Everything on TV is Fake

You know that show you watch? Turns out, Stargate Studios does green screen work on it.

Your mother was right.

How The Internet Sees You

Once again, Facebook’s privacy options are in the news, with recent changes and ancient text messages fueling renewed concern. Provocative discussions of our changing expectations and norms are everywhere.

One abstract, and rather surprising, way of looking at your online footprint can be reached here. Aaron Zinman built the Personas engine for the MIT Media Lab, and it calls up one answer to the question “How does the Internet see you?” The colorful display changes each time you run it.

Even optimists and technophiles, and I count myself among them, would do well to admit that our networking is unprecedented, and consequences for law enforcement, politics, finance, friendship, and our workplaces are truly unknown.

I have not quit Facebook, like some are loudly recommending. I was, however, curious enough to spend a full half-hour examining and adjusting every single privacy setting on my account (top right hand side, Account > Privacy Settings). I recommend you do, too. I found very few of the settings where I wanted them.

It’s The Future: Myoelectric Mitchell

Claudia Mitchell has a new arm that she controls with her brain. Annalee Newitz has the story on io9. “Mitchell’s arm is ‘myoelectric,’ which means it picks up electrical signals coming straight from her brain, down her nerves. Electrodes help the signals jump from her body, to the prosthesis, which uses a computer to figure out which motion Mitchell is thinking about.”

The designer, Todd Kulken, wrote an article about the arm. He reminds us that we’ve built “a humanoid robot that can walk up and down stairs, a robot that can rove on Mars, collect samples, and send images back to Earth, and robots that are used to help perform surgery.” But prostheses present unique challenges. Targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR) is one solution:

The goal of TMR surgery is to utilize to the brain commands that still attempt to reach the missing limb… If these nerves are connected to different muscle sites, they can cause these other muscles to contract, producing the signals used to control myoelectric prostheses.

So the woman’s a cyborg. This kind of thing is not news, but it is still awesome.

Infoviz Art

I went for the naked people, and they didn’t disapoint: The Artist is Present, the big-deal performace art retrospective at MoMA through May 31, is well worth the trip. A few of Marina Abramović’s pieces broke through my instinctive skepticism, doing wierd and entrancing things to the passing of time. A few didn’t, but were interesting enough anyway. See it for yourself.

On our way out, my friend and I found ourselves in front of a big screen filled with bobbing pink baloons. Each represented a real profile pulled from a dating website; touching the screen sorted them by age, sex, opening and closing lines, ideal first dates. You were invited to explore the swirling shapes, wondering about the people on the other side, or try your hand at avatar matchmaking.

Around the corner were other examples of “infoviz” art, creative representaions of real world data. Carefully planned and yet largely out of the artist’s control, data mining and information visualization is fertile ground. Edits to Wikipedia entries, airplane and taxi traffic, and computers pondering chess moves translate surprisingly well to museum walls.

Every morning, planes take off in a wave that rolls across the country with the rising sun. Rendered in glowing white against blank black in a looping video, this looks like fireworks, or anemone orgasms. Wonder about all those journeys and destinations; watch the cycles, like breaths. The sensual and cerebral layer deliciously.

Explore more artist/data collaborations in this Slate slideshow. Don’t miss the massive and engrossing piece on break-ups, or the eerie Radiohead music video. Of course, most data visualization doesn’t get labeled fine art, but it can be as fascinating and moving as anything in a museum: check out some of the best here and here.

History of The World: Part 1 (through 100)

The British Museum is producing a series of stories attempting to tell the story of the human race. They selected 100 objects from their collection, and with BBC Radio 4, are building fifteen minutes of radio around each, releasing them in chronological order.

It’s worth noting the disenchantment over how the museum acquired these pieces, and the institution’s claims to universal importance; the imperial roots of this collection are clearly audible as you listen. The skillful storytelling and the range of experts you’ll hear goes a long way towards selling this project despite that, but the gorgeous story itself is the draw here: how humanity developed, grew, and changed over these last thousands of years.

No one account can do world history justice, but it would be criminal to give up trying. Nothing gives me a greater thrill than great big stories about the shape of the human story, and like other entries in this genre, A History of the World reminds you how complex and amazing this story really is.

We have accountants to thank, for example, for our species’ most important achievement: writing. What we would call literature was content with spoken language, memorized and performed generation after generation. The first bureaucrats, on the other hand, looked to reliable, physical accounting to administer an expanding state. Some of the earliest surviving writing concerns itself with rationing beer in 3000 BC.

It doesn’t hurt that Radio 4 delivers everything in a British accent and peppered with dry humor. One of the learned experts, on the topic of beer as currency, quips, “no liquidity crisis here.” Then he chuckles to himself. It’s so bad it’s awesome.

You can stream episodes here, but the site’s pretty messy. I recommend downloading the podcasts.

An article in The Economist first convinced me this project was worth following. The kicker is delicious: “Of the 100 objects, only one has not been selected yet. Mr MacGregor is waiting until the last possible moment to pick out the best symbol of our own time. Suggestions, please, on a postcard to: British Museum, London WC1B 3DG.”

It’s The Future: Chatroulette!

