In the words of the book’s author, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food (2019) is “not an attempt at prediction but rather a study of cultured meat as a special case of speculation on the future of food, and as a lens through which to view the predictions we make about how technology changes the world.” While not serving as some crystal ball to tell us the future of food, Wurgaft’s book certainly does serve as a kind of lens.

Our very appetites are questioned quite a bit in the book. Wondering about the ever-changing history of food, the author asks, “Will it be an effort to reproduce the industrial meat forms we know, albeit on a novel, and more ethical and sustainable, foundation?” Questioning why hamburgers are automatically the default goal, he points out cultured meat advocates should carefully consider “the question of which human appetite for meat, in historical terms, they wish to satisfy.”

Wurgaft’s question of “which human appetite” – past, present, or future – is an excellent one. If we use his book as a lens to observe other emerging technologies, the question extends well beyond our choices of food. It could even have direct implications for such endeavours as radical life extension. Will we, if we extend our lifetimes, be satisfactory to future people? We already know the kind of clash that persists between different generations, and the blame we often place on previous generations for current social ills, without there also being a group of people who simply refuse to die. We should be wary of basing our future on the present – of attempting to preserve present tastes as somehow immutable and deserving immortality. This may be a problem such futurists as Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near (2005) need to respond to.

If we are to justify the singularity at which we or our appetites are immortalized, we should remember technology changes “morality’s horizon”, as Wurgaft observes. If, for example, a new technology arises that can entirely eliminate suffering, our choice to allow suffering is an immoral one. If further technologies then emerge that can eliminate not just suffering but death, it will become immoral on that day to permit someone’s natural death – at least to the extent it is like the crime of manslaughter. I argued in my own book that it will be immoral to withhold novel biotechnologies from impoverished countries, if we know such direct action will increase their economic independence or improve their health. Put simply, our inaction in a situation can become an immoral deed if we have the necessary tools to stop suffering.

Beyond the way they alter our moral structures and expectations, Wurgaft notes that much fear over emerging technologies stems from the belief “technology might introduce a new plasticity into our concept of what it is to be human.” This is already expected to be the case with potential transhuman technologies, which critics of transhumanism find greatly troubling. Fully respecting the sanctity of animal life may ultimately coincide with respecting the same for all sentient beings, such as artificial and posthuman beings. Alternatively, the plasticity being described may ultimately undermine all our rights, leaving sentient life open to a whole new range of abuses, which certainly is the outcome critics of transhumanism fear. The fear of human rights being only more easily degraded and devalued by technology, or the notion technology will broaden the scope of all things morally wrong, is frequently expressed in the British dystopian Netflix series Black Mirror.

The moral appetite of the advocates of cultured meat is clear. They seek increased animal protection primarily, followed by environmental protection, but much rarer are their appeals to food security and human health. Wurgaft points out there is no apparent compelling philosophical defence or apologetic for the eating of animals. Perhaps the aforementioned plasticity of our morals to align with our species’ technological abilities, however, means most of us will remain unable to develop an acceptance of the sanctity of animal life until it becomes more broadly convenient to do so.

A chapter of Meat Planet addresses promises, noting how hopeful expectations often reinforce each other. The author also discusses “hype”, noting it is both necessary to the success of, and yet also a component leading to eventual (in Wurgaft’s view inevitable) disillusionment with any emerging technology. Such lessons may seem dissatisfying to those of us who are more enthusiastic about the future, but they seem necessary. Those of us who write science fiction know it is still fiction, and at best can only inspire some small part of the real future.

Wurgaft acknowledges “physical technologies (in energy, in transport, in medicine, in manufacturing) have lagged behind our digital ones”. This is regrettably true. Far too much effort in the tech sectors goes into software and smarter approaches to old problems rather than achieving real breakthroughs or actually inventing something. This only adds to the disappointment many feel. Rather than entering a sci-fi world filled with new domains of advanced technology, we are striding into a world only filled with new gimmicky apps and ever more efficient ways of doing whatever we already did.

Staying on the issue of technological disappointment, many problems are especially frustrating because they are the result of our culture rather than hurdles in engineering itself. Wurgaft makes a good point that privately funded labs don’t share their research and are “at risk of reinventing the wheel”. If we are to imagine a solution, it may be that governments should purchase the research of failed biotech start-ups, then hand it out freely with a goal to reduce any duplicated work and accelerate research.

