Live expectancy is now well over double what it was for the Medieval Briton, and knocking hard on triple’s door.

What for the future? Extreme life extension is no more inherently ridiculous than human flight or the ability to speak to a person on the other side of the world. Science isn’t magic – and ageing has proven to be a very knotty problem – but science has overcome knotty problems before.

A genuine way to eliminate or severely curtail the influence of ageing on the human body is not in any sense inherently ridiculous. It is, in practice, extremely difficult, but difficult has a tendency to fall before the march of progress. So let us consider what implications a true and seismic advance in this area would have on the nature of human life.

One absolutely critical issue that would surround a breakthrough in this area is the cost. Not so much the cost of research, but the cost of application. Once discovered, is it expensive to do this, or is it cheap? Do you just have to do it once? Is it a cure, or a treatment?

If it can be produced cheaply, and if you only need to do it once, then you could foresee a future where humanity itself moves beyond the ageing process.

The first and most obvious problem that would arise from this is overpopulation. A woman has about 30–35 years of life where she is fertile, and can have children. What if that were extended to 70–100 years? 200 years?

Birth control would take on a vastly more important role than it does today. But then, we’re not just dropping this new discovery into a utopian, liberal future. We’re dropping it into the real world, and in the real world there are numerous places where birth control is culturally condemned. I was born in Ireland, a Catholic nation, where families of 10 siblings or more are not in any sense uncommon.

What of Catholic nations – including some staunchly conservative, and extremely large Catholic societies in Latin America – where birth control is seen as a sin?

Of course, the conservatism of these nations might (might) solve this problem before it arises – the idea of a semi-permanent extension of life might be credibly seen as a deeper and more blasphemous defiance of God than wearing a condom.

But here in the West, the idea that we are allowed to choose how many children we have is a liberty so fundamental that many would baulk to question it.

We may have to.

There is another issue. What about the environmental impact? We’re already having a massive impact on the environment, and it’s not looking pretty. What if there were 10 times more of us? 100 times more? What about the energy consumption needs, in a world running out of petrol? The food needs? The living space? The household waste?

There are already vast flotillas of plastic waste the size of small nations that float across the surface of the Pacific. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have just topped 400 parts per million. We are pushing hard at the envelope of what the world of capable of sustaining, and a massive boost in population would only add to that ever-increasing pressure.

Of course, science might well sort out the answer to those things – but will it sort it out in time? The urgency of environmental science, and cultural change, suddenly takes on a whole new level of importance in the light of a seismic advance in addressing the problem of human ageing.

These are problems that would arise if the advance produced a cheap treatment that could (and would) be consumed by very large numbers of people.

But what if it wasn’t a cure? What if it wasn’t cheap? What if it was a treatment, and a very expensive one?

All of a sudden, we’re looking at a very different set of problems, and the biggest of all centres around something Charlie Chaplin said in the speech he gave at the end of his film, The Great Dictator. It is a speech from the heart, and a speech for the ages, given on the eve of mankind’s greatest cataclysm to date, World War 2.

In fact, you’d be doing yourself a favour if you watched the whole thing, it is an astounding speech.

The quote is this:

“To those who can hear me, I say — do not despair.

The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.”

And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

What if Stalin were immortal? And not just immortal, but immortally young?

Immortally vigourous, able to amplify the power of his cult of personality with his literal immortality.

This to me seems a threat of a very different kind, but of no less importance, than the dangers of overpopulation. That so long as men die, liberty will never perish. But what if men no longer die?

And of course, you could very easily say that those of us lucky enough to live in reasonably well-functioning democracies wouldn’t have to worry too much about this. It doesn’t matter if you live to be 1000, you’re still not getting more than 8 years of them in the White House.

But there is something in the West that would be radically changed in nature. Commercial empires.

What if Rupert Murdoch were immortal?

It doesn’t matter how expensive that treatment for ageing is. If it exists, he’d be able to afford it, and if he were able to buy it, he’d almost certainly do so.

If Fox News was run by an immortal business magnate, with several lifetimes worth of business experience and skill to know how to hold it all together, keep it going, keep it growing? What then?

Not perhaps the sunny utopia of a playground of immortals that we might hope for.

This is a different kind of issue. It’s not an external issue – the external impact of population on the environment, or the external need of a growing population to be fed. These problems might well sink us, but science has shown itself extremely adept at finding solutions to external problems.

What this is, is an internal problem. A problem of humanity. More specifically, the fact that extreme longevity would allow tyranny to achieve a level of entrenchment that it has so far never been capable of.

But then a law might be passed. Something similar to the USA’s 8 year term limit on Presidents. You can’t be a CEO for longer than 30 years, or 40 years, or 50. Something like that might help, might even become urgently necessary over time. Forced retirement for the eternally young.

Not an unproblematic idea, I’m sure you’ll agree. Quite the culture shock for Western societies loathe to accept government intervention in private affairs.

But it is a new category of problem. A classic problem of humanity, amplified by immortality. The centralisation of control, power and influence in a world where the people it centres upon cannot naturally die.

This, I would say, is the most obvious knotty problem that would arise, for humanity, in the event of an expensive, but effective, treatment for ageing.

But then, let’s just take a quick look back at the other side of the coin. Is there a problem inherent in humanity that would be amplified were ageing to be overcome, cheaply, worldwide?

Let me ask you a question.

Do people, generally speaking, become more open to new things, or less open to new things, as they age?

Do older people – just in general terms – embrace change or embrace stasis?

Well, it’s very obvious that some older people do remain young at heart. They remain passionate, humble in their beliefs, they are open to new things, and even embrace them. Some throw the influence and resources they have accrued throughout their lifetimes into this, and are instrumental to the march of progress.

More than this, they add a lifetime of skill, experience and finesse to their passion, a melding of realism and hope that is one of the most precious and potent cocktails that humanity is capable of mixing.

But we’re not talking about the few. We’re talking about the many.

Is it fair to say that most older people take this attitude to change? Or is it fairer to say that older people who retain that passion and spark, who not only have retained it, but have spent a lifetime fuelling it into a great blaze of ability and success – is it fair to say that these people are a minority?

I would say yes. They are incredibly precious, but part of that preciousness is the fact that they are not common.

Perhaps one day we will make our bodies forever young. But what of our spirit? What of our creativity?

I’m not talking about age-related illnesses like Parkinson’s, or Alzheimer’s disease. I’m talking about the creativity, passion and fire of youth.

The temptation of the ‘comfort zone’ for all human beings is a palpable one, and one that every person who lives well, who breaks the mold, who changes the future, must personally overcome.

Do the majority of people overcome it? I would argue no. And more than this, I would argue that living inside a static understanding of the world – even working to protect that understanding in the face of naked and extreme challenges from reality itself – is now, and has historically been, through all human history, the norm.

Those who break the mold, brave the approbation of the crowd, and look to the future with wonder and hope, have always been a minority.

Now add in the factor of time. The retreat into the comforting, the static and the known has a very powerful pull on human beings. It is also not a binary process, but an analogue process – it’s not just a case of you do or you don’t. There are degrees of retreat, extremes of intellectual conservatism, just as there are extremes of intellectual curiosity, and progress.

But which extremes are the more common? This matters, because if all people could live to 200 years old or more, what would that mean for a demographic shift in cultural desire away from change and toward stasis?

A worrying thought. And it might seem that in the light of all this, we should not seek to open the Pandora’s box of eternal life, but should instead stand against such progress, because of the dangers it holds.

But, frankly, this is not an option.

The question is not whether or not human beings should seek to conquer death.

The question is whether or not conquering death is possible.

If it is possible, it will be done. If it is not, it will not be.

But the obvious problem of longevity – massive population expansion – is something that is, at least in principle, amenable to other solutions arising from science as it now practiced. Cultural change is often agonising, but it does happen, and scientific progress may indeed solve the issues of food supply and environmental impact. Perhaps not, but perhaps.

At the very least, these sciences take on a massively greater importance to the cohesion of the human future than they already have, and they are already very important indeed.

But there is another, deeper problem of a very different kind. The issue of the human spirit. If, over time, people (on average) become more calcified in their thinking, more conservative, less likely to take risks, or admit to new possibilities that endanger their understanding, then longevity, distributed across the world, can only lead to a culture where stasis is far more valued than change.

Pandora’s box is already open, and its name is science. Whether it is now, or a hundred years from now, if it is possible for human beings to be rendered immortal through science, someone is going to crack it.

We cannot flinch the future. It would be churlish and naive to assume that such a seemingly impossible vision will forever remain impossible. Not after the last century we just had, where technological change ushered in a new era, a new kind of era, where the impossibilities of the past fell like wheat beneath a scythe.

Scientific progress amplifies the horizon of possible scientific progress. And we stand now at a time when what it means to be a human – something which already undergone enormous change – may change further still, and in ways more profound than any of us can imagine.

If it can be done, it will be done. And so the only sane approach is to look with clarity at what we can see of what that might mean.

The external problems are known problems, and we may yet overcome them.  Maybe.  If there’s a lot of work, and a lot of people take a lot of issues a lot more seriously than they are already doing.

But there is a different kind of issue. An issue extending from human nature itself. Can we overcome, as a people, as a species, our fear, and the things that send us scurrying back from curiosity and hope into the comforting arms of wilful ignorance, and static belief?

This, in my opinion, is the deepest problem of longevity. Who wants to live forever in a world where young bodies are filled with withered souls, beaten and embittered with the frustrations of age, but empowered to set the world in stone to justify them?

But perhaps it was always going to come to this. That at some point technological advancement would bring us to a kind of reckoning. A reckoning between the forces of human fear, and the value of human courage.

To solve the external problems of an eternal humanity, science must do what science has done so well for so long – to delve into the external, to open up new possibilities to feed the world, and balance human presence with the needs of the Earth.

But to solve the internal problems of an eternal humanity, science needs to go somewhere else. The stunning advances in the understanding of the external world must begin to be matched with new ways of charting the deeps of human nature. The path of courage, of open-mindedness, of humility, and a willingness to embrace change and leave behind the comforting arms of old static belief systems – this is not a path that many choose.

But many more must choose it in a world of immortal people, to counterbalance the conservatism of those who fail the test, and retreat, and live forever.

Einstein lived to a ripe old age, and never lost his wonder. Never lost his humility, or his courage to brave the approbation and ridicule of his peers in that task he set himself. To chart the deep simplicities of the real, and know the mind of God. The failure of the human spirit is not written in the stars, and never will be.

We are none of us doomed to fail in matters of courage, curiosity, wonder or hope. But we are none of us guaranteed to succeed.

And as long as courage, hope and the ability to break new ground remain vague, hidden properties that we squeamishly refuse to interrogate, each new generation will have to start from scratch, and make their own choices.

And in a world of eternal humans, if any individual generation fails, the world will be counting that price for a very long time.

It is a common fear that if we begin to make serious headway into issues normally the domain of the spiritual, we will destroy the mystique of them, and therefore their preciousness.

Similar criticisms were, and sometimes still are, laid at the feet of Darwin’s work, and Galileo’s. But the fact is that an astronomer does not look to the sky with less wonder because of their deeper understanding, but more wonder.