In the campy sci-fi classic Logan’s Run, our eponymous hero, in a funk, decides to put himself on the “The Circuit,” a cross between a television and a transporter. From the comfort of your living room, The Circut brings you face to face with a random sucession of fellow surfers looking for anonymous sex.

Chatroulette, the latest crazy thing to do on the internet, bears more than a passing resemblance to Logan’s machine. The site connects you to a series of video chats with randomized strangers, and you flip to a new partner with a cold “next,” just like in the film, but the similarities don’t end there. As described by Sam Anderson, in an arresting piece in New York Magazine, Chatroulette channels some of the same nihilistic boredom, sexual longing, and bracing loneliness as the fictional Circuit. It is also fueled by the same hope, however desperate and unlikely, that we can find real connections in impersonal, virtual spaces.

The stories he tells are funny, creepy, touching, and strange. If you’re tempted to interact with Chatroulette’s users, already 20,000 strong, be forewarned: “one out of every ten chatters is a naked masturbating man,” Anderson writes, and your lack of control (beyond that ever present “next”) leads to several flavors of unpleasantness. Still, he says, the effect is powerful, and the site not easily written off. Some interactions are quite affecting. And then there’s the possible evolution of this idea:

I found myself fantasizing about a curated version of ChatRoulette—powered maybe by Google’s massive server farms—that would allow users to set all kinds of filters: age, interest, language, location. One afternoon I might choose to be thrown randomly into a pool of English-speaking thirtysomething non-masturbators who like to read poetry. Another night I might want to talk to Jets fans. Another night I might want to just strip away all the filters and see what happens. The site could even keep stats, like YouTube, so you could see the most popular chatters in any given demographic. I could get very happily addicted to a site like that.

If you want to check out the messy, unfiltered reality, give it a try. Full disclosure: I loved this article but have no desire to wade in, not in this form. But who knows where this idea will take us? I can imagine a real demand for randomized social contact, with significant implications, if in the future people feel boxed in to a narrow demographic. Nothing like a roulette to shake up group-think and other social stasis.

Logan certainly learned how disruptive it can be. When The Circuit pops Jessica 6 (the lovely Jenny Agutter) into his life, she refuses sex and instead leads him to an adventure involving love, the Library of Congress, and a homicidal robot named Box. It upends his whole world, and ends up freeing the human race. So, you know, anything could happen.

Talkin’ Web 2.0 Blues

Anyone who’s spent more than a few minutes worrying over their various online profiles or talking about nothing with strangers has experienced the weariness that Scott Blaszak captures in this hilarious song. His perfect imitation of the “talkin’ blues,” a folk staple, collides deliciously with his subject and its absurd invented vocabulary. Really, who came up with “Orkut”?

Download the song here, or check out the whole Studio 360 segment here.

For some context, listen to Bob Dylan singing “I Shall Be Free No. 10” here.

Ira’s App is Awesome

And he explains why you should buy it in an adorable video.

He could sell me anything with that little self depreciating laugh. We’re lucky he only uses his powers for good. And not, say, ShamWow. Because I would own one.

Come on, it’s a This American Life app. You don’t really need to watch the video, do you? Just buy it now.

If you haven’t seen it, “John Smith,” episode six, season two of the television series, is breathtaking. Watch it on that new “This Am Life” app you just bought.

It’s The Future: Photosynth City

The first of an occasional series. It is the future: let your jaws drop.

Microsoft’s photosynth software constructs 3D models of individual monuments from tourists’ photos. This takes it a step further. You can begin to appreciate what the world will look like to our children.

Google Earth and Street View are only a few years old, and already we take them for granted. Don’t forget! These are miracles; we are blessed. For more on modeling Dubrovnik, read the Gizmodo article.

By the way: Facebook turns six years old tomorrow, February 4.

Hope for Haiti

This week Haiti has never been far from my thoughts. I feel very sad, humbled, and impotently angry. All my mighty cynicism about television news can’t defang the images on CNN these last few days. The facts are impossible and unbearable.

This is where storytelling matters. We could easily despair, with good cause, in the face of such monstrous unfairness and heartbreak. It would be entierly appropriate, but it benefits no one if we shut down. We need to continue taking our daily footsteps, planning for the future. It’s tempting to turn off the TV and forget; we all know how well we forget, and that sometimes we have to to keep from drowning. But we can also tell stories that let us stay present while retaining (inventing?) hope.

1. Text “Haiti” to 90999 to donate $10 to the International Response Fund.

Our power to quickly and cheaply share information and resources is very recent, completely miraculous, and potentially transformative. The earth has been killing and maiming us for 200,000 years; we are not ignorant, nor impotent, anymore. “Social networking” often seems silly, but a week like this helps us remember what a blessing it is to be connected to each other. My hopeful story: we care about each other’s well being, even across oceans, and we have the ability to act, even across oceans, more than ever before.

2. There is no evil here.

It’s easy to assume that our greatest enemies are other humans, especially after studying the wretched twentieth century. I don’t think this was ever true, and it seems to be increasingly false. It’s small comfort today, but these mass graves were not the result of any human intention. My hopeful story: we’re all on the same side here, as we increasingly are, struggling against natural forces (disease, poverty) instead of each other.