It is my own observation that states are often capable of a significant amount of heavy lifting on the way to new technologies where private companies were not willing to take risks. Companies focused on new experimental technologies often leave it to engineers to solve the problem of scaling – work that too often simply doesn’t get done, as was the case with a lab-tested fuel production method using bacteria. It is possible that a state could learn best when to step in and could compensate both for the poor communication between innovators and the lack of engineering expertise and funding necessary for scaling.

On the topic of cultured meat specifically, maybe the focus should not currently be on replacing the most desired forms of meat (e.g., burgers and steaks) with cultured meat but in replacing at least a substantial percentage of lower-quality meat products with cultured meat. This, of course, depends on government adopting an agenda of phasing out industrial animal slaughter in much the same way carbon reduction targets were adopted.

A final consideration, for me, is that there may be alternative ways of achieving the same goals as cultured meat proponents. If genetic engineering could produce animals that efficiently yield greater quantities of meat, and of better quality, this may result in fewer individual animals suffering. Better yet, if synthetic biology is what it claims to be, it may eventually be possible to remake our favourite meats using the body of some wholly engineered or cognitively suppressed animal that does not experience suffering and exists its whole life as a steak.

To conclude, Wurgaft’s Meat Planet is quite nutritious food for thought. Beyond directly addressing and critically examining the hopes behind cultured meat, it raises a number of questions that should be asked of the advocates of other emerging technologies. The most important lesson is that we should not view new technology as morally neutral. It is almost certain to reconfigure our morality, whether it is for better or worse. I like to think technology only better supports us to make good moral choices in the long-term, even if there are short-term instances of abuse, as can be seen by looking at the overall course of human history.

More from me: Catalyst: A Techno-Liberation Thesis

My own 2013 book Catalyst: A Techno-Liberation Thesis offered a prediction of the political future, viewing the near-term future as a time of crisis shaped by the nature of technology and the slowness of states to adjust to it. As this struggle becomes more acute, guarded new technologies will also get stolen and overflow across borders, going global and penetrating every country before they were intended to. States and large companies will react with bans and lies as they try to save their monopolies. Ultimately, over a longer time-frame, the nation-state system will collapse because of this pressure and an uncertain successor system of governance will emerge. It will look like “hell on earth” for a time, but it will stabilize in the end. We will become new political animals with new allegiances, shaped by the crisis, much as the Thirty Years’ War brought about our Westphalian nation-state model. Six years on from my book, are we any closer to what I predicted?