Reality is both stunningly elegant, and infinitely beautiful, and in these things it is massively more amazing than the little tales of mystery humans have used to make sense of it since we came down from the trees.

In the face of a new future, where the consequences of human courage and human failure are amplified, the scientific conquest of death must be fused with another line of inquiry. The scientific pioneering of the fundamental dynamics of courage in living, and humility to the truth, over what we want to believe.

It will never be a common path, and no matter how clear it is made, or how wide it is opened, there will always be many who will never walk it.

But the wider it can be made, the clearer it can be made, the more credible it can be made as an option.

And we will need that option. We need it now.

And our need will only grow greater with time.

It’s not a physical landscape. It’s a term reserved for the new technologies. It’s a landscape in the future. It’s as though you used technology to take you off the ground and go like Alice through the looking glass.
John Cage, in reference to his 1939 Imagined Landscape [1].

In the last installment (see here, here and here) I argued that the increasing prominence and frequency of futuristic aesthetics and themes of empowerment-through-technology in EDM-based mainstream music videos, as well as the increasing predominance of EDM foundations in mainstream music over the past 3 years, helps promote general awareness of emerging-technology-grounded and NBIC–driven concepts, causes and potential-crises while simultaneously presents a sexy and self-empowering vision of technology and the future to mainstream audiences. The only reason this is mentionable in the first place is the fact that these are mainstream artists and labels reaching very large audiences.

In this installment, I will be analyzing a number of music videos for tracks by “real EDM” artists, released by exclusively-EDM record labels, to show that these futuristic themes aren’t just a consequence of EDM’s adoption by mainstream music over the past few years, and that there is long history of futuristic aesthetics and gestalts in electronic music, as well as recurrent themes of self-empowerment through technology.

In this part I will discuss some of these recurrent themes, which can be seen to derive from a number of aspects shared by Virtual Art (any art created without the use of physical instruments), of which contemporary electronic music is an example because it is created using software. I argue that this will become the predominant means of art production — via software — for all artistic mediums, from auditory to visual to eventual olfactory, somatosensory and proprioceptual artistic mediums. The interface between artist and art will become progressively thinner and more transparent, culminating in a time where Brain-Computer-Interface technology can sense neural operation and translate this directly into an informational form to be played by physical systems (e.g. speakers) at first, but eventually into a form that can be read by given person’s own BCI instantiated phenomenologically via high-precision technological neuromodulation (of which deep brain stimulation is an early form).

In the second part of this installment I will be following this discussion up with a look at some music videos for EDM-tracks that embody and exemplify the themes, aesthetics and general gestalts under consideration here.

Odditory Artificiality

The music– videos accompanying many historical and contemporary examples of EDM tracks display consistently futuristic and technoprogressive thematics, aesthetics and plots, as well as positive, self-empowering and often primal-pleasure-appealing depictions of emerging and as-yet-conceptual technologies. Many also exemplify the recurrent theme of human-technology symbiosis, inter-constitution and co-deferent inter-determination. It is not just physical prosthesis – for in a way language is as much prosthetic technology as artificial arm.  This definition of prosthesis doesn’t make a distinction between nonbiological systems for the restoration of statistically-normal function and nonbiological systems for the facilitation or instantiation of enhanced functions and/or categorically-new functional modalities. And nor should it. I argue that such a dichotomy is invalid because our functional modalities are always changing. This was true of biological evolution and it is true of mind and of cultural evolution as well. Other recurrent themes depicted in the video include technological autonomy and animacy and the facilitation of seemingly magical or otherwise-impossible feats, either via technology or else against a futuristic background.

These videos are not wrong for picking up on the self-empowering and potential-liberating inherencies of technology, nor their radically-transformative and ability-extending potentials. Indeed, as I argued in brief in the first installment of this series, electronic music exemplifies a general trend and methodology that will become standard for more and more artistic mediums, and to an increasingly large degree in each medium, as we move forward into the future. Contemporary EDM and electronic music is made using software – and this fundamental dissociation with physical instrumentation demonstrates the liberating potentials of what I have called virtuality – the realm of information, the ontics of semiotics, and the ability to readily create, modulate and modify a given informational object to an arbitrarily-precise degree. Not only do artists have the ability to modulate and modify a given sound-wave or sound-wave-ensemble with greater magnitude and precision, but they can do so to create end-result sound-waves that are either impossible with current physical instruments or else significantly harder to produce with physical instruments.

Virtuality De-Scarcitizes

The ability to create without constraint (i.e. if it’s an information-product then we aren’t constrained by the use of physical resources or dependency on materials-processing and system-configuration/component-integration) means that our only limiting factor is available or objective-optimal memory and computation. The ability to readily duplicate an information-product with negligible resource-expenditure (e.g. it doesn’t cost much, in terms of memory or computation, to create and transmit an electronic file) means that any resources expended in the creation (whether computationally or manually by a human programmer) or maintenance (e.g. storage) of the information-product is amortized over the course of all the instances in which it is doubled – that is, it’s cost, or the amount of resources expended, in comparison to the net product is cut in half every time it’s doubled).

Is it coincidence that these de-scarcitizing and constraint-eschewing properties inherent in information-products are paralleled and reflected so perfectly, in thematic, aesthetic and gestalt, by electronic-music videos? Or could such potentials be felt by our raw intuitions, seen in the ways in which technology empowers people, expands their choices, frees possibilities and works once-wonders on a daily basis, and simply amplified through the cultural magnifying-glass of art? After all, if one looks back throughout the history of electronic music one can see many early pioneers and antecedents of electronic music, we can see individuals and movements that acknowledge these de-scarcitizing, possibility-actualizing and self-empowering potentials in various ways. This very virtue of virtuality could be seen, exemplified in embryonic form, in early forms of electronic music as long as 100+ years ago — for instance in the works and manifestos of Italian Futurism, an early 20th century art movement, which embraced (among other artistic sub-genres) Noise Music, an early20th century embodiment of electronic music

It’s not as though EDM came out of nowhere after all (claims to constraintless creation aside); the technological synthesis of sound can be seen as a natural continuation of the trends set out by the creation and development of recording equipment  in the early to mid-20th century, and harkened by the explosion of popularity the electric guitar and synthesizers saw in the 1960s. In an interview with Jim Morrison given in 1969 essentially predicts the predominance of electronic music we are seeing today, saying that “I guess in four or five years the new generation’s music will have a synthesis of those two elements [blues and folk] and some third thing, maybe it will be entirely, um, it might rely heavily on electronics, tapes… I can kind of envision one person with a lot of machines, tapes, electronic setups singing or speaking using machines.”

Sound-Wave Sculptor

I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the use of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard. Photoelectric, film and mechanical mediums for the synthetic production of music will be explored.
John Cage, The Future of Music: Credo, 1937 [2].

When did these underlying potentialities inherent in virtual or informational-mediation really start to become obvious, or at least detectable in nascent or fledging form?

The de-scarcitizing effects of virtually-mediated art (a class that includes such early embodiments and antecedents of electronic music) seems only to have become obvious on a level beyond intuition when the ability to artificially synthesize sound brought with it a greatly increased ability to directly modulate and modify such sound.

This marked the beginning of the trend that distinguishes this class as categorically different than physically-mediated art. After all, playing an instrument can be considered modulating it just as operating a turn table can, so what constitutes the effective difference? Namely the greatly increased increased range and precision (that is, the precision with which the artist can modulate a given sound or create a given sound to his liking, which corresponds to the degree-of-accuracy between his mental ideal and what he can produce physicality) of modulation made possible by the technologies and techniques that allows us to artificially-synthesize sound in the first place.

Sound-waves can be modulated (i.e. controlled or affected in real-time) or modified (i.e. recorded, controlled or affected in iterations or gradually, and then replayed without modulation in real-time) with greater precision (e.g. ability to modulate a waveform within smaller intervals of time or with a smaller standard-deviation/tolerance-interval/margin-of-error). The magnitude of such changes (e.g. the range of frequencies a given waveform can be made to conform to, or the range of pitches a given waveform can be made to embody, through such methods) is also greater than the potential magnitude available via the modulation of playing a physical instrument. What’s more, fundamentally new categories of sound can be produced as well, whereas in non-virtually-mediated-music such fundamentally new categories of sound would require a whole new physical instrument — if they can be reproduced by physical instrumentation at all.

The earliest synthesizers harkened the future of all art mediums; artificially-created, modulated and modified sound via the user-interface of knobs, dials and keys is one small step away from music produced solely through software – and one giant leap beyond the watered-down and matter-bound paradigm of music and artistic-media in general that preceded it.

References:

[1] Kostelanetz, Richard. 1986. “John Cage and Richard Kostelanetz: A Conversation about Radio”. The Musical Quarterly.72 (2): 216–227.

[2] Cage, John. 1939. “Future of Music; Credo”.

I want to live longer and help others do the same. I assumed the most effective way to do that is by understanding the science of aging and then engineering solutions to extend human lifespan. That is why I became a biomedical researcher and over the past several years I have pursued this goal almost single-mindedly.

When a 2004 study showed that reducing the calorie intake in mice extended their life by 42%, I enthusiastically embraced the results and even put myself on a calorie restricted diet. But, subsequently, a 2012 study showed that long-term calorie restriction may not have the promised benefits. On the contrary, fewer calories without the required nutrients might actually cause harm.

Calorie restriction is not the first such “promising” route that eventually did not live up to the promise, and it will not be the last. Antioxidants showed promise in holding back diseases caused by aging, but now we know that antioxidant supplements are more likely to shorten your life.

Earlier in May, researchers showed that reducing a protein called NF-kB in mouse brains modestly improved their lifespan. I am not holding out for this result either. Before too long, I’m sure there will be reports of severe side effects of manipulating levels of NF-kB.

Take it easy

Looking at the data I have come to the conclusion that “doing nothing” may be the best option in most cases. This may not be as pessimistic as it sounds and it is definitely not to say that research in fighting aging must not be carried out.

When I say “do nothing”, I am assuming that you do not smoke or drink too much alcohol, and have access to medical care in case of injury. Such measures are bound to increase your lifespan.

But currently, not intervening in the aging process is more likely to help you live longer than trying any of the methods I’ve mentioned, not by a few months but by many years. Trying any of those interventions may actually cause harm, and will do so for the foreseeable future.

Lesson from the past

The chart below shows the survival rates – the percentage of the population that lives to a certain age – for men in England and Wales from 1860 to 2010.

In the 1860s, more than 20% of children died at birth or soon after. On average, men’s health started to decline around the age of 30, and only about 20% of the population survived for more than 70 years.

By 1910, child mortality decreased, thanks to improvements in hygiene and better medical care. This meant more men lived past the age of 50. Circle A shows this reduction in childhood mortality between 1860 and 2010. But, as can be seen from Circle D, the gain towards the end was not significant. This is because only 30% of males passed the age of 70.

Fifty years later, after the discovery of penicillin and invention of more vaccines, 90% of English and Welsh men lived until 50, and more than half survived to 70. Arrow B marks this trend.

