanist agenda is a runaway freight train, barely mentioned in the mainstream media, but threatening to run over us all. In related "mad science" offshoot, scientists have succeeded in creating the first biological computer-based hybrids called Xenobotswhich the New York Times describes as "programmable organisms" that "live for only about a week". The corporate PR frontage for these "breakthroughs" is always the same: they will only be used for the highest purposes like getting rid of plastics in the oceans. But still the question remains: who will control or regulate the use of these man-made creatures?In the brave new world of building machines that can think and evolve on their own because they combine AI programming with biological programming, we have to ask where all this is headed. If machines are being used to evaluate us for job interviews, then why won't they be eventually used as police officers or judges? (In fact, Singapore is now using robotic dogs to police parks for Covid-related social distancing.)

As both a technologist and a journalist, I find it very difficult to think of transhumanism and what I'll call the New Eugenics as anything less than deeply and literally dehumanizing. In the aftermath of WWII, eugenics used to be widely reviled when Nazi scientists experimented with and so highly valued it. Now it's lauded as cutting edge.There are two ugly flies in this ointment. The first is the question of who directs and controls the AI machines being built. You can make a safe bet that it won't be you, your friends, or your neighbors but rather technocratic elites. The second is the fact that programmers, and their masters, the corporate Lords of Tech, are the least likely candidates to come up with the necessary wisdom to imbue AI with the deeper human qualities necessary to make it anything more than a force used for social and political control in conjunction with mass surveillance and other tools.

Another consideration is: how does politics fit into this picture? In the middle ages, one of the great power shifts that took place was from medieval rulers to the church. In the age of the enlightenment, another shift took place: from the church to the modern state. Now we are experiencing yet another great transition: a shift of power from state and federal political systems to corporations and, by extension, to the global elites that are increasingly exerting great influence on both, the 1 percenters that Bernie Sanders frequently refers to.

When considering the use of any new technology, the question should be asked: who does it ultimately serve? And to what extent are ordinary citizens allowed to express their approval or disapproval of the complex technological regimes being created that we all end up involuntarily depending upon?

These trends have political implications because they have happened in tandem with the neoliberal sleight of hand that began with President Reagan. Gradually anti-democratic policy changes over a period of decades allowed elites to begin the process of transferring public funds to private coffers. This was done under the neoliberal smokescreen of widely touted but socially hollow benefits such as privatization, outsourcing, and deregulation bolstered by nostrums such as "Government must get out of the way to let innovation thrive."

Behind the scenes, the use of advanced technology has played a strong role in enabling this transition but it did so out of the public's watchful eye. Now, it seems abundantly clear that technologies such as 5G, machine learning, and AI will continue to be leveraged by technocratic elites for the purposes of social engineering and economic gain. As Yuval Harari, one of transhumanism's most vocal proponents has stated: "Whoever controls these algorithms will be the real government."

If AI is allowed to begin making decisions that affect our everyday lives in the realms of work, play and business, it's important to be aware of who this technology serves: technologically sophisticated elites. We have been hearing promises for some time about how better advanced computer technology was going to revolutionize our lives by changing just about every aspect of them for the better. But the reality on the ground seems to be quite different than what was advertised. Yes, there are many areas where it can be argued that the use of computer and Internet technology has improved the quality of life. But there are just as many others where it has failed miserably. Healthcare is just one example. Here misguided legislation combined with an obsession with insurance company-mandated data gathering has created massive info-bureaucracies where doctors and nurses spend far too much time feeding patient data into a huge information databases where it often seems to languish. Nurses and other medical professionals have long complained that too much of their time is spent on data gathering and not enough time focusing on healthcare itself and real patient needs.

When considering the use of any new technology, the question should be asked: who does it ultimately serve? And to what extent are ordinary citizens allowed to express their approval or disapproval of the complex technological regimes being created that we all end up involuntarily depending upon? In a second "Gilded Age" where the power of billionaires and elites over our lives is now being widely questioned, what do we do about their ability to radically and undemocratically alter the landscape of our daily lives using the almighty algorithm?

Excerpt from:
A Closer Look at the AI Hype Machine: Who Really Benefits? - Common Dreams

Into The Darkness, a new indie VR game from Cosmos Games, promises a compelling story involving transhumanism in the near future merged with exciting VR action-adventure gameplay that uses a Boneworks-like physics system.

Announced this week, the game will be available for PC VR in late 2021, developed by Vietnamese studio Cosmos Games and published by GameBoom VR and PlayWay.