3. There is, incredibly, grace here.

Humans have endured impossible hardships and found hope in hopeless situations throughout history. This week has been no different. I am proud of the US Marines, NYC firefighters, and doctors from all over who travelled to Haiti this week to help. I am even more proud of the Haitians who have responded with vigor and grace. Some have marched and danced through the streets. My hopeful story: it is a blessing, an inspiration, and a privilege to share a planet with such people.

Give all you can, extend your best wishes to all affected, and find stories that keep you going. This isn’t about denying or forgetting horror and heartache. Storytelling is a creative and willful act that lets us hope, work, and find meaning when the facts would suggest we stop. Don’t stop.

…Or Not to Tweet

I signed up for Twitter a week ago at the request of a family member, and after resisting for so long, I’ve found it to be exactly what I expected: equal parts fascinating and ridiculous. I’ve read the stories about how powerful it was this summer in Iran, and the stories calling that into question. I’ve looked up what a “hashtag” is and wondered what Ashton Kutcher could possibly be saying that is so interesting. (I still don’t know.) I’ve marveled at my ability to look up what people near me are tweeting, and been amazed by how little I care.

One Slate article I read highlights the 90% of users of the service who don’t write often… or at all. Orphaned Tweets collects messages sent by those who “sign up for Twitter, post once, then never return.” They offer strange and often hilarious glimpses into anonymous lives: kttheet was “Wearing a gigantic t-shirt (2XL),” and anord04 was “eating a miniature pie.” DouglasAllen, in his first and only tweet, wrote: “I am writing an email to the makers of Spray N Wash to thank them for making a product that got the blood stains out of my new PJs and robe.”

Click on these accounts and you’ll find most of them have now been updated, after a year or more of inattention, presumably due to this very article. The second kttheet post assures us “My clothing is now appropriately sized,” and anord04 seems to be enjoying his new fame, as he is currently “Making fun of people for following me on twitter.” DouglasAllen, however, has never revealed what came of those blood stained pajamas. I fear we may never know.

To Google

She identifies herself as a photographer for the New York Times and asks my name, so I give it to her, carefully spelling the whole unique business of it, already wondering how the potential caption will affect my Google results. If this sounds odd, or vain, or both, it is, but it’s been on my mind for good reason. I refocus. She’s in town for the summer, a student from Tennessee. She is cute as a button. How would one go about getting a stranger’s number? I’m convinced that never actually happens outside of sitcoms. I am talking and talking, grateful for something to do besides waiting for the day to end. She’s smiling. She’s not walking away. If she’s humoring me, she’s really good at it. I try to guess what percentage of her work is chatting people up to get their names for a caption. I imagine a skilled photographer who due to a tragic inability to get strangers to spell their names for him is completely unable to make a living. The young woman in front of me will not have that problem. I watch her get turned down a few times; people think she’s trying to sell them something, or maybe suggesting they get involved in one of those unwelcome, interactive political or artistic projects people are always trying to pull off on city streets. It’s not her fault. She’s lovely; I can see her smile from here. If that’s acting, she’s missed her calling.

Having a singularly Google-able name has to be counted as a blessing. My privileged position is in no danger of being eroded, because the thing is just so damn unwieldy and ever so very unlikely. It’s all mine. Others have to worry about the relative fame of the serial killer, grumpy pundit, and television psychic with whom they share a name, but that will never be my problem. Instead, if you search for what’s on my birth certificate, you get exactly and entirely results having to do with me. This, I am learning, can be its own challenge.

For a long time, searching for my name returned this anarchist list serve I signed up for before I could legally drive. A cousin once virtually caught me, long after the 2000 election had come and gone, passionately arguing for the election of Ralph Nader. (I may need to explain, here, that these are not political positions that I currently hold. They are nowhere near political positions I currently hold; they seem like bad jokes, cringe-worthy, nonsensical. I contend that before the Internet many later revered men were, at the age of fourteen, similarly ridiculous. They just burned the stuff.) Most recently, as I applied to jobs left and right, I was unaware that the name on top of the resumes I was sending out returned a Digg profile cheerfully displaying, as my one and only “favorite,” an article called “I Smoke Pot, And I Like It.” When I became aware of this page just this week, it had been viewed forty-three times.

I Smoke Pot And I Like It was written by Will Wilkinson, a Research Fellow with the Cato Institute. After getting his B.A. from the University of Northern Iowa, receiving an M.A. from Northern Illinois University, being a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, and working for The Institute of Humane Studies and The Mercatus Center at George Mason University, he became editor of Cato’s web magazine, contributor to The Economist’s economics blog, and host of a show on Bloggingheads TV. He presents himself, in the postage stamp picture accompanying his writing in The Economist, Reason, Forbes, or on his excellent blog The Fly Bottle, in a suit jacket and tie, with that 1950s, “charming simpleton” hair part running across his head. Click the link to see what I mean. The article is a desperately needed argument for sanity in the government’s drug policy. Wilkinsons’s sober cost benefit analysis of the issue is, to the best of my knowledge, universally shared among economics departments and intelligent people everywhere. His position was advocated with particular power by the great Milton Friedman, he of the Nobel Prize, beginning decades ago. It was without embarrassment or uncertainty that I endorsed this essay, fully understanding the moral urgency of the violence, fear, misery and death that our current laws needlessly cause. I took the page down immediately.

