Technology

Take Heart, Evidence Pouring in Hourly (Part 1)

Photo by Håkan Dahlström Flickr/creative commons

Photo by Håkan Dahlström
Flickr/creative commons

The far right believes they have a chance
to remake the world into the christian,
capitalist theocracy they have always wanted.

Even liberal media says, “If they win
this election cycle
they will do things that would
reverse history for 75 years!”

But none of that’s going to happen.

Just before the U.S. Election a week ago, I put forth the theory that non-Republicans should not fear, in fact we ought to take heart — that the probable Republican takeover the Senate and their increased footprint in the House were going to be good things for progressives. This is the right time in history to put these jokers on full display and in sharper relief so that everyone, at least more and more people, can see them for whom they really are.

Since the election, I’ve taken particular delight in just how fast and furious the Republicans are continuing to repudiate their reputations and dispel their humanity in the things they do and say. The timeline for their backward thinking to be completely expunged here and abroad has been immeasurably upstepped. The circumstances for progressives to act boldly have arrived.

Check the bread and circus for yourself. Don’t take my word for it. Assess for yourself the relative levels of buffoonery in whatever issue Repubs haplessly find themselves talking about, from the climate, the military, technology, you name it. Nothing they do or say suggest any understanding of the inherent equality of all people, of history, or even how our government actually works.

The only measurement we have, the one that matters, is the amount of special interest cash that is always involved. Whenever and wherever we follow the money, it leads to what’s rotten. Fortunately, these rotten cavities of entrenched special interests, rewarding corporate elites at everyone else’s expense, also offer a crystal clear roadmap for populists and all activists devoted to economic and social justice.

Some of my musings on this subject can be found in Part 2, tomorrow, and I would enjoy hearing from you if you too see it for yourself and want to share, here or on Facebook. (Maybe I should start numbering each of their rabbit holes for posterity.)

Each time one of them opens their mouth to speak, they show themselves to be, at best, uninformed, and, at worse, delusional. A shady combo of plain greed and stupidity takes over their thinking. It doesn’t appear they’ve read the news or read a book or seem to have studied much in college or since. Add to that the sweaty hysteria of desperate people driven by fear gasping for relevance, it’s almost sad (but not, really).

In VenusPlusX’s quest for a more perfect world of peace and universal equality, where every child born survives with all of its human rights unchallenged, we of course continue to focus on life-threatening issues such as climate change and the military and supporting net neutrality to make sure all voices are heard.

Freedom will not be a reality until we address the most pressing problems, the ones that are direct threats to life on this planet. The good news is that it will be the process of our joining together across borders and cultures to solve these life-threatening problems that will perforce bring about solutions to all the scaffolding issues such as ending racism, sexism, genderism, xenophobia, ageism, income inequality, and unharnessed capital greed.

Solving these planetary problems will re-enfranchise the voiceless of this world, and make sure we do have a world. Get active, do something. If you are already an activist in any area, continue to connect the dots between all of these issues — they are all connected, and all, in the end, are matters of life and death.

 

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Net Neutrality on the front burner, at last

Basically Every Big Internet Firm Signs Letter Against FCC’s Net Neutrality Plan

There has been a rush of public pressure on the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) to put off the May 15 vote that would drastically change the Internet. The commission has proposed allowing big providers (Verizon and Comcast to name two) to create higher priced “fast lanes” for big media companies such as Netflix to move their content, costs that will be passed onto consumers. Instead of maintaining the free and democratic access to the utility of the Internet, there would be winners and losers, different classes of Internet users.

WikiCommons

WikiCommons

Now over a 100 tech companies, including Google and Amazon, have come together to oppose these proposed new rules, in an effort organized by New America’s Open Technology Institute. In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler and the agency’s four commissioners, the companies warn of “grave threat to the Internet.”

Right now there is a split among the commission chair and two Democratic members on whether or not these rules go into effect next week. The Republican commissioners are on the side of maintaining the Internet’s existing net neutrality.

As we have pointed out before, this issue should be important to every small business owner, every non-profit organization, and every activist who makes way for the voiceless. Just a casual look at emerging democracies is proof enough of just how important net neutrality is to the eventual peaceful resolution of all differences, and how it will help end of the most destructive forms of nationalism.

Get involved, and make your voice heard.

 

Introducing our upcoming book, The Unseen Journey (working title)

Photo courtesy of Larry D. Moore  Wikimedia Commons

Photo courtesy of Larry D. Moore
Wikimedia Commons

This is a newly carved out space to periodically share excerpts
from our new book prior to its publication later this year.
We welcome (we crave) your comments, suggestions, and critiques.