The game takes place in a dystopian sci-fi setting where humans are trying to move consciousness into machines in order to live forever. Heres a summary of the story from Cosmos Games:

Humanity is trying to achieve immortality by transferring consciousness to machines. Transhumanism, however, is a dangerous path, and a poorly conducted experiment can end in a tragedy. As agent Frank, you are sent to one of the research facilities with which contact has been interrupted, and the previous agents never returned. Navigate through environments, solve the puzzle, engage the enemy to find out the dark secret behind the experiments.

You can sneak an early look at the games visuals and gameplay in the announcement trailer embedded above.

As you can see from the trailer, Into The Darkness is looking to implement a comprehensive physics system that works similarly to pioneers in the field like Boneworks. All of the objects have weight and physics that react in a manner consistent with the real world. Towards the end of the trailer, theres even a glance at a Half-Life: Alyx-style glove system that lets you force pull items toward you.

Into The Darkness will launch for PC VR in Q2 of this year, available on Steam for Oculus Rift, Valve Index (including finger tracking support), HTC Vive, and Windows Mixed Reality headsets.

Read more:
Into The Darkness Is A Promising VR Adventure With Boneworks-Like Physics - UploadVR

One of the most popular subgenres of '80s movies was the buddy cop film.Two partners are thrown together, bicker and clash, learn to trust each other, and finally become a formidable team. Audiences couldn't seem to get enough of all the wisecracks, shoot-outs, and car chases in Beverly Hills Cop(1984), Lethal Weapon (1987),Red Heat (1988), Dragnet(1987), Stakeout (1987), Tango and Cash (1989),and many others.

RoboCop both follows and subverts the formula. Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) gets transferred from his cushy uptown station to the urban hell of Old Detroit. He partners with the veteran Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen), who is initially put off by Murphy's cockiness standard buddy cop stuff.RoboCop departs from the formula by making one of the partners female. Another major difference is that Murphy is shot to death on their first day of work together. Lewis disappears for a stretch while Murphy's consciousness is implanted into RoboCop, but once she recognizes him, they reunite to take down the bad guys that killed him.

Buddy cop movies of the era had little use for female characters, who served as background to the bromance between the male partners. Lewis' competence and professionalism as a police officer, as well as the fact that she is never sexualized or made into a love interest, is one of the many ways that RoboCop was forward-looking while still embracing '80s conventions.

Read more from the original source:
Why RoboCop Is The Sci-Fi Film Most Representative Of The 1980s - Looper

A new top-down cyberpunk game is set for release in the second quarter of the year.

Glitchpunk is a new top-down action game from studio Dark Lord. Its based on the retro style of GTA and GTA2, the predecessors to the 3D open world GTA games that have in turn inspired modern action games such as Grand Theft Auto 5.

A trailer that explores the action in the game is available via Youtube below:

Glitchpunk pits the player as an android bounty hunter with a glitch that causes them to rebel against their programming, and facing off against the government and megacorps of the dystopian setting.

Like GTA2, the game will have you stealing cars, shooting enemies, sneaking around, and upgrading your body with tech to make you a formidable android.

The developers Dark Lord are aiming to make the game true to the genre, by telling a story that covers transhumanism, xenophobia, and religion with a narrative that lets you influence the world, make friends and find love.

Listed amongst the key features are confirmation that there will trains, tanks, motorbikes and busses, and that the gameplay will take place in four different cities including USA and Russia.

Glitchpunk is going to launch into Steam Early Access in the second quarter of 2021. A Discord server is available for players who want to keep up to date with all the games progress.

As part of the Steam Game festival next week, there will be a demo for Glitchpunk released on February 3.

Read the original post:
'Glitchpunk' will see players take to the neon streets from a top-down view - NME

A teacher could be banned from the classroom after writing an anonymous 'Gossip Girl'-style blog about teachers and pupils at his school.

Alexander Price, 43, penned the "The Provoked Pedagogue" blog about students, parents and staff at Denbigh High School in Denbigh, North Wales.

The design and technology teacher even targeted school girls, writing that they dressed " like Eastern European prostitutes and trans-human Kardashian clones" at prom.

Between January 2016 and March 2018 he wrote 24 blog posts, until a colleague found the site, and reported it to headmaster Dr Paul Evans.

Dr Evans quickly connected the dots, and realised that one post, titled 'Liars, Backstabbers and Empire Builders' referred directly to a meeting the two had had.

Do you think Mr Price be struck off? Let us know in the comments below.

In some posts he made up nicknames for headteachers at the school, calling one "El Supremo" and another "Grima Wormtongue" after a character from Lord of the Rings.