I’m not someone who has taken naturally to managing my online identity. I’m supposed to be crafting a compelling argument for myself (be my friend! hire me! date me, why don’t you!) out of photos on Facebook, music on MySpace, incessant tweets and status updates and announcements of interesting vacation plans. I haven’t had the heart. Instead I’m almost entirely passive: there are one hundred and seventy-five pictures of me on Facebook, and I have not uploaded a single one.

I’d like accomplishments before I tout them. I’d like to have a better idea of what I’m selling before I market myself. I’d like to have a well defined aim before I start censoring what turns up when people try to find me. At this point, after being surprised by the existence, and then the prominence, of I Smoke Pot under my name, I feel like I can’t afford to wait. Out of a desire for basic presentability, a brush your teeth and shower kind of decency, I want my Google hits to be palatable to any conceivable interested party. An employer, say. A relative. A teacher I had in high school. I believe in the legalization of drugs, I really do. I’ll gladly have that conversation with any reasonable and interested person I know. It’s just that “I Smoke Pot and I Like It” is not what I want making my first impressions for me. If this is the first sentence you read about me, there’s a good chance it will also be the last, forget looking at the essay. Not only does this seem to say “I use drugs and feel the need to be loud about it,” which is not true, but also, crucially, that “I believe this is the most important fact for you to know about me.” Trust me. There are a hundred things I’d rather we start with than my man crush on Will Wilkinson and my thoughts on drug legislation.

My weight, for example. The only other thing of substance that gets drawn out of the interwebs when you call out my name, after my Facebook page, my damning Digg account, and the suck-up essay on AmeriCorps I wrote for an internship when I was fifteen, is a blog post from a guy I went to high school with. Like everyone else I went to high school with, he’s clearly gone and done awesome things while I wasn’t looking, and now keeps a blog chronicling his travels all over the world. One day, who knows why, writing from some distant continent he decided to share a memory from a certain high school history class. The teacher couldn’t see this kid, lucky him, because he was “completely blocked out from her view” by my “hulking body.”

There are a lot of ways to take this. First, most obviously, it’s really funny. I liked this guy. I remember him as a thoroughly friendly kid most well known for achievements on the soccer field, so discovering that he now writes earnest, personal narratives on his travel blog is great. To be included, however peripherally, is kind of neat. To discover that I am included only for blocking someones eye line, well, I just had to laugh. Then I thought about the gray sweatshirt I used to wear at all times, pulling down from the front pockets, hiding myself, lumbering through the halls. That qualifies as hulking, surely. Or hulking could refer to my body type, my broad shoulders that a few people have complimented over the years. I’m not a small person, certainly, which can make me feel safe, and at times even proud. I’ve never really wanted to trade in the wide shoulders for weaker, less substantial versions.

But who am I kidding? Clearly I am sitting there in everyone’s memories a fat slob, a lump of a thing, counted on to be wide enough to duck behind so the teacher doesn’t call on you. I am a throwaway joke, strangely named to be sure, but not worth mentioning anything further about. What this clearly means, I patiently inform myself, is that you are an embarrassment.

It’s curious, my former classmate’s decision to use my full name in this story fragment, where everyone else is identified only by their first. Maybe embarrassing me was his goal. Surely he’s aware of, and has considered at length, the fragile nature of my Google results. There’s a chance it has something to do with there being another character who shares my first name, up in the first paragraph… but I guess we’ll never know. Whatever the reason, it drove the point home: my name is so distinctive that I can easily control what it’s linked to, or just as easily can let it be determined for me, by accident, by chance, in weird and unpleasant ways.

I’ll get over “hulking.” I’ve lost a lot of weight recently, been eating right, been doing yoga, and today, that beautiful Times photographer left with my number. So it’s not just in sitcoms. It didn’t happen easily, of course. She walks over for the third time, draws out our goodbyes, patiently waits out my various unsuccessful attempts to steer the conversation towards naturally exchanging information. We shake hands, twice. The moment hangs. She’s still here, we’re still talking, and if I don’t take this chance now I’ll never forgive myself. Sometimes being passive is just wildly inappropriate. I have this opportunity to make a choice, to make an impression. Finally, I step up.

Delight of the Day

Today after work, I was talking with two coworkers, when in the course of our conversation one said she can not run on flat ground. When I asked what that meant, she said it’s because of a titanium rod in one of her legs. I immediately started grinning, and exclaimed, “Awesome! So you’re a cyborg! I’m a big fan of cyborgs! They are the future,” and then I gave her a high five. So that was pretty much the greatest thing ever: a high five for someone being a cyborg.

A related delight came to me later: we can’t tell who is a cyborg by looking at them. The future will be easier than anyone expects. It will be normal. Hell, this is the future. I work with a cyborg.

Afterward I walked west and discovered how easy the park is to walk across, and how beautiful a thing it is to walk across the park at midday. There’s no better vantage point to marvel at the blessings of our modern, cosmopolitan world. An observation: some people would do well to stop running so much.