Shortly before Dan Massey hung up his keyboard and departed for cosmic shores, he and I had more or less finished the manuscript of what we had only referred to during the previous 30 months as the book. But it is also something that has been in the making through our entire 40-year relationship.

Technologists and teachers by trade, we two strode through decades, hand and hand as close as two souls could be, looking at the cosmos and all its possibilities. We ruthlessly stripped away millennia of mysticism and superstition, and as much as possible applied the scientific method, measurement, and experimentation to evaluate the social consequences of our personal experiences with the interacting personalities and systems that we refer to as cosmic technology.

Like everyone else, we seek enhanced living, a state of being that is transhuman and surpasses, or cures, the stagnation of homo sapien man. By unpacking cosmic technology, we uncover an energy and connection to the entire universe, a living state of joyful immortality in the here and now, and can at last uncover the spiritual basis of all things erotic.

There are no tricks or gimmicks, no religion or even an order of doing this or that, but rather the direct access to the secrets of the universe though a built-in physical connection. This human aspect to cosmic technology is so deeply embedded  and available to each individual that it is a wonder civilization isn’t already further along because of it.

Although known or variously ignored though the ages, a relative few have yet realized that our erotic senses (our love senses) are the conduit of this cosmic knowledge and new energy, whether asexual, as in your friend’s comforting hand upon your shoulder when you needed it the most, any simple act of doing good to others, or the rush of sexually explicit touch sometimes leading to ecstatic orgasm, and practically every bio-chemical and -electrical feeling in between.

It’s all about Love actualized as Truth (consistent realities), Beauty (orchestrated or accidental harmony), and Goodness (motivation to do good to others). No matter what your station or situation in life, true freedom and immediate enhanced living are here for the taking, if you let nothing but Love rule your heart. 

From The Unseen Journey . . . (all rights reserved).

The underlying fundamental absolute of the universe in which we live is the power we recognize in the desire to do good to others, which we properly name Love. Love is expressed in and bestowed upon every level of universe reality, from the most perfected, absolute, or final, qWa to the most primitive human-like person able to make moral decisions.

Love is expressed and perceived differently at each level of progressive maturation and perfection, in a manner uniquely significant and appealing to the esthetics and values of each level.
If divine love is manifest on every level of being, then it must be apparent in our direct, sensory, physical world, and not be limited to the domain of the super consciousness.

Where is this?
The most direct, basic, physical manifestation of the reality of Love is experienced in erotic joy, in the intense experience of neurological orgasm, or even the warm feeling of pleasure of a friend’s hand on your arm when you need comforting. Sexual or not, pleasure activates the very same erotic senses. In any case, the stimulated sensorium explodes with joy as the individual consciousness briefly impinges on the reality of absolute Love.

And what should be our attitude towards this experience of momentary contact 9O’ with maximum joy? Certainly not fear, though that is the reaction of far too many who have been told and/or come to believe that they are unworthy of pleasure.

What is the appropriate action of any person confronted with a vast goodness beyond any other human sensory experience? There can be only one answer.

Worship.
Worship erotic joy.
Worship the living experience of orgasm and every simple pleasure.
Worship the most basic sensory experience of Love.
Worship is the conscious act of surrendering one’s mind, one’s will, to the object of worship. Worship makes the worshiper more like that which is worshiped.
Worship of the orgasmic spirit of Love defeats barriers to interpersonal expression of Love through service. Worship opens the door of the mind to Truth, which directs our action.
Through erotic worship the human spirit is progressively attracted to higher levels of understanding, enjoyment, and service.
Those who would deny this first great step, this open and personal acceptance of a physical gift of Love, place a barrier between the human state and the progressive expression and experience of Love.
When worship of Love is only invoked in the abstract or in deep meditative states, extreme focus is required to experience enlightenment. By comparison, when the first step in the path of Love recognition and worship is taken in the erotic, growth of the consciousness to experience greater enlightenment is simplified and expedited for most people.
All humanity knows erotic joy. The time has come for all humanity to acknowledge the supremacy of erotic joy and join in worship of this amazing, far too long ignored, gift of Love to humanity.
Join me today and forever in the worship of the power of erotic joy.

 

 © VenusPlusX, 2013. All rights reserved.
Already available now as a companion reference, A Course in Immortality (and in Spanish, Un Curso En Inmortalidad), which will be published as an included Appendix in the new book.