At a hearing in Cardiff, Mr Price, who admits writing the blog but denies the posts amount to unacceptable professional conduct, said he had no intention of ever returning to the teaching profession.

Mr Price said: " I would assert the absolute right to freedom of expression.

"In these times of cancel culture and the ownership of language this is one further example of the liberal elite attempting to sanitise the world with their own brand of passive-aggressive censorship and bullying."

He added: "Teaching in Wales is in crisis, teaching at Denbigh High School was non-existent in any meaningful sense of the word, fact borne out of its inability to meet even the basic standards of competence.

"The school is run in a shameful way which negatively impacts on the lives of children and their families in one of the poorest wards of the UK.

"Paul Evans treated Denbigh High School like his own personal fiefdom, running roughshod over procedure and bullying those who did not comply with his methods.

"He blamed me directly for failings in his own management and to seek to intimidate me to complying with his unreasonable demands."

The headteacher said he had been made aware of the 'The Provoked Pedagogue' blog and Twitter account in February 2018.

The 540-student school was in special measures at the time Mr Price wrote the blog.

Dr Evans added: "T o know that one of our colleagues was letting the world know it was a challenging situation and a lack of leadership and direction showed a lack of loyalty towards the school and what we were trying to do at the time.

"I think many staff would find it hurtful one of their colleagues was being disrespectful and pouring scorn on their efforts.

"I think it's very disrespectful to his colleagues, I think if they were to read that they would find it hurtful."

Mr Price has no plans to return to teaching regardless of the panel's decision, but he urged them to not "shoot the messenger" for exposing problems at the school. He said he hoped the blog would "shine a light" on the "disgraceful behaviour" of Dr Evans.

He said: " Behaviour was horrendous and unsafe. Drug use was rife. The blog had a tiny readership and was fully anonymous.

"Hundreds of pages of papers and hours and hours of time have been invested to investigate a blog which yielded zero complaints and simply told the anonymous truth.

"The articles are colourful and meant to be entertaining. While it was active I would regularly receive responses asking if I worked at their school - indicating the issues experienced were mirrored and lending strength to the efforts to anonymise the blog.

"I hope this shines a further light on the how poorly the children of Denbigh High School are being served.

"I hope these proceedings finally manage to drive the improvements that all the people served by the school deserve."

In one article titled "The Problem With Prom", Mr Price called the event "a shallow, vacuous affair, about nothing more than who has spent the most on looking nice".

He described the evening as where anxious young teens are "shoehorned into gowns and paraded into towns like cattle".

The post called attending teenagers: "Shameless chicken fillets shoved into criminally expensive and ill-fitting gowns."

Presenting officer Ashanti-Jade Walton asked Mr Price if he was sorry for his comments about the school prom.

He answered: "I'm sorry that so many pupils are forced to do this. That's what I'm sorry about."

Dr Evans hit back, saying his comments were "extremely hurtful".

He added: "The pupils are not from rich backgrounds therefore could not be in a position to afford expensive prom gowns or overpriced cosmetics.

"I believe they are wholly derogatory comments about the pupils at the school, disrespectful and seeking to undermine pupils at the school.

"The comments are wholly offensive to parents whose pupils attend the school."

Colin Adkins, Mr Price's NASUWT union representative said his comments were fair and a "reasonable professional opinion", in which the school, parents and pupils could not be identified.

He said: " The contents of the blog are true and the attack on Mr Price is an attempt to cover-up the failings of the school.

"Just because these facts are inconvenient to the school should not allow the school to succeed in this cover up.

"The blogs are totally anonymised. There is not one article which mentions a pupil by name, a parent by name, or a member of staff by name."

Mr Price left the school in 2019 and may be struck off permanently, pending the outcome of the hearing.

Visit link:
Teacher who insulted pupils and colleagues in 'Gossip Girl' style blog faces being struck off - Mirror Online

After the storming of the U.S. Capitol by an insurgent lynch mob driven by far-right social media conspiracy theories and stirred on by then President Donald Trump, at least 10 market-dominating tech companies took action through content moderation and account suspension. Chief among those removed was Trump himself, banned from Twitter, and Parler, an alternative social media platform that markets itself to far-right extremists, which was ejected from its host, Amazon Web Services.

The ban had an immediate effect on internet discourse: Within a week, researchers tracked a 73 percent reduction in disinformation about election fraud on Twitter and other platforms. Amazons filing against Parler documents months of futile work to convince the platform to suppress users explicit calls for violence in accordance with their terms of service. While some argue that tech companies should take similar action against other world leaders who use populism to stir up mass violence, critics of the decision are alarmed at the supposed restriction on free speech by tech companies.

