It was at the end of the first day of the Singularity Summit 2012 when Ben Popper — the dude from The Verge who I’d spoken to by phone — approached.  “What do you think?” he asked.

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Eric Packer (played by Robert Pattison) — reigning master of the universe of unencumbered digital financial trading — spends most of his disastrous day in the back of a limo in David Cronenberg’s new film.

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While President Vlad Putin tries to wrest control of the internet,  young internet-savvy activists are showing up post-Soviet bureaucrats by providing flood relief in Krymsk, Russia.

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editor’s note: IEET prefers what Charlie Stross says in this 2009 interview, far more than what he’s said recently.  Two days ago on his blog, Stross labeled H+ as “sordid… rotten… blind.. smugly self-satisfied hypercapitalists.” We regard these attacks as inexcusably sloppy. (interview by RU Sirius)

David Pearce, in his Hedonistic Imperative, believes that through such technological manipulations as genetic engineering, better drugs, and precise stimulation of various localities in the brain, human beings (just for starters) can live in a sort-of paradise in which all unpleasant states of consciousness have been banished to the old “Darwinian Era.” These new-found paradisical brain-states will exist within the context of an advanced, nanotechnologized society in which oppressive external conditions have also been eliminated.

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Both the funniest and the most scientific of cyberpunk SF’s fab four, Rudy Rucker’s autobiography Nested Scrolls is a laid back groove, in the best sense. It’s funny, real, a bit off center… yet friendly and so thoroughly engaging that I was sorry that it ended.  Maybe Rudy could live another life so that he could take us along, once again.

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I never felt a particularly intense curiosity about the life and personality of Steve Jobs until the night he died.

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By now, everybody knows that there’s a big crowd of folks who think something really big is going to happen this year because the Mayan Calendar allegedly ended in 2012 — specifically December 21, 2012. Less well known amongst the masses that are vaguely familiar with the meme is the fact that psychedelic/cyberdelic philosopher Terence McKenna was the original primary source for this notion and for this particular date.

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