1. The internet is “liberating” and “empowering” in a political sense (pp. 2, 3)
   • Uncertain outcome. Will current habits of censorship, de-platforming and other techno-enslavement as a result of controversies like “Russiagate” persist or are they temporary? If the economically or commercially favorable course is one of freedom and the removal of all filters and bans, will we see a reversal in the next few years? As younger politicians replace the old, will the internet become a sacred anarchy again?
2. “Duplicitous policies” preserve the status of rich countries as exploiters and bullies (p. 11)
   • Yes, and it is increasingly obvious. Such policies became exposed and visible under the Trump administration, which openly declares its national interest to lie in the economic deprivation of others and sabotage of their tech. This has been criticized as harmful to free trade, and has been described as “de-globalization”. Even Russian President Vladimir Putin remarked that the tech war complicates the issue of global inequality (a rare observation seemingly asserted only in the Catalyst Thesis before recently).
3. “Nano” and “bio” appliances will be in the household and will “shrink” production processes, abridging these processes so they are not corporate or state controlled and are in the “hands of the people” (p. 15)
   • This is uncertain. If there has been progress towards this outcome, it is not visible and has not had a major impact on world events. The possibility of it has started to cause concern for states and monopolistic schemes, but this is more in the ‘alarm’ stage rather than the ‘ban’ stage. More time may be needed, before this trend has a deeper impact on society.
4. The nation-state system is being weakened by technology, media and globalization (p. 16), anti-state forces are “winning”
   • Well, not really. As of 2019, unless everything we just saw was a hiccup in the grand plan of history, the “ideological mask” of exploitation and division — the nation-state system — has reasserted itself. In almost every policy area in every country, the clock is running backward towards nationalism, censorship, borders, walls, and deep paranoia. Almost everyone on the political left and right is part of the problem, wittingly or unwittingly.  Whether you support Trump or think he’s a Russian asset, or even care, your views and values are right out of the Nineteenth Century. We have seen the defeat of net neutrality, along with the passive acceptance of censorship on social media in the foolish assumption it will only be used on targets we dislike or who went too far. There seems to have been a lack of any major follow-up disclosures of government abuses on the scale of Edward Snowden’s, and whether it will ever happen again is questionable. With all these things considered, “losing” might be a better description of the situation for anti-government techno-politics as of 2019. If what is happening is not a minor disruption in the flow of history, it is consequential for the Catalyst Thesis and severely undermines its value. If the “soft” battle is lost as described above, and we revert to a society dominated entirely by strong states and corporations, the “hard” battle of techno-liberation may never start in our lifetimes.
5. Historical transitions are “dark and filled with reaction” (p.23)
   • Yes. This appears to still be the case. The reaction may be what we are already facing, as all elites invested in the old system desperately try to suppress the global political will, motivated by fear of a new world order in which they are demoted.
6. “Open-borders global political will” will form as a result of the internet, translation software, and the difficulty of statists in managing the overflow of popular technologies and their users (pp. 24, 25)
   • Yes. Almost every attempt by the media conglomerates and/or state to create a uniform public opinion about an election, a global issue, a scandal, etc. is failing because of alleged foreign “trolls”. They cannot be stopped because the internet’s circulatory system is not for one nation, but completely open to the world. That is the whole point of it, the reason it is the internet. The US 2016 election was the most visible example of the loss of control. Repressive and paranoid statements ensued. But, as of 2019, governments and media still gasp at the results they are getting.
7. We will see new or experimental technologies shared illegally, the way information is leaked (p. 37)
   • Uncertain. Edward Snowden and Wikileaks do not seem to have captured as many imaginations as they should have, given how central they have been in the story of the internet. It is difficult to argue that the next generation will be even more rebellious, if they are to grow up in a much more monitored and conformist society. If the anarchy of the internet is going to be stopped and the smallest infractions punished as treason, this will damage the thinking of younger people who should have grown up noticing the contradictions in society. If, on the other hand, younger people are increasingly trained to be highly capable in the cyber-world (e.g. coding classes), we may see an even bigger generation of cypherpunk rebels accidentally raised by the state.

Catalyst is read in less than a day, and can be found on Kindle as well as in print. It was written to bring together a number of ideas and predictions I presented in articles at the IEET website, h+ Magazine, and other websites and includes full lists of sources. If you prefer to see more first, follow @CatalystThesis on Twitter or sign up to the email newsletter.

Utopistics is an emerging field in political science, dealing with the creation of an alternative social system or civilization with different values and priorities from the dominant ones today. Learn about it with this video:

Is there a viable alternative to the neoliberal economic consensus?

Is the nationalism and protectionism of Trump and similar politicians the only alternative?

Is another world possible?

Is a respected alternative even necessary for us to justify getting rid of a reigning economic or social system?

These questions are all relevant to futurism, which closely resembles utopistics in its scope and often asks similar questions.

Point discussed at 1:31 in the video: https://youtu.be/VJ_qtKf64Is?t=1m3s

From the conference text at: https://www.academia.edu/34323947/Mont_Order_July_2017_Conference_Text

• “Climate change not likely to be stopped, likely to result in a crisis. No resources may be left for next generation.“
  • “Crises occurred in the past, and the 1% lost the most. The 99% are likely to survive climate change by struggling through anything (droughts, resource shortages, food shortages, economic crashes etc.) whereas the 1% could lose everything.”
  • “If the elite crack under pressure as Donald Trump does, this supports the above. The future of the 1% during a climate change crisis could be a larger scale version of the insanity that grips people who suffer a financial loss and become homeless after a relatively normal life.”
  • “As above, the Great Depression did not impact average person, but drove stockbrokers and other wealthy people to ruin or suicide.”

According to Carson, “the more technical advances lower the capital outlays and overhead for production in the informal economy, the more the economic calculus is shifted” (p. 357). While this sums up the message of the book and its relevance to advocates of open existing and emerging technologies, the analysis Carson offers to reach his conclusions is extensive and sophisticated.

