These are the types of news stories that leave me scratching my head and wondering what type of people in the United States or in the rest of the so-called ´developed nations´ think items such as these are ´neat´ and ´funny´ applications of technology--specifically brain mapping technologies. The tone of this NY Times article left me with the feeling it could have easily been recited by Adam Sandler--Hollywood´s patented ´goofy,´ ´fuzzy´ and ´sexy´ brother or boyfriend for children and young adults who need ´branding´ by the corporate state--in a product placement moment.
As Dr. Nick Begich has pointed out, the Human Genome project has received a great deal of attention by the press, but curiously, such media attention in the realm of decoding and mapping the human brain has, to the best of my knowledge, all but been ignored by the corporate media.
The Stanford Research Institute or SRI International in Menlo Park, California, may not be what it once was in its heyday, but Palo Alto and Stanford University it seem, by virtue of their proximity to SRI, Google (which also received initial seed money from the Pentagon) and Silicon Valley, are still a vast clearing house for scientific experimentation put into the service of the Pentagon and it´s number one contractor: the global corporate-fascist state.
With the corporatist fascist international flexing its muscles on a global scale in this, the third decade of ´Bush,´ it should come as no surprise that readers of popular weekly news magazines as Newsweek write letters to the editor such as this one below:
An Ugly World for the Unborn
As to why people are deciding not to have children, I believe there are macro themes that run through all societies these days (Whatever Happened to Having Kids, Sept 4) Among them, the current state of the world; the vacuum of true leaders with any vision for a sane future; the growing class system that is pulling apart the fabric of even the most liberalized societies. In short, many sane people are having a hard time rationalizing bringing someone they would love into this world.
The title of the above letter reads like something out of a punk or metal song from the 1980s.
Another possible utilization for this technology might enable the ´parental unit´as represented by the corporate state to directly communicate with its ´children--´ young, impressionable consumers of technology such as the Playstation 3 module. Needless to say, children in the west have, on the whole, spent more time with the CEO of Sony Corporation via the PS3 than their actual biological parents.
As the Critical Art Ensemble write in Flesh Machine, Cyborgs, Designer Babies, and the New Eugenic Consciousness (Chapter Six, Eugenics the Second Wave--available in pdf format from their website):
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This entry first appeared on ce399 | research archive: 19 January 2007
Posted by: ce399 | 30 July 2007 at 23:49