Functional Mods and Antique Rockers ----------------------------------- by Read Write Execute There is a trend now on television that I find rather disturbing. I have seen some ads for a new brand of contact lenses that change your eye color to blue or "violet" (purple). They denigrate brown eyes as "brown as bark" or "brown as old shoes". My lover's sister has brown eyes, and I find them one of her strongest features, rich and warm. What's so great about having blue or purple eyes? It seems to me that this is a form of implicit racism. As I understand it, compared to Caucasians, most subpopulations of humankind [1] have a narrow range of variation of eye color; from personal observation, I would say it is usually limited to browns or black. (This is not to say "them people all look alike", for "them people" often exhibit a wider range of variation of ~other~ physical traits.) Thus, to denigrate brown eyes seems to me roughly the same as denigrating brown, red, and yellow skin and people who wear it. Fuck, we've already got enough dyetanned bleachblond(e)s. Do they all have to have to have blue eyes too? (Are we Aryan yet?) I want to see more diversity from this technology, not less, as the advertisers of these contact lenses seem to want to promote and provide. I dread the possible day William Gibson describes in his Sprawl stories, if/when everyone looks like the latest video star. Wouldn't you hate to live on the Planet of the Tapes? "I've got one word to say to you, son: ~plastic~" (surgery). And so I am not condemning cosmetic modification. (Just got a hair upgrade myself.) If blue or purple contact lenses, why not the whole spectrum? Wouldn't it be fun to have red eyes on occasion? Or fluorescent orange? Why not silver or gold, or mebbe copper? Why not make some skin dyes available too? We can be any color we want that way. Why settle for a purple mohawk or purple eyes when you can have purple skin? And why settle for just one color? "Hi, I'm Roy G. Biv." And why just cosmetic mod for the eyes? Why not functional mod? Heinlein, even that old fascist, has the computer Minerva in ~Time Enough for Love~ say she can see chords in rainbows and many "octaves" of colors. Splitting the spectrum into seven (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) is an arbitrary scheme and many cultures analyse it differently ("indigo" seems particularly arbitrary to me), and the eight-tone scale of music is itself a human invention, so it's kinda hard to say, as Heinlein seems to, that we fall one color short of an octave. Nevertheless, there are probably many epiphenomena of perception--analogous to chords and octaves, rhyme and rhythm, hue and saturation, complementarity (of colors and also flavors, as in Chinese cuisine), stereo and other 3D effects, endlessly, as well as whole senses--that we are missing because of our sensory limitations. With functional mod we can sense all of these. [2] In Table 1 are a few hacks I would like to make to my bodymind. These suggestions are made assuming we stay biological and on the macrolevel and take into account neither the possibility, quite real with nanotechnology (see Drexler's book below), of our translating into some other form of life (perhaps on the cellular scale or smaller, a la Greg Bear's ~Blood Music~), nor any tech we might carry or cyborg ourselves with, let alone a completely inorganic (robotic) bodymind. ~It also~ ~does not include changes we will think of after improvements~ ~like these take and we become smarter and more balanced--or~ ~changes after that.~ Sure, one can imagine future groups of people who will refuse functional modification. Perhaps we can call these ordinary humans Antique Rockers and the automutants the Functional Mods ("Antique Rockers" because their bodies will be creaking furniture and they will inherit this rock long after we Functional Mods have left). As with their namesakes, as many people ridicule cosmetic mods today, perhaps the Rockers will reject the Mods as effete or alien. But just this: imagine the person embodying for you the superlative of every human ability, then imagine yourself beyond them. A better dancer than Duncan, more musical than Mozart, stronger than Schwarzenegger, smarter than Saint Ron. Heh. Of course one will have to be, as they say, richer than Rockefeller to afford all these self-mutations, but a technology which can modify humans at the molecular level (i.e. a nanotechnology) can also turn stones into bread--that is, food and money, or, more generally, ~wealth~. And so with future tech we will have wealth enough and time. And if you do, will you refuse? Optimal or optional: your choice. NOTES ----- 1. I use the term "subpopulations" and others like it because I find the term "race" somewhat misleading; we are all members of the human "race", or species, are we not? We can mate and produce fertile children. Humans of other genetic backgrounds native to the planet are not Martians or Kzinti (though Martians Are People Too). "Racism" seems to me a form of parochialism, xenophobia, or neophobia. When we start modifying ourselves deeply, we won't be able to tell from which subpop the person's ancestors came--and we'll probably be able to mate with anyone and anything we want, to become, as my friend Dan Johanssen claims to be, "biosexual". 2. I won't speculate on how many senses we do have, but it also seems arbitrary to me; besides the five traditional in our culture, we can also count kinesthesia (motion sense and body knowledge, based in your muscle nerves), balance (based in your inner ear), cognition (as in Buddhism), and others. Table 1: POSSIBLE HACKS TO THE BODY ELECTRIC -------------------------------------------- **CHASSIS HACKS** * emortality (deathlessness) * more athletic (slim, muscular, coordinated) frame * radiation shielding * water- and vacuumproofing * self-containment (efficient recycling of body resources) * comfort control (e.g. self-heating for Antarctic conditions or worse) * extra limbs * shapechange ability * better repair of macrodamage (e.g. ability to repair dental cavities) * improved immune system * true, reversible gender-change tech (down to the chromosomes) **BRAIN HACKS** * faster brain with better memory and higher intelligence * in-brain Net link * better self-metaprogramming capability * ability to instantly alter consciousness in any way **SENSORY HACKS** * wider-spectrum vision and hearing * extra senses of all sorts (e.g. sonar, polarised light, electromagnetic senses, internal organ monitoring) * ability to adjust intensity ("volume") of senses, and to turn them off ("close one's ears") RECOMMENDED READING ------------------- Bear, Greg. ~Blood Music~. Drexler, K. Eric. ~Engines of Creation~. Ettinger, R.C.W.. ~Man into Superman~. FM-2030. ~Are You a Transhuman?~ [reviewed next issue] Gibson, William. ~Neuromancer~, ~Count Zero~, and ~Mona Lisa Overdrive~ (the Sprawl Trilogy), and ~Burning Chrome~. Harrington, Alan. ~The Immortalist~. Wilson, Robert Anton. ~The Illuminati Papers~, ~Prometheus Rising~. Shareright ---------- (S) Shareright 1989 by Read Write Execute for ~Singularity~ magazine, 89 Mass. Ave., Suite 199, Boston, MA 02115. You may reproduce this material only if your recipients may also reproduce it, you do not change it, and you include this notice. Everything for nothing now!