With the technology of individual creativity expanding constantly, the analysis goes, “increasing competition, easy diffusion of new technology and technique, and increasing transparency of cost structure will – between them – arbitrage the rate of profit to virtually zero and squeeze artificial scarcity rents” (p. 346).

An unrivalled champion of arguments against “intellectual property”, the author believes IP to be nothing more than a last-ditch attempt by talentless corporations to continue making profit at the expensive of true creators and scientists (p. 114–129). The view has significant merit.

“The worst nightmare of the corporate dinosaurs”, Carson writes of old-fashioned mass-production-based and propertied industries, is that “the imagination might take a walk” (p. 311). Skilled creators could find the courage to declare independence from big brands. If not now, in the near future, technology will be advanced and available enough that the creators and scientists don’t need to work as helpers for super-rich corporate executives. Nor will the future see such men and women kept at dystopian, centralized factories.

Pointing to the crises of overproduction and waste, together with seemingly inevitable technological unemployment, Carson believes corporate capitalism is at death’s door. Due to “terminal crisis”, not only are other worlds possible but “this world, increasingly, is becoming impossible” (p. 82). Corporations, the author persuades us, only survive because they live off the subsidies of the government.  But “as the system approaches its limits of sustainability”, “libertarian and decentralist technologies and organizational forms” are destined to “break out of their state capitalist integument and become the building blocks of a fundamentally different society” (p. 111–112).

Giant corporations are no longer some kind of necessary evil needed to ensure wide-scale manufacture and distribution of goods in our globalized world. Increasingly, they are only latching on to the talents of individuals to extract rents. They may even be neutering technological modernity and the raising of living standards, to extract as much profit as possible by allowing only slow improvements.

And why should corporations milk anyone, if those creators are equipped and talented enough to work for themselves?

The notion of creators declaring independence is not solely a question of things to come. While Kevin Carson links the works of Karl Hess, Jane Jacobs and others (p. 192–194) to imagine alternative friendly, localized community industries of a high-tech nature that will decrease the waste and dependency bred by highly centralized production and trade, he also points to recent technologies and their social impact.

“Computers have promised to be a decentralizing force on the same scale as electrical power a century earlier” (p. 197), the author asserts, referring to theories of the growth of electricity as a utility and its economic potential. From the subsequent growth of the internet, blogging is replacing centralized and costly news networks and publications to be the source of everyone’s information (p. 199). The decentralization brought by computers has meant “the minimum capital outlay for entering most of the entertainment and information industry has fallen to a few thousand dollars at most, and the marginal cost of reproduction is zero” (p. 199).

The vision made possible by books like Kevin Carson’s might be that one day, not only information products but physical products – everything – will be free. The phrase “knowledge is free”, a slogan of Anonymous hackers and their sympathizers, is true in two senses. Not only does “information want to be free”, the origin of the phrase explained by Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants (2010), but one can acquire knowledge at zero cost.

If the “transferrability” of individual creativity and peer production “to the realm of physical production” from the “immaterial realm” is a valid observation (p. 204–227), then the economic singularity means one thing clear. “Knowledge is free” shall become “everything is free”.

“Newly emerging forms of manufacturing”, the author indicated, “require far less capital to undertake production. The desktop revolution has reduced the capital outlays required for music, publishing and software by two orders of magnitude; and the newest open-source designs for computerized machine tools are being produced by hardware hackers for a few hundred dollars” (p. 84).

Open source hardware is of course also central to the advocacy in The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, especially as it relates to poorer peripheries of the world-economy. It is through open source hardware libraries of the kind advocated by Vinay Gupta that plans for alternative manufacture as the starting point in an alternative economy for the good of all become feasible.

As I argued in my 2013 Catalyst booklet, not only informational goods will face the scandals of being “leaked” or “pirated” in future. The right generation of 3D printers, robots, atomically-precise manufacturing devices, biotechnology-derived medicines and petrochemicals will all move “at the speed of light” as the father of synthetic biology J. Craig Venter predicted of his own synbio work.

The fuel of an economic singularity, those above creations should be of primary interest in the formation of an alternative economy. They would not only have zero cost and zero waiting times, but they would require zero effort.  Simply shared, they must be allowed to raise the living standards of humanity and allow poor countries to leapfrog several stages of development, breaking free of the bonds of exploitation.