This debate is overwrought, but also raises bigger questions. In 2021, losing a Twitter account meaningfully limits the presidents influence, as it would any other figure. That shouldnt be confused with his freedom of speech, which remains unshackled by the government. But it does point to the way in which big tech has come to dominate and shatter the public sphere. Yet, thanks to the failure of politicians to meaningfully act through legislation, tech firms are policing themselves through inconsistently enforced terms of service.

When leaders call for violence through social media, their influence is especially pernicious. As far back as 2015, Trumps dehumanizing rhetoric was viewed by many hate groups as a tacit permission slip to engage in hate crimes. Subsequent studies showed violent metaphors by political leaders dramatically increase support for political violence, and is fuel for moral disengagement, serving to designate certain people or groups as fundamentally unworthy of protection, and as legitimate targets for violence. Violent rhetoric is also contagious: A 2017 National Academy of Sciences study likened hate speech to a pathogen. That pathogen manifested at the White House on Jan. 6.

Stopping hateful speech is thus vital to maintaining the public space that non-violent, deliberative democracy needs. Completely unmoderated speech endorsing lies and violence, as Parler cultivated and which has threatened to overwhelm mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, risks fragmenting that public space. But navigating the tension between moderation and openness means reexamining basic political commitments.

The American philosopher John Dewey defined a public as a community of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for. In a single, unified public, actions affect strangers, which creates an ethical obligation to think about the ripples of behavior. But in a fragmented society, with smaller publics, people are less attuned to how their behavior affects others (see the mask debate).

The United States lacks a single public. Exacerbated urban-rural divides, class differences, and prolonged exposure on the right to a closed media ecology have shrunk the so-called mainstream, while the legacy of apartheid has always meant the exclusion of Black communities from anything resembling a single, universal public. Even within the parochial and breakaway political right there are pronounced fractures that produce a proliferation of mini-publics, with a divisionalbeit a shrinking onebetween supposedly moderate Republicans and those who consume and represent the views advanced in extremist media spaces like Breitbart or One America News Network. Meanwhile, an increasingly revolutionary far-left public has emerged that agitates against Democrats as often as it does Republicans, and on the sidelines are various fringe communities driven by often-violent conspiracies like QAnon and anti-vaccine groups.

Publics are formed and maintained through a public spherea space to discuss social problems, debate solutions, and form agreements about collective ideals and goals. German philosopher Jurgen Habermas famously studied how a vibrant, if limited, public sphere formed in the coffee shops and salons of 18th-century Europe, only to collapse in the 19th century as mass printed media rose to prominence. A public sphere, he argued, exists on the basis of inclusivity, a commitment to good faith argument, and a collective willingness to cooperate in the search for meaningful agreement on how the world is and should be. Journalistic elites arguing in op-ed pages are no substitute.

But at least when popular media consumption was restricted to a smaller range of outlets and run according to consistent editorial standards, something like a public sphere could exist. Citizens could broadly be on the same page, so to speak, about which facts and principles were under debate and which were not. This was not an especially egalitarian or inclusive discourse, but it was transparent and coherent enough to allow for some cross-sections of the population to meaningfully engage with one another (though this was not the case for many marginalized groups).

Social media might have offered a solution, as an open digital space where anyone could join, contribute, share information, and learn new ideas and skills. This was the utopian argument of American poet John Perry Barlows 1996 manifesto, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which claimed that the non-material nature of cyberspace exempted it from considerations of place, money, property, and identity. But, as the mass deplatforming of Trump and his insurrectionists demonstrated, cyberspace has never been separate from material concerns, and it is certainly not above politics.

Social media platforms are not like coffee shops or salons. Facebook and Twitter are not a public sphere in any sense of the term. They are ostensibly inclusiveat least until individual members are driven away by threatsbut not dedicated to good faith argumentation; they make no commitment toward constructive discussion. This is an intentional design choice, as shown by the domination of outrage content, or the campaigns of harassment that target women and minorities with particular ferocity. Privately owned and in command of vast powers of surveillance and control over what and how users communicate, they are even now reluctant to use those powers to create a healthy public sphere.

The problem is that they also monopolize expression on the internet. The current choice between social media or nothing has led dissidents like Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny to call Twitters ban on Donald Trump a form of censorship on par with government suppression of speech. World leaders expressed alarm as well, from Andres Manuel Lpez Obrador vowing to fight Twitters policies to German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggesting that the only actor authorized to make decisions about bans should be the government itselfthe implication being that Twitter should not be allowed to determine who is allowed to use its platform.