Teratology

I had no idea there was a word for it before today, but there it was in front of me: the abnormal and the deformed, walls of skulls and eight-foot colons and the chair that the original “Siamese” twins had built for them. What I had heard, not inaccurately, billed as a “museum of medical oddities,” and had consequently driven a few hours to find, was the outwardly proper Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. Home of a collection intended to educate medical students on potential traumas, diseases and weirdness back whenever it was put together (shows how closely I was paying attention to the fine print… I’m guessing the 1800s), the dense, small space houses a woman turned to soap, a man whose muscles turned to bone, plaster casts of eyeball tumors, creepy things in formaldehyde, drawings of conjoined twins through time, a giant’s skeleton, and a comparitively mild exhibit on the health of U.S. presidents. In case you were curious, the most unnerving human anatomical possibility is a fully developed eyeball tumor. No contest. Eyeball tumor. Wow.

On the ride home, discussion found it’s way to the fantastic 1932 horror movie “Freaks.” The movie casts circus freaks in starring roles, highlighting their sense of community and the strange and awesome ways they manage or adjust for their abnormality. The thing that stayed with me the most (ok, after “one of us… one of us…”) was the opening title card. In setting the stage, it describes how the diseases and deformities on display in the film are rapidly being cured or corrected by medicine, and therefore the contemporary generation of a lot of freaks (I think pinheads were mentioned specifically) will be the last. These are words from a film released in 1932, so I can only imagine how much further along medical science and technology is today.

It is a fascinating, curious “problem” that society is faced with when it has the knowledge and the means to make abnormal people more normal. There seems to be a lot of hand wringing going on about how medical intervention to change a condition stigmatizes it, suggests that all must aspire to a “normal” ideal, and removes the impetus for tolerance as well as the contact based engine of it. So what justifications do we believe in for limits on the individual’s right to inhabit a body he or she chooses? Consenting adults are allowed a good deal of freedom to modify their biological raw material for personal reasons – tattoos, piercings, hair coloring, and makeup are common, but increasingly profound elective cosmetic surgery is also widespread and gaining in popularity. What societal goals should trump the individual’s control over the shape of his or her own body?

The fantastic thing about this question is that prior to very recent human history it was next to meaningless, because available technology for body modification was either inoffensive, gradual, or nonexistent: humans could adjust diet, clothing and exercise, and make only minor, temporary, and superficial changes beyond that. We can see this in the lives of the “normal,” who were straightforwardly living what they were handed biologically, and in the lives of those men and women who were born at significant remove from the human body’s averages, who were for lack of other options doing the same. Conditions present at birth that led to loss of bodily functioning, pain, and severe social barriers, conditions that narrowed potential employment, impaired the ability to have and raise a family, caused limited mobility or early death, these were dealt with as gracefully as could be managed, because humans had no technologies to offer them control over their own bodies. So we all went our merry ways, inhabiting the bodies genetic and environmental chance handed to us, and in most instances, couldn’t even imagine biological choice possible.

Today, I think it’s clear, both those born under the category of “normal” and those born with recognized variation from that norm, including variations that cause significant impairment, have more avenues open to them than ever before. We learn more about the shockingly extensive degree of choice a wealthy American currently has over his or her biological systems ever day, on voyeuristic television programming that reports exactly what new, completely optional surgery is being performed on those with the money to pay for it. We also hear stories of birth abnormalities being operated on successfully, of diseased being treated or cured, of the survival and in some cases long, productive lives of those who only a few years ago would have been doomed by their lot in the genetic lottery to extremely limited lives, or would not have lived at all. I doubt these stories, the cosmetic and the medical, strike many as two dimensions of the same trend, but it seems to me that the exact same thing is happening in both cases. Whether or not our current medical edifice labels a surgery elective or curative, what we are seeing is humans beginning to flex their new found ability to make transformational personal biological choices.

As many commentators have documented, there is a hugely fuzzy line between correcting biological “mistakes” and offering up the same technology for use in optional improvements. Medicine has learned, for instance, how to significantly extend human height for many, causing people who once would have had no say in the matter to chose to live lives as taller humans (the men and women receiving this treatment to date have to my knowledge all been of below average height). Where should we draw the line between those who are so far out of the mainstream when it comes to height that growing taller is classified a medical procedure, correcting a diagnosable flaw, and those humans who just really wish they were taller? What is the optimal human height range, outside of which you are allowed to resort to growth hormone therapy, and within which you are not? I have little sympathy for such distinctions. It seems unjustifiable to divide human beings from on high into those with different rights when it comes to biological alteration. It seems unjustifiable, actually, to limit acceptable biological alterations to those changes that bring people closer to human averages.

What about the man of average height who wants to be of above average, who dreams of a career in the NBA? What government bureaucrat has the right to deny him, when he’s willing to pay for the procedure and accept the risks? What societal “good” do we preserve by limiting freedom in this area? It would seem to be the same sort of exaltation of human “norms” and averages that disability advocates decry when it comes to treatment of those with divergent bodies. The expansion of choice will no double cause many who today are abnormal to seek normality, and this will no double have repercussions when it comes to societal treatment of those who chose to retain their nontraditional biology. But this is the same choice we will all have: a body which generally conforms to norms and expectations, or a body wildly divergent from them. To deny this choice to those born abnormal seems criminal and discriminatory; to deny this choice to the enormous pool of the medically normal but personally unsatisfied just seems impossible, not to mention unwise and cruel.