Today almost 80% of men live to the age of 70. Four times as many men reach 70 now than in 1860.

What accounts for the change? Between 1860 and 1960, the significant increase in survival rate was due to medical intervention. Since 1960, the survival curve has improved mainly due to reduction in smoking.

This trend is similar in many rich countries, including the US. Druin Burch, a physician and writer, says in his book Taking the Medicine, that eliminating smoking would provide more benefits than being able to cure people of every possible type of cancer.

Age gracefully

Many experts believe that human lifespan might actually have an upper limit of 125 years. The average may not increase much beyond 90. If we are to agree with them, this leaves little room for improvement.

But we have never concentrated on maximising human lifespan before. Most people believe human lifespan is finite, so all drugs being manufactured today are targeted towards certain age-related diseases such as diabetes and hypertension. They are not designed to extend human lifespan.

If this bleak outlook is indeed true, we should not practise naive interventionism because it is unlikely to help. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes in his book Antifragile, naive interventionism occurs when we try to fix a single thing, but end up disturbing a complex system.

In case of extending human lifespan, those naive interventions would include calorie restriction, antioxidant supplements or manipulating the protein NF-kB, as mentioned earlier. They also include the current obsession with replacing fat in foods with sugar, the health benefits of drinking red wine, or the use ofsurgery or supplements to “fight” aging. This latter industry has grown in the past decade from being non-existent to an estimated worth of $88 billion today.

If intervening in the aging process with current biomedical science has any positive effect at all, it will be far too small to worry about. It’s far more likely to harm us.

That is why I have decided to do nothing and follow a simple rule: unless I meet with an accident, or suffer from a terminal disease, I will not add anything to my life with the explicit purpose of extending it. To do anything else would most likely do more harm than good.

Avi Roy does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Asia Institute Report

Proposal for a Constitution of Information
March 3, 2013
Emanuel Pastreich

Introduction

When David Petraeus resigned as CIA director afteran extramarital affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell was exposed, the problem of information security gained national attention. The public release of personal e-mails in order to impugn someone at the very heart of the American intelligence community raised awareness of e-mail privacy issues and generated a welcome debate on the need for greater safeguards. The problem of e-mail security, however, is only the tip of the iceberg of a far more serious problem involving information with which we have not started to grapple. We will face devastating existential questionsin the years ahead as human civilization enters a potentially catastrophic transformation—one driven not by the foibles of man, but rather by the exponential increase in our capability to gather, store, share, alter and fabricate information of every form, coupled with a sharp drop in the cost of doing so. Such basic issues as how we determine what is true and what is real, who controls institutions and organizations, and what has significance for us in an intellectual and spiritual sense will become increasingly problematic. The emerging challenge cannot be solved simply by updating the 1986 “Electronic Communications Privacy Act” to meet the demands of the present day;[1] it will require a rethinking of our society and culture and new, unprecedented, institutions to respond to the challenge. International Data Corporation estimated the total amount of digital information in the world to be 2.7 zettabytes (2.7 followed by 21 zeros) in 2012, a 48 percent increase from 2011—and we are just getting started.[2]

[1]As is suggested in the article by Tony Romm “David Petraeus affair scandal highlights email privacy issues” http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83984.html#ixzz2CUML3RDy).

[2] http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23177411#.UTL3bDD-H54

The explosion in the amount of information circulating in the world, and the increase in the ease with which that information can be obtained or altered, will change every aspect of our lives, from education and governance to friendship and kinship, to the very nature of human experience. We need a comprehensive response to the information revolution that not only proposes innovative ways to employ new technologies in a positive manner but also addresses the serious, unprecedented, challenges that they present for us.

The ease with information of every form can now be reproduced and altered is an epistemological and ontological and a governmental challenge for us. Let us concentrate on the issue of governance here. The manipulability of information is increasing in all aspects of life, but the constitution on which we base our laws and our government has little to say about information, and nothing to say about the transformative wave sweeping through our society today as a result. Moreover, we have trouble grasping the seriousness of the information crisis because it alters the very lens through which we perceive the world. If we rely on the Internet to tell us how the world changes, for example, we are blind as to how the Internet itself is evolving and how that evolution impacts human relations. For that matter, in that our very thought patterns are molded over time by the manner in which we receive, we may come to see information that is presented in that on-line format as a more reliable source than our direct perceptions of the physical world. The information revolution has the potential to dramatically change human awareness of the world and inhibit our ability to make decisions if we are surrounded with convincing data whose reliability we cannot confirm. These challenges call out for a direct and systematic response.

There are a range of piecemeal solutions to the crisis being undertaken around the world. The changes in our world, however, are so fundamental that they call out for a systematic response.We need to hold an international constitutional convention through which we can draft a legally binding global “constitution of information” that will address the fundamental problems created by the information revolution and set down clear guidelines for how we can control the terrible cultural and institutional fluidity created by this information revolution. The process of identifying the problems born of the massive shift in the nature of information, and suggesting solutions workable will be complex, but the issue calls out for an entirely new universe of administration and jurisprudence regarding the control, use, and abuse of information. As James Baldwin once wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

The changes are so extensive that they cannot be dealt with through mere extensions of the United States constitution or the existing legal code, nor can it be left to intelligence agencies, communications companies, congressional committees or international organizations that were not designed to handle the convergence of issues related to increased computational power, but end up formulating information policy by default. We must bravely set out to build a consensus in the United States, and around the world, about the basic definition of information, how information should be controlled and maintained, and what the long-term implications of the shifting nature of information will be for humanity. We should then launch a constitutional convention and draft a document that sets forth a new set of laws and responsible agencies for assessing the accuracy of information and addressing its misuse.

Those who may object to such a constitution of information as a dangerous form of centralized authority that is likely to encourage further abuse are not fully aware of the difficulty of the problems we face. The abuse of information has already reached epic proportions and we are just at the beginning of an exponential increase. There should be no misunderstanding: We are not suggesting a totalitarian “Ministry of Truth” that undermines a world of free exchange between individuals. Rather, we are proposing a system that will bring accountability, institutional order, and transparency to the institutions and companies that already engage in the control, collection, and alternation of information. Failure to establish a constitution of information will not assure preservation of an Arcadian utopia, but rather encourage the emergence of even greater fields of information collection and manipulation entirely beyond the purview of any institution. The result will be increasing manipulation of human society by dark and invisible forces for which no set of regulations has been established—that is already largely the case. The constitution of information, in whatever form it may take, is the only way to start addressing the hidden forces in our society that tug at our institutional chains.

Drafting a constitution is not merely a matter of putting pen to paper. The process requires the animation of that document in the form of living institutions with budgets and mandates. It is not my intention to spell out the full parameters of such a constitution of information and the institutions that it would support because a constitution of information can only be successful if it engages living institutions and corporations in a complex and painful process of deal making and compromises that, like the American Constitutional Convention of 1787, is guided at a higher level by certain idealistic principles. The ultimate form of such a constitution cannot be predicted in advance, and to present a version in advance here would be counterproductive. We can, however, identify some of the key challenges and the issues that would be involved in drafting such a constitution of information.

The Threats posed by the Information Revolution

The ineluctable increase of computational power in recent years has simplified the transmission, modification, creation, and destruction of massive amounts of information, rendering all information fluid, mutable, and potentially unreliable. The rate at which information can be rapidly and effectively manipulated is enhanced by an exponential rise in computers’ capacity. Following Moore’s Law, which suggests that the number of microprocessors that can be placed on a chip will double every 18 months, the capacity of computers continues to increase dramatically, whereas human institutions change only very slowly.[3] That gap between technological change and the evolution of human civilization has reached an extreme, all the more dangerous because so many people have trouble grasping the nature of the challenge and blame the abuse of information they observe on the dishonesty of individuals, or groups, rather than the technological change itself.

The cost for surveillance of electronic communications, for keeping track of the whereabouts of people and for documenting every aspect of human and non-human interaction, is dropping so rapidly that what was the exclusive domain of supercomputers at the National Security Agency a decade ago is now entirely possible for developing countries, and will soon be in the hands of individuals. In ten years, when vastly increased computational power will mean that a modified laptop computer can track billions of people with considerable resolution, and that capability is combined with autonomous drones, we will need a new legal framework to respond in a systematic manner to the use and abuse of information at all levels of our society. If we start to plan the institutions that we will need, we can avoid the greatest threat: the invisible manipulation of information without accountability.

Surveillance and gathering of massive amounts of information

As the cost of collecting information becomes inexpensive, it is becoming easier to collect and sort massive amounts of data about individuals and groups and to extract from that information relevant detail about their lives and activities. Seemingly insignificant data taken from garbage, emails, and photographs can now be easily combined and systematically analyzed to essentially give as much information about individuals as a government might obtain from wiretapping—although emerging technology makes the process easier to implement and harder to detect. Increasingly smaller devices can take photographs of people and places over time with great ease and that data can be combined and sorted so as to obtain extremely accurate descriptions of the daily lives of individuals, who they are, and what they do. Such information can be combined with other information to provide complete profiles of people that go beyond what the individuals know about themselves. As cameras are combined with mini-drones in the years to come, the range of possible surveillance will increase dramatically. Global regulations will be an absolute must for the simple reason that it will be impossible to stop this means of gathering big data.

Fabrication of information

In the not-too-distant future, it will be possible to fabricate cheaply not only texts and data, but all forms of photographs, recordings, and videos with such a level of verisimilitude that fictional artifacts indistinguishable from their historically accurate counterparts will compete for our attention. Currently, existing processing power can be combined with intermediate user-level computer skills to effectively alter information, whether still-frame images using programs like Photoshop or videos using Final Cut Pro. Digital information platforms for photographs and videos are extremely susceptible to alteration and the problem will get far worse. It will be possible for individuals to create convincing documentation, photo or video, in which any event involving any individual is vividly portrayed in an authentic manner. It will be increasingly easy for any number of factions and interest groups to make up materials to that document their perspectives, creating political and systemic chaos. Rules stipulating what is true,and what is not, will no longer be an option when we reach that point. Of course the authorization of an organization to make a call as to what information is true brings with it incredible risk of abuse. Nevertheless, although there will be great risk in enabling a group to make binding determination concerning authenticity (and there will clearly be a political element to truth as long as humans rule society) the danger posed by inaction is far worse.

When fabricated images and movies can no longer be distinguished from reality by the observer, and computers can easily continue to create new content, it will be possible to continue these fabrications over time, thereby creating convincing alternative realities with considerable mimetic depth. At that point, the ability to create convincing images and videos will merge with the next generation virtual reality technologies to further confuse the issue of what is real. We will see the emergence ofvirtual worlds that appear at least as real as the one that we inhabit. If some event becomes a consistent reality in those virtual worlds, it may be difficult, if not impossible, for people to comprehend that the event never actually “happened,” thereby opening the door for massive manipulation of politics and ultimately of history.

Once we have complex virtual realities that present a physical landscape that possesses almost as much depth as the real world and the characters have elaborate histories and memories of events over decades and form populations of millions of anatomically distinct virtual people with distinct individualities, the potential for confusion will be tremendous. It will no longer be clear what reality has authority and many political and legal will be irresolvable.

