Extreme Futurist Festival of Transhumanism 2011 fronted by Rachel 'Haywire' Mendelson : A REVIEW
Reginald Honeysack B.Q.
'Haywire' Mendelson
http://extremefuturistfest.info/
100$ for 20 minutes of Natasha Vita Moore (phoning her speech in with
a webcam!) burbling her 20 year old unchanged gerbil noise? NO
THANKS!
This event was total bullshit, and it was founded by a bullshit
artist, thief and serial lying scumbag Rachel ‘Haywire’ Mendelson, who
has the worst reputation imaginable for lying and systematic
harassment in the industrial music community that completely rejected
her.
This event is only 1 centimeter away in importance from any old Star
Trek or Comic Book Con, and it is comprised of and serves fantasy and
the dorks/nerds/goths who have no other frame of reference but
fantasy.
“Energy Through Crystals”? That is exactly the kind of bullshit the
atheistic and rational majority of Singulatarians REJECT VEHEMENTLY.
You paid 100$ to attend this nonsense? You should have bought yourself
food. You wasted your time and money, this event is bourgeoisie,
elitist and Ayn Rand Objectivist Libertarian to its core but with a
weird and really inexplicable veneer of new age occultism.
also, all the music and art with one sole exception was performed by
unknown amateurs, friends of Rachel Haywire. And it was all juvenile
and childish, with nothing of substance to it at all. And performed w/
o even a stage! in a crappy little conference room with people sitting
in chairs! I left and came back for Hanin Elias, but she is tired and
worn out, stale now in her latter day state. This whole event was only
the Extreme Future of 1992. Cyberpunk is bullshit and these people
responsible for this non-event are complete bullshit artists, the sole
medium in which they excel At All.
P.S. ......... I snuck in w/o paying also. this crapfest wasn’t even
worth 15$, needless to say 100$….!
IN REPLY TO:
I write this post from the Starbucks at Union Station mere hours after
the festivities ended. The experience has left me simultaneously
hopeful about the possibilities of the transhumanist movement and
overwhelmed by its absurdity. Our dreams of body and society
transformed via technology become almost unintelligible when read
through the lived realities of the present day – especially for those
of us on the margins of capitalist industrial civilization. Torn jeans
and toes peeking out of worn-out sneakers defined the bus ride here
from the cozy conference hotel in Marina del Rey. Through the lens of
inequality and impotence, I perceive a wealth of productive tensions
in the ideological foundations and material dynamics in effect at
Extreme Futurist Festival 2011.
The event featured an eclectic mixture of themes, aesthetics, and
political positions broadly united under the umbrella of culture and
technology. Speaker topics ranged from the neuroscience of vision to
polyamory. Ian Midgley‘s presentation on Open Source Ecology appealed
the most to me. The decentralization and democratization of the means
of production would prove a great boon to creating revolutionary
autonomous communities. Here we find a point of convergence between
the communist anarchism I advocate and the libertarianism that
permeates the transhumanist scene. The interest in independence and
innovation I encountered from XFF participants resonates with me and
stands out as an site for collaboration. We can at least agree on the
vast negative utility caused by state coercion and above all
corporate-
government collusion; the Occupy Wall Street movement made various
appearances and received significant sympathy.
However, the transhumanist emphasis on creating alternative systems
rather than engaging in social struggle to dismantle the existing
order comes hand in hand with a problematic conception of power. I
suspect Michael Anissimov and company underestimate the importance of
established oppressive hierarchies. Access to technology, information,
and physical resources remains profoundly limited for almost all of
us. The project of escaping inequality through personal empowerment
and open-source entrepreneurship strikes me as primed for failure. I
enthusiastically support the spread of knowledge and spirit of
creativity but consider these things utterly insufficient to undo the
nightmare of heteropatriarchal capitalism I walk through daily. How
can we forge a parallel society when the bosses control the bulk of
the world’s wealth and jealously defend their dominance with extreme
force? In the absence of massive solidarity networks, seasteading
seems doomed to either serve the interests of corporate and elite
sponsors or succumb to violent repression at the first spark of
promise.
The all-to-human details of XFF highlight the chasm between
transhumanist visions of post-scarcity playgrounds and the our
contemporary powerlessness. Unsurprisingly, in practice transhumanists
function rather like anybody else. Michael doesn’t have comic-book
superpowers just yet. When I walked to the location of the XFF VIP
party on Friday morning, I performed the role of biological alarm
clock for the event organizers. We made signs for merchandise that
nobody bought with sharpies and sheets of paper ripped from notebooks.
The plan to cook a meal for the pool party foundered for lack of
funds. Because of student debt and arguably neurosis, I had to get by
on the bags of walnuts and pecans I’d brought with me. My mind raced
through the fascinating conversations I’d had at the party and my
stomach growled as hoofed it the three miles back to the CouchSurfing
host I was staying with.
The fun last night concluded with a drunken romp through the Courtyard
Marriott. We hummed in unison, channeled energy through crystals, and
sang slurred Christmas songs in Michael’s room. Once an ultimatum came
from hotel security, we scattered to the hot tub are only to be
evicted again. Under the influence of alcohol, XFF attendees started
to resemble the bro culture they earlier criticized. Despite the
notable embrace of queerness and feminism, there’s still plenty of
straight white dudeness to work on in the transhumanist scene. Our
reliance on the labor of the hotel staff and unseen workers across the
globe to make this sort of technological conference possible went
completely unacknowledged and unexplored.
Because CS hosts frown on surfers stumbling in at the wee hours of the
night, I found myself without a place to sleep when the curtains
finally closed. Thanks the generosity of fellow attendees, I ate and
socialized until at an IHOP until about 4am. Only then did I trudge to
bus stop and take a long trip back to downtown LA with a bunch of
homeless folks. Here at Union Station, the driver hustled eir sleepy
passengers out of the bus. What does transhumanism mean to people on
the street and those toiling to facilitate our speculation? Apart from
millionaires like Ray Kurzweil and Peter Thiel, does the movement have
even a silver of the material power required to turn fantasies into
reality?
I share this story and raise these questions with twin intentions of
entertainment and constructive criticism. I thoroughly enjoyed XFF
2011 and extend my appreciation to the organizers and performers. In
an echo of Kim Solez’s goal to mass appeal, I encourage the
transhumanist movement to engage more substantively with workers,
local community, and social justice activism. Let’s continue to expand
this compelling conversation.