Arse Elektronika: Come for science!

Jack Diehl, Alison Gardner, and Dan Massey contributed to this article.

VenusPlusX attended the Arse Elektronika conference in San Francisco (September 29 – October 2), hosted by the Austrian “art-technology-philosophy groupMonochrom. This energetic collective has run the European AE for many years, and this is the fifth year in a row they have brought its parallel to San Francisco. The call for entries last February gives some insight to what unfolded.

This year’s theme was Sex and Technology. It was hard to know what to expect from the schedule of four days of programming over three different venues, with intriguing titles like “Phallic Home Economics,” “Make your own Mind Controlled Dildo,” and “It’s Wankie Time!” But we are not complaining, we had to see it.

The entire conference had a natural leftist perspective, expressed in the sub theme, “Screw The System.” Kink was commonly understood, appearing quite abundantly in many presentations and all over the walls of the San Francisco Center for Sex and Culture, one of the 3 venues. Technology, the Internet, and hacking were also well represented. The last day of Arse Elektronika was held at one of the country’s biggest hackerspaces, Noisebridge. (Here is Jack’s brief video walk-through of Noisebridge.)

The first night was at author-rac0nteur Chicken John‘s legendary warehouse, a multi-media opening introduction made up of summaries of the previous 5 conferences in San Francisco, previews of talks to come during the following days, lots of high jinks, and some very enjoyable entertainment from “song a day guy” Jonathan Mann (who has made a song everyday for the last 1,000+ days.)

What Does It Mean To Love A Machine? (buy for $1)
Until The Vulcans Call (free download)

The presentations were extremely wide-ranging, and showed the creativity possible as a new age of sexual freedom emerges. Each one incrementally stretched the group or “hive” mind in real time.

Among the dozen+ offerings, we heard from Kitty Stryker in her frank talk, “Sex Work, Disability, and Stigma”  and Maymay presented “A Class Analysis of Social Status in the BDSM Scene” (also available on YouTube). David Fine, who vaguely describes himself as “a Sex Robot from the 25th century” spending his time in our era guiding technology in useful, or at least interesting, directions, brought us his reimagining of the Mindflex kids’ toy (available on Amazon) which he modified to activate a vibrator, simple and perhaps the first attempt we’ve seen to apply an EEG headset  to a sex toy; The future possibilities are endless.

Most expressive of the intersection of sex and technology, though, is the impressive work and activism of Ned and Maggie Mayhem.  Their  PSIgasm (that’s Pounds per Square Inch, pronounced, sci-gasm) is one of the first legitimate, fully engineered entries into the nascent science of teledildonics. As they describe it . . .

PSIgasm was conceived in 2010 by an HIV prevention specialist and an experimental physicist, both of whom moonlight as queer porn performers and are active in the Bay Area sex positive scene. The project revolves around measurement devices that can be used as sex toys, simultaneously getting people off and monitoring physiological responses correlated with arousal and orgasm.

PSIgasm

Considering themselves citizen scientists, the Mayhems prompted the assembled to start thinking about other commercial grade sex toys that might emerge and use their application and the sensors they’ve engineered in this device, and the ways that data on your heart rate, anal contractions, other statistics recorded during orgasm will prove beneficial.

Besides the PSIgasm project and being so damn cool, the Mayhems are HIV and sex educators, and among many useful things for society that they advocate for, they  campaign to empower others to produce and star in ethical and sex positive pornography to escape financial hardship. The pair are coming to DC in March to participate in the Momentum conference, and hold other events we will be promoting soon. For now, they are headed to the next phase of substantial testing and data collection for the PSIgasm under their slogan, “Come for Science.”

Overall, we assert that the teledildonics field hasn’t received the attention it deserves. These breakthroughs will lead to better and safer sex practices and extend to people often excluded from traditional social connections.

The toys being made right now are mostly DIY (do-it-yourself), and have very little financial backing. Technology will continue to be applied to sex, and as society grows out of its strangling sexual repression and we move further into an interconnected world, there is no doubt in our minds that the future of teledildonics will be exciting. Want to contribute yourself? Check out The Sex Prize, a new competition announced at this year’s conference challenging entrants to develop open source teledildonics software for f#^king machines. Entries will be judged by a Turing Test, meaning your program has to preform so well that it is indistinguishable from a human operator. With countless people willing to test such devices, we can’t wait to see what people come up with.