Re: <nettime> Dreaming of Molly Millions, the Panther Moderns and Body Hacking

[Wade Tillett <wade@thefrictioninstitute.org>]

               [digested @ nettime -- mod (tb)]

Re: <nettime> Dreaming of Molly Millions, the Panther Moderns and Body Hacking
     Wade Tillett <wade@thefrictioninstitute.org>
     Wade Tillett <wade@thefrictioninstitute.org>

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Subject: Re: <nettime> Dreaming of Molly Millions, the Panther Moderns and
	Body Hacking
From: Wade Tillett <wade@thefrictioninstitute.org>
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2008 16:53:04 -0500

> > If "life has become an object of power in itself", then what about 
> > second life or the mass consensual hallucination of another life?
> 
> How is that different from, say, popular written fiction? RWA 
> estimates 64.5 million "Americans" (presumably residents of the USA) 
> read at least one romance novel last year.[2] Does that make romance 
> novel reading an even larger "contemporary occurrence"? Does it make 
> romance novels a more-significant "mass consensual hallucination"?
> 
> And if not, why not? That's the question I have to ask, when I look at 
> VW and the like critically. What justifies a claim or assumption that 
> these forms of activity have different implications for wider society, 
> or politics, or what have you?
> 
> Mind you, I'm not saying they *don't* have different implications. I'm 
> just saying I haven't seen a convincing argument why they would.

So what are the different implications for say, body hacking vs. second
life vs. an afterlife vs. romance novels? And, of more interest, where
do these different implications emerge from? Can we categorize all of
these as "mass consensual hallucinations"? Who decides these are
hallucinations (or consensual or mass for that matter)? 

I would think that one of the major differences is the degree to which
I, as participant, take the body/world to be real. How much do I believe
in this? How attached am I? To me personally then, body hacking would be
of significant difference to second life or romance novels or an
afterlife because of my (old-fashioned?, programmed?) deeply held belief
in the physical as somehow more real. I'm not saying this is a correct
belief, mind you, or one universally held. In fact, I would say that
reality is at best a slippery, ambiguous concept. But saying that and
believing it deep down are two different things.

So, if I believe in a body as real, to modify that real body
simultaneously modifies the contours my belief. I could perhaps do it
the other way: change my belief, and then the contours of the real body
would follow. But, it's hard to do that. I'm not much of an expert in
changing beliefs. So instead I use tools to hack the real (where real is
defined by the degree I believe in it). On the other hand, I could just
imagine a different body, but how can I make it real (to me, deep-down)?
How can I believe in it? It seems like it might be easier to modify the
real to reshape belief than vice-versa.

So, doesn't the implication for wider society and politics rest
somewhere in what counts as real ("change we can believe in (tm)" and
what not...)? And in what happens when these realities of different
truth value to different people are overlaid?

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Subject: Re: <nettime> Dreaming of Molly Millions, the Panther Moderns and
	Body Hacking
From: Wade Tillett <wade@thefrictioninstitute.org>
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2008 17:42:52 -0500

forgot to link these:
surgery.com the body space 1999 site at the internet archive here:
http://web.archive.org/web/19991012210546/http://surgery.com/topics/body.ht=
ml=EF=BB=BF

my post from 1999 on nettime about the above site.
my design me
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9911/msg00062.html

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