But that is only half of the problem. Thosevirtual worlds are already extending into social networks. An increasing number of people on Facebook are not actual people at all, but characters, avatars, created by third parties. As computers grow more powerful, it will be possible to create thousands, then hundreds of thousands, of individuals on social networks who have complex personal histories and personalities. These virtual people will be able toengage human partners in compelling conversations that pass the Turing Test. And, because those virtual people can write messages and Skype 24 hours a day, and customize their message to what the individual finds interesting, they can be more attractive than human “friends” and have the potential to seriously distort our very concept of society and of reality. There will be a concrete and practical need for a set of codes and laws to regulate such an environment.

The Problem of Perception

Over time, virtual reality may end up seeming much more real and convincing to people who are accustomed to it than actual reality. That issue is particularly relevant when it comes to the next generation, who will be exposed to virtual reality from infancy. Yet virtual reality is fundamentally different from the real world. For example, virtual reality is not subject to the same laws of causality. The relations between events can be altered with ease in virtual reality and epistemological assumptions from the concrete world do not hold. Virtual reality can muddle such basic concepts as responsibility and guilt, or the relationship of self and society. It will be possible in the not-too-distant future to convince people of something using faulty or irrational logic whose only basis is in virtual reality. This fact has profound implications for every aspect of law and institutional functionality.

And if falsehoods are continued in virtual reality—which seems to represent reality accurately—over time in a systematic way, interpretations of even common-sense assumptions about life and society will diverge, bringing everything into question. As virtual reality expands its influence, we will have to make sure that certain principles are upheld even in virtual space so as to assure that it does not create chaos in our very conception of the public sphere. That process, I hold, cannot be governed in the legal system that we have at present. New institutions will have to be developed.

The dangers of the production of increasingly unverifiable information are perhaps a greater threat than even terrorism. While the idea of individual elements setting off “dirty bombs” is certainly frightening, imagine a world in which the polity simply can never be sure whether anything they see/read/hear is true or not. This threat is at least as significant as surveillance operations, but has received far less attention. The time has come for us to formulatethe institutional foundation that will define and maintain firm parameters for the use, alteration and retention of information on a global scale.

Money

We live in a money economy, but the information revolution is altering the nature of money itself right before our eyes. Money has gone from an analog system within which it was once was restricted to the amount of gold an individual possessed to a digital system in which the only limitation on the amount of money represented in computers is the tolerance for risk on the part of the players involved and the ability of national and international institutions to monitor. In any case, the mechanisms are now in place to alter the amount of currency, or for that matter of many other items such as commodities or stocks, without any effective global oversight. The value of money and the quantity in circulation can be altered with increasing ease, and current safeguards are clearly insufficient. The problem will grow worse as computational power, and the number of players who can engage in complex manipulations of money, increase.

Drones and Robots

Then there is the explosion of the field of drones and robots, devices of increasingly small size that can conduct detailed surveillance and which increasingly are capable of military action and other forms of interference in human society. Whereas the United States had no armed drones and no robots when it entered Afghanistan, it has now more than 8,000 drones in the air and more than 12,000 robots on the ground.[4] The number of drones and robots will continue to increase rapidly and they are increasingly being used in the United States and around the world without regard for borders.

As the technology becomes cheaper, we will see an increasing number of tiny drones and robots that can operate outside of any legal framework. They will be used to collect information, but they can also be hacked and serve as portals for the distortion and manipulation of information at every level. Moreover, drones and robots have the potential to carry out acts of destruction and other criminal activities whose source can be hidden because of ambiguities as to control and agency. For this reason, the rapidly emerging world of drones and robots deserves to be treated at great length within the constitution of information.

Drafting the Constitution of Information

The constitution of information could become an internationally recognized, legally binding, document that lays down rules for maintaining the accuracy of information and protecting it from abuse. It could also set down the parameters for institutions charged with maintaining long-term records of accurate information against which other data can be checked, thereby serving as the equivalent of an atomic clock for exact reference in an age of considerable confusion. The ability to certify the integrity of information is an issue an order of magnitude more serious than the intellectual property issues on which most international lawyers focus today, and deserves to be identified as an entire field in itself—with a constitution of its own that serves as the basis for all future debate and argument.

This challenge of drafting a constitution of information requires a new approach and a bottom-up design in order to be capable of sufficiently addressing the gamut of complex, interconnected issues found in transnational spaces like that in which digital information exists. The governance systems for information are simply not sufficient, and overhauling them to make them meet the standards necessary would be much more work and much less effective than designing and implementing an entirely new, functional system, which the constitution of information represents. Moreover, the rate of technological change will require a system that can be updated and made relevant while at the same time safeguarding against it being captured by vested interests or made irrelevant.

A possible model for the constitution of information can be found in the “Freedom of Information” section of the new Icelandic constitution drafted in 2011. The Constitutional Council engaged in a broad debate with citizens and organizations throughout the country about the content of the new constitution. The constitution described in detail mechanisms required for government transparency and public accessibility that are far more aligned with the demands of today than other similar documents.[5]

It would be meaningless, however, to merely put forth a model international “constitution of information” without the process of drafting it because without the buy-in of institutions and individuals in its formulation, the constitution would not have the authority necessary to function. The process of debating and compromising that determines the contours of that constitution would endow it with social and political significance, and, like the constitution of 1787, it would become the core for governance. For that matter, the degree to which the content of the constitution of information would be legally enforceable would have to be part of the discussion held at the convention.

Process for the Constitutional Convention

To respond to this global challenge, we should call a constitutional convention in which we will put forth a series of basic principles and enforceable regulations that are agreed upon by major institutions responsible for policy—including national governments and supra-national organizations and multi-national corporations, research institutions, intelligence agencies, NGOs, and a variety of representatives from other organizations. Deciding who to invite and how will be difficult, but it should not be a stumbling block. The United States Constitution has proven quite effective over the last few centuries even though it was drafted by a group that was not representative of the population of North America at the time. Although democratic process is essential to good government, there are moments in history in which we confront deeper ontological and epistemological questions that cannot be addressed by elections or referendums and require a select group of individuals like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. At the same time, the constitutional convention cannot be merely a gathering of wise men, but will have to involve those directly engaged in the information economy and information policy.

That process of drafting a constitution will involve the definition of key concepts, the establishment of the legal and social limits of the constitution’s authority, the formulation of a system for evaluating the use and misuse of information and suggestions as to policies for responding to abuses of information on a global scale. The text of this constitution of information should be carefully drafted with a literary sense of language so that it will outlive the specifics of the moment and with a clear historic vision and unmistakable idealism that will inspire future generations as the United States Constitution inspires us. This constitution cannot be a flat and bureaucratic rehashing of existing policies on privacy and security.

We must be aware of the dangers involved in trying to determine what is and is not reliable information as draft the constitution of information. It is essential to set up a workable system for assuring the integrity of information, but multiple safeguards, checks, and balances will be necessary. There should be no assumptions as to what the constitution of information would ultimately be, but only the requirement that it should be binding and that the process of drafting it should be cautious but honest.

One essential assumption should be, following David Brin’s argument in his book The Transparent Society,[6] that privacy will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to protect in the current environment. We must accept, paradoxically, that much information must be made “public” in some sense in order to preserve its integrity and its privacy. That is to say that the process of rigorously protecting privacy is not sufficient granted the overwhelming changes that will take place in the years to come.

Brin draws heavily on Steve Mann’s concept of sousveillance, a process through which ordinary people could observe the actions of the rich and powerful so as to counter the power of the state or the corporation to observe the individual. The basic assumption behind sousveillance is that there is no means of arresting the development of technologies for surveillance and that those with wealth and power will be able to deploy such technologies more effectively than ordinary citizens. Therefore the only possible response to increased surveillance is to create a system of mutual monitoring to assure symmetry, if not privacy. Although the constitution of information does not assume that a system that allows the ordinary citizen to monitor the actions of those in power is necessary, the importance of creating information systems that monitor all information in a 360-degree manner should be seriously considered as part of a constitution of information. The one motive for a constitution of information is to undo the destructive process of designating information as classified and blocking off reciprocity and accountability on a massive scale. We must assure that multiple parties are involved in that process of controlling information so as to assure its accuracy and limit its abuse.

In order to achieve the goal of assuring accuracy, transparency and accountability on a global scale, but avoid massive institutional abuse of the power over information that is granted, we must create a system for monitoring information with a balance of powers at the center. Brin suggests a rather primitive system in which the ruled balance out the power of rulers through an equivalent system for observing and monitoring that works from below. I am skeptical that such a system will work unless we create large and powerful institutions within government (or the private sector) itself that have a functional need to check the power of other institutions.

Perhaps it is possible to establish a complex balance of powers wherein information is monitored and its abuses can be controlled, or punished, according to a meticulous, painfully negotiated, agreement between stakeholders. It could be that ultimately information would be governed by three branches of government, something like the legislative, executive, and judicial systems that has served well for many constitution-based governments. The branches assigned different tasks and authority within this system for monitoring information must have built into their organizations set conflicts of interest and approach in accord with the theory of the “balance of power” to assure that they limited the power of the other branches.

The need to assure accuracy may ultimately be a more essential task than the need to protect privacy. The general acceptance of inaccurate descriptions of state of affairs, or of individuals, is a profoundly damaging and cannot be easily rectified. For this reason, I suggest as part of the three branches of government, a “three keys” system for the management of information be adopted. That is to say that sensitive information will be accessible—otherwise we cannot assure that information will be accurate—but that information can only be accessed when three keys representing the three branches of government are presented. That process would assure that accountability can be maintained because three institutions whose interests are not necessarily aligned must be present to access that information.

Systems for the gathering, analysis and control of information on a massive scale have already reached a high level of sophistication. What is sadly lacking is a larger vision of how information should be treated for the sake of our society. Most responses to the information revolution have been extremely myopic, dwelling on the abuse of information by corporations or intelligence agencies without considering the structural and technological background of those abuses. To merely attribute the misuse of information to a lack of human virtue is to miss the profound shifts sweeping through our society today.

The constitution of information will be fundamentally different than most constitutions in that it must contain both rigidity in terms of holding all parties to the same standards and also considerable flexibility in that it can readily adapt to new situations resulting from rapid technological change. The rate at which information can be stored and manipulated will continue to increase and new horizons and issues will emerge，perhaps more quickly than expected. For this reason, the constitution of information cannot be overly static and must derive much of its power from its vision.

Structure of an Information Accuracy System

We can imagine a legislative body to represent all the elements of the information community engaged in the regulation of the traffic and the quality of information as well as individuals and NGOs. It would be a mistake to assume that the organizations represented in that “legislature” would necessarily be nation states according to the United Nations formulation of global governance. The limits of the nation state concept with regards to information policy are increasingly obvious and this constitutional convention could serve as an opportunity to address the massive institutional changes that have taken place over the past fifty years. It would be more meaningful, in my opinion, to make the members companies, organizations, networks, local government, a broad range of organizations that make the actual decisions concerning the creation, distribution and reception of information. That part of the information security system would only be “legislative” in a conceptual sense. It would not necessarily have meetings or be composed of elected or appointed representatives. In fact, if we consider the fact that the actual physical meetings of government legislatures around the world have become but rituals, we can sense that there the whole concept of the legislative process requires much modification.