One area to be criticized in the book could be a portion in which it reflects negatively on the very creation of railways or other state-imposed infrastructure and standards as a wrong turn in history, because these created an artificial niche for corporations to thrive (p. 5–23). It seems to undermine the book’s remaining thesis that the right turn in history consists of “libertarian and decentralist technologies and organizational forms”. “Network” technologies and organizational forms only exist due to that wave of prior mass production and imposed infrastructure the author claimed to be unnecessary. Without the satellites and thousands of kilometers of cable made in factories and installed by states, any type of “network” organizational form would be a weak proposition and the internet would never have existed.

Arguably, now the standards are set, future technological endeavors that connect and bridge society won’t need new standards imposed from above or vast physical infrastructure subsidized by states. The formation of effective networks itself now produces new mechanisms for devising and imposing standards, ensuring interconnectivity and high living standards should continue to flourish under the type of alternative economy advocated in Carson’s book.

Abolish artificial scarcity, intellectual property, mandatory high overhead and other measures used by states to enforce the privileges of monopoly capitalism, the author tells us (p. 168–170). This way, a more humane world-economy can be engineered, oriented to benefit people and local communities foremost. Everyone in the world may get to work fewer hours while enjoying an improved quality of life, and we can prevent a bleak future in which millions of people are sacrificed to technological unemployment on the altar of profit.

Watch this video on YouTube.

STATEMENT 1: NEW SECRET WIKI CREATED

The Mont Order’s secret wiki created via PBworks holds information on the origin and literature of the Mont Order as well as our current structure, ranks and members. Members will be invited via email and will be able to contribute pages or post comments and questions on this literature. The public will not have access to it.

STATEMENT 3: FRIENDS OF THE MONT ORDER GROUP IS EFFECTIVE

The Friends of the Mont Order group created by Raincoaster at Facebook has seen a surprising growth in membership. Our hope is that it will reach a point where members can confidently post to the group and a minimal amount of admin involvement is needed. Due to the continued growth in its membership and the high amount of activity there, the group can be deemed a success so far.

STATEMENT 8: ON ANTI-ISLAM MEDIA AND POLICIES IN EUROPE AND THE US

“Integration”, humiliation of Muslims by the state, and blaming Islam for violence are non-answers to terrorist threats. These steps will only deepen tensions and extremist views on all sides in European countries, where terrorist incidents have occurred. We have noted that incidents in Europe are beginning to resemble a more American pattern of “mass shootings” but similar tragedies have curiously not been occurring in the UK. In addition, editorial policies of Western media clearly follow a pattern of only describing attacks as “terrorist” after an attacker is described to be a Muslim.

POLL ALSO TAKING PLACE

(Vote Here) From a MONT member: “All funding of religious groups by non-citizens should be banned” (expanded: “Religions should be treated the same way as political parties”). Justified by the way Saudi Arabia uses mosque financing to spread its political power and extremism particularly in Europe. Might also bring states and authorities to account for spreading extremism rather than blaming communities. Might also allow Muslim communities to take control of their own future rather than taking orders from foreign clerics. Should this be advocated as law? (NOTE: The UK already bans political parties from getting foreign funds. What is being advocated in the UK context is only that religious groups be also added to these lists of groups. In the context of other countries, they would copy the above element of UK law and then add the religious groups to the lists.)

The Mont Order, often just called Mont, is an information society of writers and networks based in different countries who collaborate to broaden their influence. To date, this has been achieved mainly through the internet.

The Mont Order has held online audio conferences since February 2015.

Shared website: lordre.net

Shared Twitter timeline: @MontOrder

Subscribe to updates from this society: feeds.feedburner.com/lordre/tajQ

Watch this video on YouTube.

How could global economic inequality survive the onslaught of synthetic organisms, micromanufacturing devices, additive manufacturing machines, nano-factories?
(http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/lordre/2016/04/obsessed-…L36KMDo.99)

Narrated by Harry J. Bentham, author of Catalyst: A Techno-Liberation Thesis (2013), using the introduction from that book as a taster of the audio version of the book in production. (http://www.clubof.info/2016/04/liberation-technologies-to-come.html)

Paperback: http://www.amazon.com/Catalyst-Techno-Liberation-Harry-J-Ben…atfound-20

Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Catalyst-Techno-Liberation-Harry-J-Ben…atfound-20

Audio: coming soon!