If that sounds absurd, blame social media companies themselves for producing this crisis. Their lame and inconsistent regulations of content are driven not by a commitment to clear principles, and certainly not to the values of the public sphere or a commitment to free speech. Rather, their self-regulation is driven entirely by the need to monetize data, deliver targeted ads, and evade serious legal liability, with even billion-dollar fines barely amounting to quarterly rounding errors.

Instead of creating a new public sphere, a small number of monopolistic social media companies colonized the existing one, and then shattered it into jagged pieces. They have accelerated and exacerbated the erosion and fracturing of the American public, while facilitating mass right-wing violence.

There is no easy solution to this problem, but there are a few principles that might help us devise one. First, social media companies must regulate and manage their platforms to better secure the conditions for a public sphere: inclusivity, fact-checking, and safety from violence. These alone cannot produce the utopia of Habermass private dinner discourse ethics, but without them, no public can survive. Policymakers should incentivize this through legislation that holds these companies liable for failure and imposes meaningful financial consequences. They should set a clear set of standards for when content crosses the line into threats of violence or hate speech, and they should establish independent review of social media firms enforcement, to ensure that it is neither lax nor arbitrary. There is a difficult balance to be struck here between First Amendment rights and the obligation to enforce existing laws prohibiting threats and harassment, but the current approach is simply refusing to tryand repealing Section 230, as some have suggested, would not address the problem of radicalization and violence anyway.

Second, social media monopolies must be broken through more effective antitrust legislation. Imagine if every 18th-century coffee house had been a Starbucks! If social media spaces are the only place a public sphere can form in the 21st century, then they must be meaningfully diverse. The old blogosphere had many attributes of a public sphere, just as the earliest days of social media did. But blogs died as the big names became digital magazine columns, and as competition from social media drew more users in. The only plausible competition to social media has come from other social media, and this is where the antitrust case against Facebook becomes salientthink of Mark Zuckerbergs private dinner with Trump right before Trump announced a ban on TikTok. In their current monopolistic state, social media resembles a government in its absolute power to exclude (and surveil), and produces the same dynamics of power and censorship that have led commentators to now conflate content moderation with institutional repression.

Third, and most broadly, the internet needs to be treated as a social good, as scholars like Ethan Zuckerman argue. This may sound aspirational, although in other countries access to broadband may soon become a public service. People in the developed world are inescapably onlinea social transformation that is permanent and should be addressed through more than liberal management or utopian transhumanism. Our first act as a public should be to come up with digital equivalents of parks, community centers, local watering holes, and other places where earlier generations were able to gather and coexist outside of pervasive governmental or corporate control. If we dont, the institutions of liberal democracy will not survive long enough for us to come up with another solution.

Read more:
How Social Media Monopolies Broke the Public Sphere - Foreign Policy

As part of its enforcement activities, the Food and Drug Administration sends warning letters to entities under its jurisdiction. Some letters are not posted for public view until weeks or months after they are sent. Business owners have 15 days to respond to FDA warning letters. Warning letters often are not issued until a company has been given months to years to correct problems. The FDA frequently redacts parts of warning letters posted for public view.

Cocos Holistic Specialties & Apothecary Online sales

An online eastern & holistic herbal medicine company is on notice from the FDA for claims made about their products ability to mitigate, prevent, treat, diagnose, or cure COVID-19 in people.

In a Jan. 4 warning letter, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration described a Nov. 19, and Dec. 17, 2020, review of Cocos Holistic Specialties & Apothecarys website at the internet address https://cocosholisticspecialties.org/.

The FDA observed that the companys website offers 4-Thieves Florida Tea Concentrate and 4-Thieves Florida Tea Powder for sale in the United States and that this product is marketed as being intended to mitigate, prevent, treat, diagnose, or cure COVID-19 in people.

Based on the FDAs review, these products are unapproved new drugs sold in violation of section 505(a) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. This product is also a misbranded drug under section 502 of the FD&C Act. The introduction or delivery for introduction of these products into interstate commerce is prohibited under sections 301(a) and (d) of the FD&C Act.

Listed below are examples of the claims on the companys website that establish the intended use of their products and misleadingly represent them as safe and/or effective for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19.

The company was given 48 hours to send an email to the FDAs COVID-19 Task Force describing the specific steps they have taken to address these violations.

The full warning letter can be viewed here.

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Continued here:
FDA sends warning letter to company that is advertising COVID-19 curing tea - Food Safety News