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I'm surprised people have trouble with the concept of the Laboratory - my sense at the moment is that society is being changed more by the increasing speed of technological adaptation than by politics or conflicts. In fact political shifts, business shifts and conflicts are as both caused and resolved by technology now in a way that they never were before. In the meantime, medical science is extending in all kinds of new directions and bringing with it an enormous amount of extraordinary new ethical problems, from cloning through to stem cells. In the background, science is pushing extraordinary new models of the universe - and bringing us ever closer to the promises of nanotechnology. And around us, the ever increasing influence of the internet is changing human abilities to communicate, self-express, distribute information and the like. The Laboratory is for all of these things.
I mean, there's the Great Firewall of China and the involvement of various technology companies, there's stem cells, cloning, climate change, missions to comets, missions to mars, dropping fertility rates, alternative fuels, genetic science, genetically modified foods, second life, avatars, ubiquitous computing / everyware, mobile technology, the interconnected web of data, seti@home, distributed computing, what on earth Google is up to buying all the world's dark fibre, the return of airships, the safeness of nuclear technology. I mean seriously - just in terms of things on the frontpage of BBC News' science and health sections at the moment that could be the basis of discussions, we've got junk DNA, martian history, black holes, dinosaur behaviour, British astronauts, bird flu, ice ages, flatulence-free beans, rivers in antarctica, live organ donations, the ethics of having another child if you're predisposed towards giving birth to disabled kids, blood donors being refused.
I mean, seriously, people can't find something interesting in there to get excited about?
My sense of Barbelith is that it's supposed to be a place where people of massively different backgrounds and ideologies get together and discuss things that aren't necessarily in their native disciplines, that it can be hard and intimidating on occasion but that we're trying to create a hybridisation and cross-polonisation of musicians, artists, technologists, scientists, politicans, activists, theoreticians and the like. The Head Shop traditionally has been very active, although it's less powerful at the moment. The Switchboard is also pretty active and cool, and the Temple bluntly is full of nutters, but at least it's the best place full of that kind of nutter on the internet. We're quite balance on theory, current affairs and theology/spiritualism but we're sorely lacking in the discussions about one of the main motivators for change we've got at the moment and we need to fix that! |
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