It will flow naturally, then, from medicine tackling mental impairment that artificial mental enhancement will become commonplace. Surgery and pharmaceuticals pioneered on those with below average capabilities will, once tested, become available to anyone looking for above average capability. If we’ve learned anything, its that the human appetite for self betterment is insatiable. We won’t stop at curing all known diseases. We’ll begin to view previously “natural” capabilities as woefully unsatisfactory, and this may happen in the blink of an eye, just as contemporary laptop computers outperform the fastest supercomputer in existence twenty years ago. We’ll also discover all the things we’d enjoy doing if only our biology allowed us, and then begin realize them.

So what will the world begin to look like when humans start exercising greater choice in their biology, be it conforming to or confounding anatomical averages? This choice, offered up across the board (if you can pay for it, and accept the risks, sign here) would level the playing field in a truly wonderful and profound way when we consider the maddening unfairness of a pre-1932 world filled with carnival freaks and others who, not by choice but by chance, found themselves far outside of the mainstream of human social and productive life. It’s terribly impolite to say it, but despite how beautiful we find human diversity, the fact that it is imposed by genetic selection causes a lot of suffering and loss of opportunity: only the beautiful can be beautiful, only the strong can be strong, some of us cannot experience biking along a river or watching great cinema or hearing great music, ever, and that’s just tough. The extension of basic human abilities – sight, mobility, hearing, memory – to those who don’t now have access to them would in itself be a glorious achievement. Cochlear implants and modern prosthetic limbs suggest how completely and how soon technology will allow this.

Of course, in other ways, the playing field will be less level than ever before. Our species will experience intensified biological segregation and inequality, which although well entrenched already thanks to substantial differences in diet, health care, personal grooming budgets and the option for cosmetic surgery, is today a pale shadow of what it will become. Billions will continue to struggle for basic nutrients and bodily function while several million will pioneer advanced stages of biological reinvention.

The separation of human bodies into new forms will not simply mirror wealth, however, as people will have wildly divergent goals. For many, optimal health and physical beauty will be something traditional, easily recognized, and familiar, probably a slight enhancement and exaggeration of the typical human form. Many will continue to adjust their music collections, social networks, travel plans and hobbies more avidly and carefully than their bodies, and more boldly; I can’t imagine that true adventurous biology will be a mainstream pursuit, at least not any time soon. But what of our minorities? Already many of us choose physical appearances at odds, in varying degree, with expectations or notions of beauty. Niche athletes in the year 2008, as we witnessed at the Olympics, have freakish and fantastical bodies finely tuned to whatever sport they have chosen, bodies that come in all shapes and sizes but that are unified in their high level of directed, intentional alteration. Many communities create and embody alternative notions of the desirable and the possible, modifying their bodies with scars, piercings, ink, amputations, dye, implants; there’s even that one guy with the ear in his arm. Tomorrow giantism and dwarfism will be chosen, not an accident of birth; gills, sail fins, scales, and wings will be both beacons of irrepressible, brash individualism and centerpieces for close knit communities of transhumans. I look forward to photosynthesizing skin, myself.

Anorexia in runway models, bulimia in figure skaters, and steriod abuse in professional athletes and entertainers all point to the extremes that some of us will go to in inventing new ideals for ourselves. Don’t kid yourself. Many of our fellow humans, in the coming generation, will craft and inhabit bodies that to our standards are downright grotesque. Some men will seek to imitate their favorite superhero; I can’t imagine not one person will attempt a giant green “Hulk” body. There will likely be women who continue to reduce their width and extend their height, in a feedback loop with their peers, to comic (and likely tragic) extremes. The consequences of limitless body modification on gender expression and sexual function are truly awesome to contemplate; speculation on what forms that will take would require another book-length discussion.

There will be inventions, hybridization, ornamentation, innovations artistic and functional (flying will undoubtedly be a rewarding and exhillarating experience), and whole categories of designed, biological change that are impossible to forsee. From cottage industy to recognized university degree, cosmetic body design will grow rapidly and transform millions of lives. The abberations, the choices a few will make that most or all other humans will look upon with disapproval and disgust, should be allowed, and even celebrated. They will represent the triumph of the mind over the dictates of biology, and represent a huge expansion in human freedom. There have always been giants, bearded ladies, human torsos, living skeletons; there have always been abnormal bodies, some (if we’re honest) unbearably grotesque. The crucial difference is that in the past, the people who had to live in and with those bodies had no choice in the matter. When everyone can be as average as they want to be, those who chose abnormality will not only profit themselves from living out their dreams, but will reward the rest of their species with continued, and expanding, human diversity. Diversity will be as beautiful and desireable as it has always been, only this time around, it will be created through human choices and not genetic whims.

A few other notes from today. Downtown Philadelphia is terribly clean and quiet, and stunningly dull: enormous windowless walls, hospitals and banks, a few beautiful old buildings and all too many terrifically ugly new ones. Waffle House is… beyond. It’s worth a six hour drive thinly disguised as a field trip to a museum of medical oddities just to sit in that butter-yellow box and gorge on waffles, hash browns, and bacon. What a world.

Better Living Through Biology

Back in April, William Saletan reported that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has thrown its hat in the ring for the development of non-animal meat products, putting together sort of an X Prize for the world of vat grown tissue. The internal politics of this group are fascinating in their own right, and Saletan focuses on these, observing that, like the interested parties in the abortion debate, “Pragmatists thought they could broaden the movement’s appeal by changing its language and arguments. Purists worried that these changes would narrow the movement’s agenda. Both sides were right. This is an important lesson in politics: Message, constituency, and agenda are related. The broader your message, the broader your constituency, and the narrower your agenda. You have to choose your trade-offs.”