A petition has been circulated from Change.org, calling on Google to reverse its policy changes which deny advertising at so-called “sensitive” content. It can be signed via the link below.

https://www.change.org/p/larry-page-cofounder-google-susan-w…ting-on-wa

Problems in the way Google sees the information media revolution of the internet are implied in the recent Mont Order society Seven Point program embedded below, which designated Google as a neoconservative-leaning organization. Disruptive technologies, and the potential of nanotechnology, were also addressed in the same section of the Mont Order program, which held a more positive view of individual technologies rather than the companies and executives promoting them.

In a book by Google executives called The New Digital Age, Google claimed that “enforcing the law” is not censorship, despite the fact that all censorship consists of creating laws to stifle and shut down criticism. This shows a profound refusal to accept basic logic or terminology, matched only by Google’s chauvinist alliance with US mass surveillance and belief the US government must disarm and conquer the entire world to bring security.

Fear of scientists “playing god” is at the centre of many a plot line in science fiction stories. Perhaps the latest popular iteration of the story we all love is Jurassic World (2015), a film I find interesting only for the tribute it paid to the original Michael Crichton novel and movie Jurassic Park.

Full op-ed from h+ Magazine on 7 October 2015 http://hplusmagazine.com/2015/10/07/opinion-synthetic-biolog…f-mankind/

In Jurassic Park, a novel devoted to the scare of genetic engineering when biotech was new in the 1990s, the character of John Hammond says:

“Would you make products to help mankind, to fight illness and disease? Dear me, no. That’s a terrible idea. A very poor use of new technology. Personally, I would never help mankind.”

What the character is referring to is the lack of profit in actually curing diseases and solving human needs, and the controversy courted just by trying to get involved in such development. The goal to eradicate poverty or close the wealth gap between rich and poor nations offers no incentive for a commercial company.

Instead, businesses occupy themselves with creating entertainment, glamour products and perfume, new pets, and other superfluities that biotech can inevitably offer. This way, the companies escape not only moral chastisement for failing to share their technology adequately or make it freely available, but they can also attach whatever price tag they want without fear of controversy.

It is difficult for a well-meaning scientist or engineer to push society towards greater freedom and equality in a single country. It is even harder for such a professional to effect a great change over the whole world or improve the human condition the way transhumanists, for example, have intended.

Although discovery and invention continue to stun us all on an almost daily basis, such things do not happen as quickly or in as utilitarian a way as they should. And this lack of progress is deliberate. As the agenda is driven by businessmen who adhere to the times they live in, driven more by the desire for wealth and status than helping mankind, the goal of endless profit directly blocks the path to abolish scarcity, illness and death.

Today, J. Craig Venter’s great discoveries of how to sequence or synthesize entire genomes of living biological specimens in the field of synthetic biology (synthbio) represent a greater power than the hydrogen bomb. It is a power we must embrace. In my opinion, these discoveries are certainly more capable of transforming civilization and the globe for the better. In Life at the Speed of Light(2013), that is essentially Venter’s own thesis.

And contrary to science fiction films, the only threat from biotech is that humans will not adequately and quickly use it. Business leaders are far more interested in profiting from people’s desire for petty products, entertainment and glamour than curing cancer or creating unlimited resources to feed civilization. But who can blame them? It is far too risky for someone in their position to commit to philanthropy than to stay a step ahead of their competitors.

Even businessmen who later go into philanthropy do very little other than court attention in the press and polish the progressive image of the company. Of course, transitory deeds like giving food or clean water to Africans will never actually count as developing civilization and improving life on Earth, when there are far greater actions that can be taken instead.

It is conspicuous that so little has been done to develop the industrial might of poor countries, where schoolchildren must still live and study without even a roof over their heads. For all the unimaginable destruction that our governments and their corporate sponsors unleash on poor countries with bombs or sanctions when they are deemed to be threatening, we see almost no good being done with the same scientific muscle in poor countries. Philanthropists are friendly to the cause of handing out food or money to a few hungry people, but say nothing of giving the world’s poor the ability to possess their own natural resources and their own industries.