The executive branch of the new information accuracy system would be charged with administrating the policies based on the legislative branch’s policies. It would implement rules concerning information to preserve its integrity and prevent its misuse. The details of how information policy is carried out would be determined at the constitutional convention.

The executive would be checked not only by the legislative branch but also a judicial branch. The judicial branch would be responsible for formulating interpretations of the constitution with regards to an ever-changing environment for information, and also for assessing the appropriateness of actions taken by the executive and legislative.

The terms “executive,” “legislative” and “judicial” are meant more as placeholders in this initial discussion, rather than as actual concrete descriptions of the institutions to be established. The functioning of these units would be profoundly different from such branches of present local and national governments, or even international organizations like the United Nations. If anything, the constitution of information, in that information and its changing nature underlie all other institutions; will be a step forward towards a new approach to governance in general.

Conclusion

It would be irresponsible and rash to draft an “off the shelf” constitution of information that can be readily applied around the world to respond to the complex situation of information today. Although I accept that initial proposals for a constitution of information like this one may be dismissed as irrelevant and wrong-headed, I assert that as we enter an unprecedented age of information revolution and most of the assumptions that undergirded our previous governance systems based on physical geography and discrete domestic economies will be overturned, there will be a critical demand for new systems to address this crisis. This initial foray can help formulate the problems to be addressed and the format in which do to so in advance.

In order to effectively govern a new space that exists outside of our current governance systems (or in the interstices between systems), we must make new rules that can effectively govern that space and work to defend transparency and accuracy in the perfect storm born of the circulation and alteration of information. If information exists in a transnational or global space and affects people at that scale, then the governing institutions responsible for its regulation need to be transnational or global in scale. If unprecedented changes are required, then so be it. If all records for hundreds of years exist on line, then it will be entirely possible, as suggested in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, to alter all information in a single moment if there is not a constitution of information. But the solution must involve designing the institutions that will be used to govern information, thus bringing an inspiring vision to what we are doing. We must give a philosophical foundation for the regulation information and open up of new horizons for human society while appealing to our better angels.

Oddly, many assume that the world of policy must consist of the drafting turgid and mind-numbing documents in the specialized terminology of economists. But history also has moments such as the drafting of the United States constitution during which a small group of visionary individuals manage to meet up with government institutions to create an inspiring new vision of what is possible that are recorded in terse and inspiring language. That is what we need today with regards to information. To propose such an approach is not a misguided modern version of Neo-Platonism, but a chance to seize the initiative with regards to ineluctable change and put forth a vision, rather than responding to change.

[1]As is suggested in the article by Tony Romm “David Petraeus affair scandal highlights email privacy issues” http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83984.html#ixzz2CUML3RDy).
[2] http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23177411#.UTL3bDD-H54
[3] Human genetic evolution is even slower.
[4]Peter Singer. “The Robotics Revolution” in Canadian International Council, December 11, 2012.
[5] http://fairerglobalization.blogspot.kr/2011/06/iceland-write.….n-age.html
[6]Brin, ‚David. The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose between Privacy and Freedom? New York: Basic Books, 1998.

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For those who are interested T. Musha, M.J. Pinheiro and T. Valone (Advanced Science Technology Research Organization, Yokohama, Japan, and others) have a new book that will be published soon:

In the final part of this installment, I will analyze a few more mainstream music videos with future-friendly memes and motifs, this time looking at videos mostly from 2010. In the last two installments, I argued that the increasing prominence of future-friendly memes and motifs as well as themes of self-empowerment via technology in mainstream music are significant insofar as such an increasing prominence extends the general awareness and potential-recognition of futurist or futuristic concepts, causes and potential crises, and insofar as it presents a sexy and appealing vision of the futuristic gestalt and of technology both high (e.g emerging, converging and otherwise-radically-transformative technologies) and low (e.g. consumer electronics).

This final part of the present installment will be my last dip in the mainstream as far as this series in concerned (although I am finding some of these EDM beats getting stuck in my head, despite myself). The next installment will consider some future-infused visuals and videos made by artists of EDM and electronic-music-“proper” (as opposed to the recent mainstream incorporation of EDM beats as a musical foundation).

Following that we’ll take a more pragmatic and discerning eye to the near future of music, considering how certain existing and on-the-horizon enhancement technologies could potentially disrupt the music industry and dramatically increase the variety and diversity of new music still to come.

All of the following images are the copyright of Interscope Records.

The Time, Dirty Bit (2010)

Here we take a look at an even older instance of future-infused visual aesthetics, with will.i.am’s previous group The Black Eyes Peas’ 2010 release “The Time, Dirty Bit”. The video opens on a depthy night sky; the futuristic visuals (simply because space, besides largely embodying the unknown for all of us, has been featured so often as an environment for sci-fi films and fictions, has become inextricably associated with a futuristic feel) are contrasted by the flickery lines we see transposed onto the view, giving the impression of looking at an old projector film.

The camera zooms in from space, to earth and finally to an alley-way, where we see will.i.am (sporting Beats by Dr. Dre, no surprise there) as his head becomes increasingly pixellated.

This pixellation eventually culminates in will.i.am’s head becoming one large black pixel, now acting as a blank screen. Such visuals blur the line between the real and the virtual, the physical and the digital, as virtual pixels become a physical screen and the image transforms into the very physical medium instantiating it.

Moreover, the theme of the fluidity of self, the extreme liberation possible in virtual worlds, in which you can become anyone you want and switch persona with the nonchalance of changing attire, is also exemplified as pixels (now on the screen that has become will.i.am’s head) sputter into synchrony, slowly converging to create the face of Fergie, the female member of the group. The pull of the future dissolves boundaries and the self is no exception.

Notice the ghostly lines forming her face and hair — a ghostly digital aesthetic indeed.

Distortion and vastly increased ability to modify (and/or increased ease of modification, whether your determining metric be time, energy, or computational performance) is also highlighted by the contortions her image undergoes as it gradually resolves.

The camera seems to zoom in on Fergie now, traveling down the hierarchy of scales, where we sweep past big blocky 3-D pixels and into a night club.

Here we find will.i.am sporting fairly futuristic attire (notice the metallic sleeves and gold grating-pattern on his jacket), and the lit-up computer servers behind him.

This video’s most prominent theme seems to be pixellation; this and other features found in the video support the recurrent motif of blurring the boundary between the real and the virtual.

Another feature exemplifying this motif is made when will.i.am (and others) hold their tablets out to take in a given scene. We see their virtual avatar on the screen occupying the real, physical space that their tablets take into view — and when we look back on the real scene, we see no avatar. Anyone familiar with Augmented Reality Video Games will be familiar with the effect. Here we see early augmented reality technologies being featured in a mainstream music video.

This effect, combined with the spreading pixellation that infects both artist and audience-member, work to create a boundary-blurring, future-friendly and technology-trendy aesthetic and thematic.

Imma Be Rocking That Body (2010)

Here is another mainstream music video released by the BEP that same year, featuring robots, hover-cars and fast-flicker effects that all work to create a futuristic and sci-fi feel. This particular video is a bit more dystopic than the others, but it suggests self-empowering and self-transformation technology-wielding thematic nonetheless.

Here we see Fergie with metalic breast-plate and glove as she walks down a long stretch of highway.

She eventually meets will.i.am in a futuristic bar (notice the volumetric flasks of colored liquid) sporting similarly-futuristic attire. Again, featuring contemporary consumer electronic brands (i.e. Beats by Dr. Dre) amongst other fictional examples of future technology help create an association between such brands and state-of-the-art high-technology and radical innovation.

Here we get a first look at the robot featured in the video.

Could the director be seeking a contrast between the featured futuristic high-technology and the old, ma-&-pa-style gas station?

In any case they jump into their hover-car (notice the out-jutting speakers on the front) and take off.

They enter the city, where they find the other members of the BEP. This one is glitching out until will.i.am presses a spot on the back of his head, after which he comes to life and plays around with the wire-and-junk-cluttered touch-screens on the tabletop.

Next a new robot comes to life, rising from out of the rubble of rubbish laying around the scrapyard.

We see other pieces of junk (the speaker behind the robot’s foot shown below, for example) come to life and start dancing around the yard.

We find the last missing member of the BEP as either robot or cyborg, and he seems to be missing his other half.

All this creates a fairly free and fun-infused scene for a music-video self-described by the group as dystopic. It seems to me that the dancing robots help create a technology-friendly rather than technology-ware feel.

And here we have a nice close-up of our original robot in all its cyclopsian glory.

We’re then picked up and dropped of at a new scene, where we see will.i.am in metal-adorned, semi-military-style getup. Notice the speaker at the business end of his gun.

We see more consumer electronics brands featured here as well, further exemplifying the trend of associating contemporary consumer-electronics brands (in this case HP and Beats by Dr. Dre) with high-tech and future-infused themes and memes.

In this video the black-eyed-peas go around town, finding everyone “glitching out” — that is, switching repeatedly between two disconnected positions or frames, the video-equivalent of a song “skipping” — a visual effect that simply screams digitality. This is an effect that does seem to imply technology-unfriendly, semi-dystopic connotations. But featuring the potential downside of technology in mainstream music videos is important too. We want to increase general awareness and willingness-to-consider high-technology-oriented and future-infused concepts and causes, not blind acceptance of their unquestionable beneficence. The video essentially consists of them going around town and “blasting” everyone back into action and out of their glitch via sonic waves of music.

We get a better look at their futuristic-themed clothing here as well.

The predominance of shiny-metal on black used in the costume design helps create a sci-fi and futuristic feel.

The self-empowering potentials of transformative and emerging technologies seem to be displayed as will.i.am climbs atop his robotic friend, to get a better vantage from which to shoot his motion-freeing sonic blasts.

Notice the speakers on the head of the white robot.

The video ends with a dance-off between the white and black robot.

Overall, the metal-heavy costume design, the vocal modulation applied to Fergie’s voice most of all, the featured instances of high-technology and the sci-fi based storyline and thematic all work to create a future-friendly with connotations of self-empowerment through technology, despite its self-described dystopic motifs, which I think are superseded by the themes of self-empowerment and self-transformation via technology displayed more prominently throughout the video.

Check it out (2010)

Another 2010 release by will.i.am and featuring Nicki Minaj also sports some technology-friendly and self-empowering motifs as well. Take a look at the futuristic and superhuman look of the single’s cover-art, showing will.i.am and Nicki in futuristic, borderline-superhero costumes, complete with a fist full of purple fire.

The video starts out like some sort of product release, with an audience of black-clad audience in black shades stoically awaiting the show.

And like we’ve come to expect, a Beats by Dr. Dre product is featured.