So true, and so rarely admitted by ideologues. I am happy to sit on the sidelines as P.E.T.A. fights among itself. My brief contact with ideological “movement” types left me with little doubt that I wanted nothing to do with such hot air. On the other hand, meat without animals! Think of the possibilities! I did, anyway. Some of them. What follows is something I wrote, ranting to a friend and probably making an ass of myself in the process, after I read about this back in April. This post is tagged as “wild speculation” for a reason, but despite the excitable tone, there’s gotta be something true here: the future will be wilder than any of us can imagine.

I’d be shocked if it took more energy to make meat outside of an animal than in it. If that’s currently the case we obviously need to hold off on this as a mass market technology until the opposite becomes true. It would happen eventually, though; without the huge waste that is the industrialized production of heads, livers, hooves, stomachs and skin, and the expenditure of calories over the lifetime of meat animals, and the waste produced by these animals, all of which is just disposed of, our meat will one day require a tiny fraction of the grain, the land, and the electricity that it does today.

The ability to tweak the end product in direct as opposed to indirect ways is one of the most attractive features of this method of food production. I know we get a superior end product from grass feeding and certain other cow-rearing methods than from certain other cow-rearing methods, but these are blunt and poorly understood tools in affecting the meat we consume. After study and trial and error, I can’t imagine we wouldn’t be able to positively affect the lipid profile, protein content, and other variables. There’s a huge amount we don’t know about precisely how nutrition, or I should say food, in general, interacts with and achieves human health, but I find within myself a nearly boundless faith that in time all things will become known to us. (Whenever this belief starts to feel silly and embarrassing, I remind myself of our record thus far, review the past 100,000 years or so in my head. Never fails to make the impossible seem guaranteed.) When we do have goals – more holistic targets than vitamin content, perhaps, or even something completely unknown to us today – as long as we’re aiming for something measurable, we’ll be able to experiment towards mass production of meat that meets those goals.

Let’s set aside practical, human-survival-on-a-crowded-planet type thinking, because these benefits are easy to predict, and if survival for survival’s sake is the goal and pleasure and diversity of experience are of no import, meat eating of both the animal and the non-animal kind is worthless. Let’s set aside the most immediate, straightforward results that adopting extra-animal meat production wholesale would have on humans (the price of meat would drop, making it available to billions for the first time, and the price of high quality meat would drop to a greater degree, improving the health and increasing the happiness of meat eaters everywhere). And let’s set aside the sea change in the amount of captivity and suffering that sentient organisms on this planet would experience.

Humans behave in very predictable ways when set free on a new task: whenever there is the time, the wealth, and the technological ability, they will tinker and play and dream up things more wonderful than a field’s pioneers ever expected. With the advent of extra-animal meat, there will be adjustments in every conceivable facet of human life. There will be counter-measures, backlashes, nostalgia. I just learned that country music became popular just at the moment the United States ceased to be a majority rural nation – when nostalgia and longing for a lost, simpler time became a majority experience among a newly minted nation of urbanites. This has implications for the practice of animal husbandry: the lore, the honor, the pride and the cache accompanying the production of animal meat for human consumption may explode. There will also be disdain and dismissal akin to the use of rotary phones, curiosity akin to the use of eight-track tapes, and accusations of barbarism akin to… well, the use of capital punishment in all those other industrialized nations that have long since ended it.

When making meat in the kitchen becomes an entire culinary discipline, like making bread or making pastries, when chefs have control over not just sourcing their meat but shaping it, when home kits allow for huge variation in taste, nutrients, texture, color, and every other meaningful variable, when meat ceases to be something we eat because it exists in the world around us in predetermined form and becomes something we make exactly the way we want it to be, however we want it to be, how many trillions of gastronomical experiences and combinations will we realize, almost overnight? Who will get rich formulating and marketing the flavor of the week? How much better will cheap meat-based food taste!? How many hours of human ingenuity and industry will be spent blissfully, by the few with a taste for it, adjusting time, temperature, microbes, ingredients? What trade magazines will crop up? What writing careers will be made reporting on the variety, recent innovations, new combinations? What corporations will sponsor the annual world championship meat making competitions? How many new restaurants will appear, claiming to have founded a new kind of cooking, a new kind of eating? Who will cheapen and exploit this ability? What ad men and women (and machines) will come up with soulless jinges to hawk the latest no-calorie all-vitamin great-tasting answer to all our problems? What artisans will quietly cultivate and enjoy this, like potters? What daredevils with warp and radicalize and obsess over this, like base jumpers? What artists will declare this a new canvass, what performance artists will use it as a prop, what small town will brand itself with some story related to this? (Home of CocaBeef!)