Like our bodies, our planet is no longer a sufficient vehicle for human dreams and aspirations. The biology of the planet is too inefficient to support the current growth of the human population. We face the prospect of eventually perishing as a species if we cannot repair our species’ oft-omitted disagreements with nature over issues of sustainability, congenital illness and our refusal to submit to the cruelties of natural selection from which we evolved.

Once we recognize that the current species are flawed, we will see that only by designing and introducing new species can suffering, poverty and the depletion of natural resources be stopped. Once we look at this option, we find already a perfect and ultimately moral solution to the threats of climate change, disease, overpopulation and the terrible scarcity giving rise to endless injustice and retaliatory terrorism.

The perfect solution could only be brought to the world by a heroic worker in the fields of biotech and synthetic biology. Indeed, this revolution may already be possible today, but fear is sadly holding back the one who could make it happen.

Someone who believes in changing the human animal with technology must believe in eradicating poverty, sickness and injustice with technology. For all our talk of equality and human rights in our rhetoric, the West seems determined to prevent poorer countries from possessing their own natural resources. A right guaranteed by the principles of modernization and industrialization, which appears to have been forgotten. Instead, we prefer to watch them being nursed by the richer countries’ monopolies, technology, and workers who are there cultivating, extracting, refining, or buying all their resources for them.

So, quite contrary to the promises of modernity, we have replaced the ideal of the industrialization of poor states with instead the vision of refugee camps, crude water wells, and food aid delivered by humanitarian workers to provide only temporary relief. In place of a model of development that was altruistic and morally correct, we instead glorify the image of non-Westerners as primitives who are impossible to help yet still we try.

The world’s poor have become not the focus of attention aimed at helping humanity, but props for philanthropists to make themselves look noble while doing nothing to truly help them. What we should turn to is not a return to the failed UN development agendas of the 1970s, which were flawed, but a new model entirely, and driven by people instead of governments and UN agencies.

It is high time that we act to help mankind altruistically, rather than a select few customers. The engineers and scientists of the world need to abandon the search for profit, if only for a moment. We should call on them to turn their extraordinary talent to the absolute good of abolishing poverty and scarcity. If they do not do this, we will talk about direct action to break free the scientific gifts they refused to share.

We live in courageous times. These are times of whistle-blowers, lone activists for the truth, and lone scientist-entrepreneurs who must be praised even if our profit-driven culture stifles their great works. And although we live in courageous times, we seem not yet brave enough to take real action to overcome the human disaster.

###

Synthetic biology image from https://www.equipes.lps.u-psud.fr/TRESSET/research8.html

(A) Enclosure of three red-fluorescent 200-nm spheres inside a “giant” liposome labeled with DiO. A wideband ultraviolet excitation filter was used for the simultaneous observation of these two differently stained species. Images were digitally postprocessed to balance the colors and to adjust their brightness at an equal level. (B) Trajectories of the particles. They were free to move but did not pass through the membrane. © GFP entrapped by a “giant” liposome. To get rid of noncaptured proteins, the solution was filtered by dialysis in such a way that the fluorescence background level became negligible with respect to the liposome interior. (D) Fluorescence photographs of λ-DNA-loaded liposome. λ-DNA was stained with SYBR Green, while DiI (red emission) was incorporated to liposome membrane. Liposome was observed through a narrow-band blue excitation filter (suitable for SYBR Green). (E) Same as previously with a wideband green excitation filter (suitable for DiI). Because of a low fluorescence response, part D was digitally enhanced in terms of brightness and contrast. In comparison, part E was darkened to present a level similar to part D. These pictures were taken at an interval of ~1 s, just the time to switch the filters. (E) Fluorescence picture of λ-DNA-loaded liposomes. Green dots stand for λ-DNA molecules, and lipids are labeled in red. A wideband blue excitation filter was used for this bicolor imaging, and a high-sensitivity color CCD camera captured it. [Anal. Chem. 77 (2005) 2795]

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Suggested topics included  transhumanism, antistatism, world events, movements, collaboration, and alternative media. The Mont Order is an affiliation of dissident writers and groups who share similar views on transnationalism and transhumanism as positive and inevitable developments.

Participants:

• Harry Bentham (Beliefnet)
• Mike Dodd (Wave Chronicle)
• Dirk Bruere (Zero State)

For more information on Mont Order participants, see the Mont Order page at Beliefnet.