Nicki Minaj’s costume, while not as explicitly futurisically-themed as the last example, seems to give one off nonetheless. Her costume, hair and emphatically-over-expressed facial-expressions combine to create a very artificial, almost doll-like look. Various effects and aesthetics converge in this video to create a dominant motif of new, material products.

will.i.am’s mirrored shades help with the futuristic feel too, as does the black background and neon-pink lighting, reminding us (much like in 2011’s Scream and Shout) of the horizontal lines composing vents and gratings (e.g. radiator vents, computer vents, etc.) that help add to the artificial, somewhat electronic aesthetic the video displays.

These multiplicatively-dilating dancers also bear some futuristic, very cyber-punkish attire as well. Note the black leather pants and boots and the metal goggles, chains, vest and arm/wrist bands.

Also like 2011’s Scream and Shout, multiplicity is a prominent theme of the video.

Here we see the same interesting visual effect used in Scream & Shout — where a figure is multiplied, but each instance is taken at a slightly different time, so that the dancer’s actions and motions are smeared across both time and space, as though a small piece of physical space is intersecting a smaller piece of phase-space for a short time.

Another very electronically-themed visual effect is colorful, boxy 3-D letters (in this case hulgul, the Korean alphabet) hovering and weaving throughout the air. Again, blurring the line between real and virtual by infusing physical space with obviously-artificial, CGI objects and entities. This instance of boundary-dissolution is furthered emphasizes as the virtual objects weave around the artists, and by the artist’s acknowledging their existence (in this case by the surprise on Nicki Minaj’s face). The video seems to pay tribute to Japanese culture in various ways — the seemingly greater popularity of consumer electronics, or at least greater seeming enthusiasm for them and the digital/electronic aesthetic and memetic gestalt in general found in Japanese culture may have something to do with it. Much of anime has had a futuristic bent to it since at least the 90’s, so this could have something to do with it as well.

Here we see some more-explicitly future-forewarned costumes. Besides the leather and latex, we see that Nicki’s suit has designs based off of cyborg and otherwise-robotic body designs (the seeming ball-joints at her hips for example), complimented by her silted, restricted robotic movements.

We also see that will.i.am’s costume bears some futuristic features as well, not least his shiny (and now red-streaked) plastic hair with its aesthetic emphasis on artificiality. We also see the new-consumer-product sheen on Nicki’s latex suit as well.

And the visual-modification effects we saw in earlier videos is also featured here, this time in the form of a now-white and somewhat-rotoscoped will.i.am. These effects remind us of virtuality’s increased ease-of-modification and the self-realizational, self-transformative potentialities made newly possible by digital and electronic technologies.

The high degree of diversity displayed by the artists’ various appearances in the video also emphasize the freeing, democratizing and diversifying effects and connotations emerging from emerging and transformative technologies, as well as the future in general. Cosmopolitanism and the increasing dissolution of national boundary and border facilitated by electronic and digital technologies is trend we will see continue in the future; cosmopolitanism in general is a future-informed sentiment The interchanged hair-styles, face-styles (via makeup for Nicki and via virtual visual effects for will.i.am) and costumes could be argued to embody such conceptual associations (e.g. diversification and democratization) visually. Even if such concepts were not explicitly in mind when the video was created, the underlying feeling and effects could still have been picked up on, without any hypothesis of underlying causes. The mere existence of Skype demonstrates electronic and digital technologies’ democratizing, boundary blurring and space-transcending utilities and potentials to the average person.

Starships (2012)

The music video for Nicki Mijaj’s “Starships” also has some futuristic themes and images, even though it seems to strive for an organic, decidedly-non-mechanical aesthetic. Here we see a space craft hovering over a secluded island.

And the slowly-resolving virtual image of Nicki as she is presumably beamed down from the ship onto the beach.

The predominance of neon-bright and depthy colors also makes use of a somewhat electronic aesthetic. In either case it looks unnatural, and this is an artificiality and unfamiliarity shared by such electronic aesthetics as the one displayed in the final sequence of “The Hardest Ever” with its rapidly-fluctuating neon-stark objects and auras.

The video also features a visual sequence bearings aspects of the electronic aesthetic that was seen prominently in other videos thus-far considered. The unnaturality of the lively colorful shapes and moving patterns, the easy modification and modulation of visual patterns (and such an ease-of-modification/modulation is exemplified by how fast and fluidly such shapes and patterns move, morph, merge and converge) and the rampant multiplicity-of-visual-elements all help produce a very virtual, electroscape aesthetic and gestalt.

So too in the physical spaces shown; the unnatural angles and hues of the lighting and the strange visual angles and POVs used here aid in creating a wonderfully alien, readily-modifiable look and feel.

The distorted lighting and reflective costumes also create a somewhat futuristic feel that manages to keep a decidedly-organic aesthetic by showing lots of skin and pink hues.

Thus the color-infused electric lighting from mere stage lights to more Kubrickean lightstreams, the novel and often hypermodern costumes, the frequent inclusion of technologies both low (e.g. consumer electronics) and high (e.g. such emerging technologies as 3-D printers and robotic myoelectric prosthesis to interstellar spacecraft and, as we saw in this final part of the installment , hovercraft and robots as well) and the recurrent themes of self-empowerment via technologies both contemporary and as-yet-conceptual all converge to suggest a futuristic and emerging-technology-sympathetic feel, not only terms of aesthetic but also thematic and general gestalt.

As noted in the last installment, while the study was not only limited but biased (e.g what counts as futuristic, especially in such unquantifiable and highly-subjective areas as aesthetic, thematic and gestalt), I tried wherever possible to interpret and analyze some of the possible underlying associations and connotations that unite certain aesthetics and thematics along a shared memetic path, lineage or trajectory. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd parts of this particular installment aim to give some exemplary cases in support of two claims. First, that futuristic themes and memes are becoming increasingly prominent in popular media and art; second, that the increasing mainstream predominance of EDM tracks brings with it a futuristic sonic aesthetic and consequently, much of the time, a likewise futuristic thematic.

Again, all of this matters only insofar as an increasing predominance of future-friendly memes and themes in mainstream popular media and art helps facilitate an increase in (potential) awareness and recognition of futurist and emerging-technology-driven concepts, causes and potential crises. The future will certainly be disruptive, and lest we want it to refute us completely then futurist and NBIC or otherwise-emerging, converging and transformative-technology-driven movements, causes, concepts and possibilities need to reach a larger, more mainstream audience. I think we’re seeing this to an increasingly larger degree — but by no means is this an excuse to stop striving to increase the overall recognition and reception of such foresight-fraught concepts, causes and possible crises.

In the next installment I will discuss a few music-videos from “real” EDM and electronic-music tracks and artists (as opposed to mainstream pop music with an EDM foundation) in an attempt to show that this increasingly popular music genre (and its multitude of variants) also displays some futuristic themes, memes, motifs and gestalts as well — indeed, that the future-friendly memes and themes displayed by such “EDM-proper” music videos are significantly more explicit and readily-apparent than the mainstream pop examples considered here.

Following that we’ll depart from case-studies completely and instead turn our (fore)sights toward the nearer-term future of art in general and music in particular, considering such question as:

• How might continuing advancements in cochlear implants radically disrupt the music industry?
• Why might we expect an explosion in the variety and diversity of sounds and basic “musical elements”, if you will, available to musicians?
• Why might we expect a dramatic increase in the overall number of music genres, and an increase in the variety and diversity of music within a given genre, in the near future?
• How might surgically-implanted electronic devices for purposes of enhancement (rather than the restoration of base-level functioning) become an effective necessity for success in the music industry?

Here is the link to the call for papers: http://www.iseti.us/pdf/RMAIAA_Call_For_Abstracts_2013-0507.pdf

Here is the link to the conference: http://www.iseti.us/pdf/RMAIAA_General_Advert_2013-0507.pdf

I’ll be presenting 2 papers. The first is a slightly revised version of the presentation I gave at the APS April 2013 conference here in Denver (http://www.iseti.us/WhitePapers/APS2013/Solomon-APS-April(2013-04-15).pdf). The second is titled ‘The Mechanics of Gravity Modification’.

Fabrizio Brocca from Italy wanted to know more about the Ni field shape for a rotating-spinning-disc. Finally, a question from someone who has read my book. This is not easy to explain over email, so I’m presenting the answers to his questions at this conference, as ‘The Mechanics of Gravity Modification’. That way I can reach many more people. Hope you can attend, read the book, and have your questions ready. I’m looking forward to your questions. This is going to be a lively discussion, and we can adjourn off conference.

My intention for using this forum to explain some of my research is straight forward. There will be (if I am correct) more than 100 aerospace companies in attendance, and I am expecting many of them will return to set up engineering programs to reproduce, test and explore gravity modification as a working technology.

Fabrizio Brocca I hope you can make it to Colorado this October, too.

——————————————

Benjamin T Solomon is the author of the 12-year study An Introduction to Gravity Modification

In the last installment I argued that the increasing predominance of futurist themes, memes and motifs in mainstream popular media (focusing on mainstream music and music-videos) is making future-friendly and technology-dominated concepts, aesthetics and general gestalts increasingly attractive, appealing and sexy to mainstream audiences. I then argued that this is good for futurist and futuristic topics in general because it increases popular awareness of the future and makes the wider public more willing to entertain and consider futuristic notions, concepts, causes and contraptions. The dehumanising, disenfranchising, deterministic and alienating connotations that surrounded technology (especially high-technology — i.e. any non-consumer technology, like those used by military and public industry, or else very-high-end consumer technology and/or technologies that are as-yet only conceptual, embryonic, in their infancy) during the latter half of the 20th century, created in part by the massive scale of destruction made possible by advanced in technology and exemplified by the 1st and 2nd World Wars, are being supplemented by sexy and self-empowering memes and motifs that are increasing future-friendly and technology-sympathetic.

In this follow-up installment, I will analyze a few more real-world examples of future-friendly mainstream music videos, giving additional real-world credence to the claim that mainstream music is indeed featuring futuristic concepts and aesthetics to an increasingly greater degree. This will hopefully be my last dip into the mainstream, at least as far as this series is concerned — so for all you real EDM heads longing for some more references to EDM-music proper, don’t worry, you won’t have to wait for long.

The majority of music videos discussed here are by will.i.am. This is not to say that connotations of the future aren’t present or prominent in tracks and videos by other mainstream artists — as demonstrated by the discussion of Tyga’s Molly in the first part of this installment, and in the discussion of Nicki Minaj’s Starships in the next and final of this particular installment — but will.i.am seems to be ahead of the game on this one, importing futuristic themes and scenes in every single music video I’ve yet seen by him. Moreover, he seems to have made an explicit vow to help bring topics centering on and sympathetic to transformative technologies, technological advancement and the future in general to mainstream audiences.

will.i.am attended an event held by Singularity University on March 4, discussing how he wants to bring the high-amplitude action and (ad)venture happening at SU “to the ghettos” — delivering awareness of exponential technologies to low-income demographics and mainstream audiences. He also spoke at the Global Grand Challenges Summit this past March on the need to promote and celebrate STEM fields, with an emphasis on increasing STEM education and encouraging young people from underdeveloped demographics to pursue STEM careers (which exemplifies the self-empowering and self-realizational potentials these technologies contain and make newly possible). See his comments here and the full talk here. Note that in this case STEM refers to Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics fields, rather than John Smart’s Space-Time-Matter-Energy compression hypothesis, which might be more familiar to Transhumanist and Technoprogressive readers. will.i.am has also recently given a series of media appearances endorsing technology and the general self-empowering pull of new and emerging technologies (see here, here, here and here) as well as a commecial with Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburgerg. He has also been seen participating in programs by Intel and IBM (see here and here) and has planned a tech talent show.