What plant traits with get combined with this malleable tissue, yielding what unimaginable and wondrous and disgusting and divine and dangerous materials years and years from now? What teenagers will distinguish themselves from mainstream society by the kind of homemade meat they consume? What young professionals with declare certain strains of meat indicators of taste and sophistication and other meat-fashions crude and inelegant? What entrepreneur will cook up some impossibly tricky or rare combination of ingredients and sell it to the super-rich with an insane markup? How will local pride and xenophobia color these new kinds of foodstuffs? What will we associate, culturally, with the different ways of getting meat? Who among us will insist on animal rearing and slaughter in the production of their meat? Where? When? What stories will they tell themselves about this insistence on the old ways? What stories will they tell themselves about the people who eat the modern kind? What wonderful or rotten childhood associations will we bind to memories of the meat we made or consumed while growing up? How many currently unimaginable careers with this create: in research and development, the inevitable government oversight, production, management, marketing, engineering, design? How many long and well-loved careers with this destroy? How many towns, how many hundreds of thousands of meat-producing acres of the world’s surface will this reshape, both culturally and physically? What will we do with the land we currently use to raise corn to feed to cows? What will we do with the land we currently house slaughterhouses on? How soon can our children tour a carefully preserved slaughterhouse on a school trip to marvel at the barbarity of their ancestors? What will the children of those who work in slaughterhouses think of their parent’s profession? What mischievous curiosity will inspire the slaughter and cooking of a real animal, every once in a while, just to see how it tastes? What will that killing feel like, what will it mean? What will our relationship with animals be in the future? How many pigs, cows, and chickens will this planet sustain in the year 2100? One million? Four thousand? Will pigs become common household pets, bred and engineered for loyalty and intelligence? Will we morally judge the death involved in other animals’ nutrient acquisition, and begin to insist that those close to us (our pets, perhaps, or chimpanzees) have nothing to do with such behavior? How will we morally signify the distinction between tissue formerly incorporated into organisms with central nervous systems and tissue never associated with a central nervous system?

What do I not know enough to wonder about? What should I be asking?

In my opinion the logic of extra-animal meat is inescapable, will inevitably will come to dominate the market for human meat consumption and will transform gastronomy. If technology is not ready to provide this to the next generation of humans (which would surprise me a great deal), it nevertheless will find its way there, and our food system will someday be free of the astronomical material and energy waste and moral unpleasantness that goes hand in hand with the consumption of parts of formerly living animals. It is not a question of it but of how, when, where, and with what unforeseen consequences, remembering that unforeseen consequences can be both positive and negative. Our coming century will be shaped more by biologists (and once we’re sufficiently advanced, by environmental scientists, meteorologists, and all those who study the large, complex systems that have heretofore been closed to our understanding and influence) than by physicists or chemists or even traditional materials engineers; pretty much anything we could hope to do with inorganic machines I predict can be done better with organic machines. And I think the change in meat production, as revolutionary as it will be environmentally and culturally and economically and politically and morally, will the the very least of our adventures.

To infinity, and beyond!

Here ends my April email. To all this, I would add one further wild speculation, touched on when I wondered about our relationship with animals in the future. Freed of the need to artificially separate ourselves from the rest of sentient life in service of our continued ability to consume it in comfort, how will we frame the rights, the potential, the beauty and wonder of the other most intelligent of earth’s animals? I think that uplift, a theoretical scientific possibility inspired by science fiction, is closer than most would guess. Enlarging known membership of the culture club from one to two or three would be profoundly disruptive, exciting, dangerous, and awesome (truly awesome). Once an intelligent species crosses the boundary into culture, develops intelligence to the degree that it can transmit information from generation to generation through non-biological means (writing, artifacts, instruction), whole worlds open up, and no one can predict what insights non-human intelligence would offer the world of knowledge. Also unknown: how our seemingly boundless capacity for violence and desire to be masters of all we survey will play itself out on this stage. We currently enslave over 27 million human beings (both the largest number and the smallest percentage of slaves in human history, thanks to population growth). What will it look like, the ability to create sentient creatures with sub-human or specialized intelligence? What will the long-term effects on our self-concept and our culture be? What reverence, hatred, or inferiority complex will these species develop towards us? What political or economic relationship will our fellow intelligent species have with us, with each other? As the breathless narrator of the “Beneath The Planet Of The Apes” trailer puts it, “can a planet long endure, half human… and half ape?”

Surely these technological and ethical choices lie open before us regardless of our preference for extra-animal or animal meat. My glass-half-full hope is that by the time we’re actually interacting with uplifted chimps and dolphins, unrelated technologies will have rendered robotic assistance cheaper and easier than intelligent biological assistance, and unrelated social and economic developments will have forcefully and finally rendered the arrangements that permit enslavement in the world today a thing of the past. An end to animal consumption and a flowering of peaceful, cooperative, technologically enhanced human potential cannot help but advance our collective moral perfection to boot; the barbarism we see in previous generation’s social arrangements, values, slavery, and entertainment will be echoed in our descendants’ view of our food production, relative material deprivation, zoos, and costly warfare. We’ve already begun re-negotiating our relationship with apes, in appealing directions. Can you say retirement homes for chimpanzees? Here’s hoping I’m around to see great parts of this possibility come to fruition.

William Saletan is a wonderful guide to the increasingly complex questions about human biology we are facing: his columns on abortion, polygamy, homosexuality, bestiality, body modification, sex practices and norms, reproduction, and the politics, ethics, and technological innovations that color these topics are delightful and thought provoking. Read his blog here and mainline his contributions to Slate here.