Full Transcript of Interview With

Doctor Mobius for SingularityHub

Article On Camera Culture Wherein

He Was Unfortunately Only Quoted

 - Ygg

SH: Do you consider the ubiquity of video & audio recordings to be a danger to individual privacy and liberty? Why or why not? What do we lose (or gain) with these technologies?

Yes, they are a danger, though of course privacy is itself as much a product of technology (think of the envelope) as publicity is. I think if we play it right and bring collective intelligence to bear, we can emerge with radically increased anonymity through "peer to peer privacy networks." These would be decentralized systems for sharing encrypted biometric data running on public key encryption. This would allow you to demonstrate anonymously where you had been, without actually divulging your identity. For banking and medical records, there is a big need for this. The technologies and their governance are still emerging, so now is the time to work towards maximizing creative anonymity as well as trying to "protect" privacy. The good news is that sexual selection in evolution seems to excel at ways of transmitting information and as well as encrypting it. Olivia Judson's book Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation, in its description of the "war between the sexes," could be read in precisely this way.

SH: What can we expect in the future in terms of new recording technologies? Should we regulate and restrict these technologies as they emerge?

Motion capture will come out of the lab, leap past Wii and into our bodies as we begin dynamically mapping aspects of our embodiment. At first this will be good old biopower - prepare to be diagnosed! Yet these new modalities of corporeal media will give us clues, feedback we can respond to in real time to maximize bliss or any other response. I can imagine, for example, nanosensors that track endogenous DMT activity for real time reality and dream tuning.

Restricting and regulating these technologies is unlikely to be any more successful than Hollywood and the RIAA attempting to restrict the sharing of mp3 and videos. Those of us concerned and interested in these emerging technologies should instead work toward bringing the maximum collective intelligence and creativity to bear on their use. For example, a noöspheric network of peer to peer embodiment could allow us to synch creatively with human and non-human allies across the planet, growing a truly global consciousness thriving on compassion and mutual aid. It is going to be a glorious time to be an anarchist as we grow the green Buddha future.

SH: How do you see the human-machine interface evolving with regard to audiovisual technologies? Will humans soon be cyborgs?

"We don't know what a body can do!" (Spinoza via Deleuze). I think the keywords here are "feedback" and "tuning". We are of course already cyborgs in some sense - our external memory storage (Merlin Donald) is not the least of the ways in which our human phenotype is actually ecological in size and scope. I enhance my vision with lenses, I ride a bike to self-locomote, and this sort of augmentation will of course continue. But I think the big effects will come from our ability to learn how to better creatively deploy and explore our embodiment through new forms of feedback enabled by highly sensitive and tiny sensors that will begin to provide real time feedback on our embodiment. It's going to take a direct investigation of consciousness to navigate this new world, and nobody can do that for us but ourselves. Think yoga as the modality for exploring the new interfaces: a Renaissance of Wetwares! Timothy Leary was right to use the terminology of "tuning" the last time we saw a new (albeit archaic) technology demanding our conscious participation and attention.

SH: Singularity, yea or nay?

Singularity is, in effect: Get a late pass! Human consciousness IS the singularity - in Deleuze's sense. I think it is both an obstacle that presents our thoroughly unique ordeal of development (and awakening) as well as a radical individuation that is not primarily individual. As the noösphere evolves, we all learn how to become individuated, together. I would suggest that much of what is perceived by visionaries as the coming singularity is in fact their own increasing awareness of their own totally unique consciousness embedded in and thoroughly interconnected with larger scale ecosystemic structures (i.e. Gaia) mapped back onto the external world. It is not the so called "external world" changing as much as our experience of our inner world that is changing in contact with a (perhaps) unprecedented infoquake and increase in interconnectivity. In fact, if we take seriously practices of consciousness alteration such as meditation (and Mobius does), then it is difficult to comprehend how these visions could literally be anything other than the content of the visionaries own minds. In other words, the Kurzweil’s and Vinge’s of the world are right on: there is something happening, & what is happening is the continuous increase in our collective and individual awareness of the role our own unique consciousness has to play in the further evolution of this planet. I find the noösphere to be a more fecund map for this transformation, if only because it forces us to think on a trans-individual scale even while it requires total individuation - we each have unique role to play in evolving the collective.

SH: How do you see the increasing presence of digital cameras (specifically in the hands of the general public) impacting the social landscape?

More porn, much more. If anything is indicated by past information technology trends, porn will mutate and proliferate past an ontological threshold where we all have to play within a porn matrix to leave progeny and/or have lovers. This will be the real "eugenics" critics have feared if it falls into a "winner fuck all" attractor, and only creativity and diversity will save us from banal thrusting repetition. Add Geoffrey Miller's The Mating Mind to ubiquitous networked cameras, and we get highly encrypted real time porn peercast. It's a good thing we'll have a global network of tantric transducers to send peer to peer anonymous but biometrically verified tactile "massage messages" too, or it could be a real bummer!

Driven by this encrypted real time peercast, we will live in a surreal mixture of total transparency and radically increased anonymity. The "obscenity of the real" (Baudrillard) will be rejected by many, who will instead either don scramble suits (Cf. Philip K. Dick's The Scanner Darkly) and/or adorn themselves with feathers and jewels in an eternal return of sexual selection motifs. I will likely join them in the woods.