His interest in SU, as well as the increasing dominance of futuristic themes and memes in his videos, may have been a large factor contributing to his being given the title of Director of Creative Innovation at IBM (see his acceptance speech here). So he’s not just promulgating these future-friendly feels in his tracks and music videos, but seems to be making an effort to support them in academia (as in SU) and industry (as in IBM) as well.

To say that the title and cover-art for his 2011 Hip House single Forever featuring EDM DJ & Producer Wolfgang Gartner was making explicit reference to Radical Life Extension and Indefinite Longevity might be wishful thinking, considering that the closest lyrical mention of longevity is “we’re going to party all night long; let’s make it last forever” — but considering his recent interest in SU, I don’t think the possibility that he’s read his Kurzweil is too unlikely, and that such connotations may very well have been present in his mind when the song was made, depending on how long he’s been hip to the concepts and conceptual-paradigms SU is based upon.

It is true that cyborg and superhuman motifs have been present in pop music for a long while, as others have argued elsewhere, and that futuristic and sci-fi-oriented themes have been featured in mainstream music since at least Parliament’s 1975 album Mothership Connection, but such future-friendly and transformative-technology-sympathatic memes and motifs seem to have become increasingly prominent and even predominant in mainstream music within the past three years. Now EDM seems to be the sonic foundation for the majority of pop songs — whereas this wasn’t this case 10 or even 5 years ago. Just last year Ray Kurzweil was featured in SuperBowl Commercial for Bestbuy. Hopefully we can expect such themes and memes to reach even greater heights in the years to come, as emerging and transformative technologies (and their transformative impacts on self and society) become increasingly more apparent and immediate to the wider public.

That Power (2013)

That Power is a new single by will.i.am that only serves to extend his recent track record for complimenting electronic beats with futuristic storylines, themes and imagery. This song even has a few transhumanist-sympathetic memes itself, aside from the EDM beats and futurephile visuals, as embodied in the chorus sang by a gigaghostly hologram of Justin Bieber:

“And oh, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive
And oh, I can fly, I can fly, I can fly
And oh, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive
And I’m loving every second. Minute. Hour. Bigger. Better. Stronger. Power.”

It embodies the same themes of self-empowerment, continual striving and the celebration of life for the sake of life itself that find kindred kindling within the Transhumanist and Immortalist communities, much like the Daft Punk track Harder Better Faster Stronger from their album Human After All.

All of the following images are the © of Interscope Records.

Here we see will.i.am’s 900 K custom-made ride, where the voluminous curves of the 1930–40’s-style car meets a slick and streamlined, hypermodern and decidedly futuristic style. A similar contrast is made by the costume design, as we’ll see shortly.

In the last installment I noted the triangle-imagery used near the beginning of Scream & Shout, and how it has futuristic connotations via its use in the Greek Alphabet as Delta, which is the scientific symbol denoting change (among other things; e.g. it can also denote uncertainty, as in the case of the uncertainty principal). Here we see a golden cube, brought by will.i.am, as one of its engraved triangles starts spinning.

We begin to see the ghostly points of light and networked lines that bring about connotations of the virtual for sure, which eventually resolve into the ghostly virtual image of Bieber singing “I’m Alive…”.

The trailing colors made as he (or his medium) moves emphasizes the virtual aesthetic as well, and embodies the space-transcending and boundary-dissolving, ultimately self-empowering potentials of digital and electronic technologies.

As does the momentary dissolution his image undergoes between-the-seconds as he moves.

Angular metal and grey-silver triangular-tessellation serve to further-ingrain an artificial and futuristic feel. The exposed beamwork seen along the sides of the walkway and on the horizon create a systemic or “internal-parts” aesthetic, while the unnatural yet sleek design of the actual building (composed, you notice, of two inverted triangles) work to reenforce this hypermodern and future-forward aesthetic. Though these two aesthetics seem to contrast one another — one reminding us of maintenance, repair and unfinishedness, the other of seemingly seamless completion, they both serve to support one another memetically, in that they both create connotations of (for lack of existing terms for memetic gestalts) technologicity or artificiality.

Here, presumably on the inside of the building just shown, we get a better view of the costumes used for the video. will.i.am’s leather getup (not to mentioned the mirrored visors of his adjacent advisors) combined with his wide-brimmed hat seems to exist in the strange interspace where the Matrix meets the Amish. This reinforces the contrast between futurity and nostalgia that we first saw in will.i.am’s Gatsby-2.0-style wheels.

We see the group dancing in front of another structure infused with visual connotations of the future. Its smooth exterior is composed of panels, emphasizing again the systemic or made-of-singular-components gestalt seen in the beamwork — yet its voluptuous curves seem to push in the opposite direction, towards the fluid continua of organicity. Its smooth exterior contrasts with the mechanical look of the interior’s rigid rig of nuts, bolts and more tesselaltion — and the contrast between both material and topology makes the structure seem part steel and part plastic or ceramic. This dissolving of boundaries, where something looks like what it isn’t, is often what makes the new exotic and exciting — enough of a surprise to startle yet small enough to still recognize. The installation’s shape itself instills contrast — it is solid as statue, yet looks as fluid as what floats inside a lava-lamp — and what is contrast but change without motion? The mere novelty and nonconformity of its shape serves to reenforce its futuristic aesthetic as well.

Notice how they restrict the position of their arms and legs with such angular rigidity. Are all varieties of the “robot dance” recognizable because the movements’ restriction and lack of fluidity reminds us of the clunky and inferior capabilities displayed by pop-culture robots throughout the 20th century? Or is it because we can see the motion of one component affect and move the next, because the causal chain of its motion is exposed in a viscerally visual way? Perhaps the orthogonal-restriction (i.e. restricted to moving in perpendicular directions relative to the preceding or succeeding components) of both the dance and the pop-culture robots they came from were originally meant to embody the systemic or “parts-like” nature of robots, technology, and artificial systems in general, because the delineating edges of parts form visual right-angles like the squares of a grid?

Here we see the group “slow-step” running down a receding corridor. The dully-mirrored walls and multiplied lighting-fixtures also work to create a mechanical or otherwise artificial impression. The dance itself reminds us of the reality-editing feats we are able to electronically/digitally apply to video (or any non-static recorded media, really) and goes so far as to blur the line between the real and the virtual; they slow down in the middle of each step and we see that they are doing this in physical space, unaided by virtual modification and video-editing — essentially embodying in “real” physical space the kinds of modification and control-over-reality we have in virtuality.

This is the second bridge (not counting the hallway) that they’ve crossed so far — symbolism? Here we see them stepping their “slow run” along a background of more tessellation, glass and white beamwork, further reenforcing the existing artificial and hypermodern aesthetics.

Finally some electronically-eclectified visuals! I was getting sick of all that motionless metal. Here we see the second half of the chorus-lyrics displayed in side-travelling text behind will.i.am and his dancers. “(And I’m lovin’ every…)

Second.

Minute.

Hour.

Bigger. Stronger.

Better. Faster.”

Notice the overlapping neon-blue tesselation in the background and the icy shimmer of the floor. Both work to reenforce the futuristic aesthetic featured in the video.

And here we see more orthogonally-restricted dancing reminding us at once of pop-culture robots and of heavy lifting, of strength and physical power, set to a background changing by the second on the tiered rows of screens that form the walls and background.

Are you still dubious that tessellation is a prominent visual-motif used in the video?

Here will.i.am’s dancers have shaded visors rather than mirrored ones. Perhaps because there was more than enough mirror to go around, right around the corner.

Multiplicity was a prominent theme in 2011’s Scream & Shout by will.i.am and Brittany Spears. It seems to have its place in this video as well. This scene looks like the ruins of a mirrored mountain, and the interlapping reflections create a visual chaos somehow simultaneously sleek and streamlined — a clean, chaste chaos.

Here we have a better look at will.i.am’s car in profile.

Here we see will.i.am removing the virtual Bieber-cube from its case. The ceiling is visually-reminiscent of the escalators a few frames back, and the white ceiling, walls and floor contrast nicely with the obsidian columns to create a very clean and futuristic aesthetic.

And here we see Bieber come to life again, to sing his exaltation of it.

Whether it is because digital or otherwise-electronic paraphernalia like Smartphones, Tablets, Ipods and Headphones in this case appeal to their audience, or because Interscope has signed a deal with Beats by Dr. Dre (as they seem to be featured in every will.i.am video I’ve seen thus far), the constant reference to digital or otherwise-electronic devices reinforce the video’s technophilic and future-friendly aesthetic.

The metallic eye they pass in front of here could be seen as futuristic by virtue of its design alone, but it also exhibits futuristic connotations by representing something organic (the eye) by way of inorganic materials, textures and shapes.

Here we see a very futuristic building with an outward-tiered shape almost like the inverse of the steps it looms over, and a brooding sky.

The building looks a lot like a spaceship — an impression aided by the array of lights we see inside, behind the virtual Bieber.

A dance-off between will.i.am’s crew and some newcomers?

No, it looks like he’s just giving them the virtual Justin Bieber.

In the final scene of the video we see will.i.am and the new crew perform a cool little bit of choreography that seeks to create the impression of an emergent machine created from the concerted action and causal interconnection of the human persons involved.

will.i.am shifts to the center.

Next, a motion by will.i.am sets the dancer below him in motion, who then passes the connection onto the next tier.

As will.i.am turns the second and third tiers do too.

And finally, we see will.i.am proffer the cube to the heavens, sending a white beam of light into the sky and off into the unknown.

We can’t see what its beaming to because of cloud-cover, so the audience may be meant to think that some sort of (alien?) communication was occurring.

Thus this newest addition to will.i.am’s list of mainstream future-friendly music videos follows with natural artificiality from his previous ones. He (or Interscope Records) has picked up on the appeal of the new-old-contrast, as exemplified by the futuristic 1930–40’s style car and the Matrix-meets-Amish costume-design (as well as the underlying appeal of Electroswing. The prominent neon-on-black and light-silver-and-grey backgrounds as well as the featured structures and art installations work to create a modern, sometimes-futuristic and ever technology-friendly feel.

The Hardest Ever (2011)

Going backward in time now for more foresight, will.i.am’s 2011 release The Hardest Ever sports some futuristic feels and technology-trendy frame-drops that like his other 2011 release Scream and Shout present various pieces of high-technology in an exciting and sexy way to mainstream audiences. Set on an abandoned military base, we see will.i.am in more leather (boy, his future does seem to have a lot of leather in it, doesn’t it? I mean, the Matrix-style aesthetic could only stay new for so long, right?) as he hurls himself over (and through) various hurdles (literally) and comes out the other side in a better ride each time. Overcoming barriers embodies themes of self-empowerment — a theme ultimately at home within Transhumanist and Technoprogressive communities — and the fact that each time he lands on the other side in an improved technological position (e.g. upgrading from feet to a bicycle to a motorcycle to car to plane to train to bigger-plane to rocket, eventually culminating in an interstellar spacecraft) also infuses the video with a technology-dominated aesthetic and tech-friendly feel. The track even contains some Transhumanist-sympathetic lyrics as well (namely “I am the future, Dalorian doors/Will he survive? Never deceased/I don’t think I’m ever gonna rest in peace”).

The video initially unfurls from a tune made by will.i.am fingers as he texts on his smartphone (which seek to utilize the same appeal as the featuring of Beats by Dr. Dre and other consumer-electronics products or brands does).

will.i.am’s getup looks like a mix between an astronaut’s jumpsuit and a tuxedo, probably foreshadowing the starry heights he reaches near the end of the video, as well as the James Bond themes also running rampant near the end. Is it the contrast between old-fashioned high-style (tuxedo) and futuristic pragmatism (astronaut’s white jumpsuit) that creates the futuristic feel we get from his costume in this video? After all, the central memetic core of the future is difference and change. The future is the foci of possibility and possible change; perhaps the pull toward extreme diversity and excess of xeno runs parallel with the pull towards anything future-infused, via the shared memetic stem of change and difference.

Here we see will.i.am as he charges through a stone-wall, emerging harder than ever on the other side in some suped-up wheels. The feat of flesh defeating the frugal frag of concrete matter.

We also see him leap over oncoming obstacles (storage trailers), reaching inhuman heights.

He goes up on a bike and comes down on motorcycle, undergoing yet another upgrade.

This next transition is a cool piece of thematic cinematography. Whereas a frame ago we saw will.i.am standing in front of the wall, in the next frame his image becomes transposed onto the wall itself, with will.i.am going from real to virtual in the flicker of a frame.

And a will.i.am music video just wouldn’t be complete without at least one visual reference to a product by Beats by Dr Dre. As noted in the last installment, featuring high-end consumer electronics not only increases the “sexyness-factor” surrounding new technologies, but also makes use of the increasing appeal of consumer electronics to younger demographics.

Having upgraded to a car, we see will.i.am speed past the video-equivilant of billboards, featuring a dancing J-Lo. A look at the back-end of these billboards reveals a technological aesthetic presumably added to remind viewers that these aren’t just boring old static, picture billboards, but their futuristic and semi-hi-tech analogs.

And yes, there is some sexual themes at play here as well — this is mainstream music, after all.

Here we get a better view of his gettup, the many pockets and grooves adding to the militaristic aesthetic — as does the car’s rugged, naked-functionalism military-styled interior.

The next upgrade is a plane.

Following that, he jumps from the sky and lands on a train. From there, he moves on up to a more advanced plane, sporting a more futuristic aesthetic.

As will.i.am takes wing we get a better look at the futuristic aesthetic aided by featuring such pieces of high-technology.

The plane quickly loses its wings, becoming a vertical-bound rocket with sights set toward the infinite sky. First overcoming stone barriers, now overcoming gravity wells, the video is full of physically-enacted themes of self-empowerment and the overcoming of materiality via technology.

Notice the upgrade will.i.am’s helmet has undergone as well.

So too with his rocket, which now looks more interstellar-spacecraft than solar-systemic two-seater. This is probably the “highest technology” featured in this video — definitely in the same league as the 3-D printer and BCI-mediated prosthetic arm featured in 2011’s Scream and Shout.

We also get a good look at its back-end as it powers up for some massive acceleration, now breaking sound and possible light barriers rather than stone ones. Sleek black, seemingly intricate, and laced with white light — this quick shot adds to the technology-made-sexy aesthetic of the video.

And will.i.am’s ship is looking even more future-infused as it lights up.

And we see its exhaust-end dilate with space as it surges forth forward-bound, ever-harder and ever-faster.

Notice the branding on will.i.am’s headgear. We are witnessing big-name brands of high-end consumer electronics looking to increase their public appeal by associating themselves with fictional instances of advanced or otherwise-futuristic-seeming technology. This is a trend also exemplified by the recent Transformers movies, which featured the use of brand-name vehicles as the cars from which the high-tech transformers emerged from. Big names looking to make big bucks are looking to do so by associating their brands with fictional pieces of high-technology — the future is coming, looking increasingly sexy to mainstream audiences, and big names with big pockets are taking notice.

Here the video takes a Kubrick-heavy forway into a visual sequence so emphatically based off of the “Start Gate scene” of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (right down to the squirming helmeted astronaut, external-visuals reflected in-visor) that they must be paying direct homage to it.

And again, more triangle imagery! I’m starting to think that the reference to Delta and change might be more explicit than I’d originally thought. Why else its promiscuous prominence?

These visuals are archetypally electric and electronic. Neon-bright abstract, transforming visuals seem to have become inextricably associated with the electronic gestalt so much that they now largely constitute the electronic aesthetic — perhaps due to their initial inclusion in futurist(ic)m films like 2001: A Space Odyssey. Did you know that one of the AI consultants he hired to hone H.A.L’s character into realism happened to be I.J Good, originator of The Intelligence Explosion hypothesis and coiner of the phrase “ultraintelligence”? Or that 10 minutes of deleted footage involving interviews with real scientists on their views regarding extraterrestrial life had featured Freeman Dyson, of the Dyson Sphere?

These visuals embody and remind us of the virtual and digital gestalt because the bring to the fore with fat emphasis the defining feature of virtuality. Such visuals are obviously not real, for their stark dissimilarity with the visuals we associate with unmodified physical reality — yet we created them (as with much CGI), and furthermore that we did so with enough fidelity that they look real (that is, we don’t doubt their reality because they are low resolution, as we do with video-games). Moreover our visual creations are almost completely disassociated from physical constraints (save physical constraints on available computational resources); we can make anything we want. The heart of the virtual is creation and liberation from limitation and constraint. That all this looks realistic despite not existing at all is a constant visual reminder of the highest virtue of virtuality: its defining indefinity and the asymptotically-approximated ideal of creation without constraint.

The fact that they are rushing past in forward-fashion faster than we can fully visually process also adds to their futurity and their hypermodern feel, perhaps even bringing about connotations of the accelerating nature of society and technology (but then again its hard to tell with such subjective subjects as connotations and gestalts).

Virtuality has other advantages besides an increased ease-of-modification-and-creation: increased ease of duplication and multiplication. Informational-products (any product consisting entirely of information, which includes digital media and software) can be duplicated without additional cost, which isn’t the case for material products. This thematic of freedom from constraint associated with “virtuality” and freedom in general is demonstrated visually in the next scene, where we see Mick Jagger dancing in a cacophotonous seething kaleidoscope of mirrored multispectrum selves.

The superposition of close-up and far-off perspectives, as well as the fluid elasticity of space and scale, bring to mind the extreme freedom of possibility embodied by and facilitated via such virtual “spaces”.

Multiplicity has been a recurrent theme in will.i.am’s music videos, and one that bears connotations of both the diversity and cosmopolitanism that share connotations of the future via the increasing trend of globalization and the transcension of space via digital and electronic technologies, as well as connotations of the primal thrust toward more that marks Man most stark.

Notice the multicolored lightening and electricity, adding to the scene’s already-electr(on)ic aesthetic.

We also see will.i.am’ ship travel down a wormhole-like tunnel that bears aesthetic connotations of the digital for sure, constituted in large part by the warped grid pattern.

Moreover, the fact that the shape, trajectory and flow of the neon-electric visuals by the movements is determined in large part by the shape and movements of the people they surround also exemplifies the themes of self-empowerment, self-creation/actualization and unconstrained-creation through the use of virtual, futuristic and otherwise-transformative and disruptive technologies. For example, here we see Jlo as she controls the shape of the electric effects surrounding her body; as she throws her body around, the lights are similarly hurled along a parallel trajectory.

And finally the video comes to a close with J-Lo, Mick and will.i.am meeting in electric sky to more electrifies future-infused visuals, Mick crackling and fizzing all weakly-godlike and fading out in a starry explosion of light a-fury.

Thus the neon-bold light-on-black visuals (from static lighting to the molten eddies and whorls of certain other electrokaleidoscopic  visual sequences), the metal-heavy costume design, the frequent inclusion of technologies both low (e.g. consumer electronics) and high (e.g. such emerging technologies as 3-D printers and robotic myoelectric prosthesis to interstellar spacecraft, and, as we’ll se in the next installment, hovercraft and robots as well) and recurrent themes of self-empowerment via contemporary and futuristic technologies all work to suggest a futuristic and emerging-technology-sympathetic feel, not only terms of aesthetic but also thematic and general gestalt.

While the study was not only limited but biased (e.g what counts as futuristic, especially in such unquantifiable and highly-subjective areas as aesthetic, thematic and gestalt), I tried wherever possible to interpret and analyze some of the possible underlying associations and connotations that unite certain aesthetics and thematics along a shared memetic path, lineage or trajectory. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd parts of this particular installment aim to give some exemplary cases in support of two claims. First, that futuristic themes and memes are becoming increasingly prominent in popular media and art; second, that the increasing mainstream predominance of EDM tracks brings with it a futuristic sonic aesthetic and consequently, much of the time,  a likewise futuristic thematic.

All of this matters only insofar as an increasing predominance of future-friendly memes and themes in mainstream popular media and art helps facilitate an increase in (potential) awareness of futurist and emerging-technology-driven concepts, causes and potential crises. The future will certainly be disruptive, and lest we want it to refute us completely then futurist and NBIC or otherwise-emerging, converging and transformative-technology-driven movements, causes, concepts and possibilities need to reach a larger, more mainstream audience. I think we’re seeing this to an increasingly larger degree — but by no means is this an excuse to stop striving to increase the overall recognition and reception of such foresight-fraught concepts, causes and possible crises.

In the next installment I will discuss a few music-videos from “real” EDM and electronic-music tracks and artists (as opposed to mainstream pop music with an EDM foundation) in an attempt to show that this increasingly popular music genre (and its multitude of variants) also displays some futuristic themes, memes, motifs and gestalts as well — indeed, that the future-friendly memes and themes displayed by such “EDM-proper” music videos are significantly more explicit and readily-apparent than the mainstream pop examples considered here.

Following that we’ll depart from case-studies completely and instead turn our (fore)sights toward the nearer-term future of art in general and music in particular, considering such question as:

• How might continuing advancements in cochlear implants radically disrupt the music industry?
• Why might we expect an explosion in the variety and diversity of sounds and basic “musical elements”, if you will, available to musicians?
• Why might we expect a dramatic increase in the overall number of music genres, and an increase in the variety and diversity of music within a given genre, in the near future?
• How might surgically-implanted electronic devices for purposes of enhancement (rather than the restoration of base-level functioning) become an effective necessity for success in the music industry?