Baylor College of Medicine researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they were able to measure the brain’s responses to thinking about “what could have been” and separate it from the neuro-activity of “what actually happened.” The emotional response of regret, registering in the ventral caudate nucleus, had a strong influence on future decision-making. In other words our capacity to imagine future possible outcomes guides our choices. Conversely addiction can hijack this link, and short-circuit our capacity to imagine alternatives.
Daniel Wilson’s new book “Where’s My Jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived” has been getting a lot of coverage. Its message - delivered in a ridiculing but humorous tone - is that there has been a lot of hype and vaporware from techno-futurists of yesteryear. He discusses failed ideas like underwater cities, smell-o-vision and jetpacks. 
On the other hand he gives the back history of ideas that are imminently achievable and practical such as cultured meat, moon bases and space elevators. Wilson focuses on the failures of technological prediction, but Simon Reynolds, in his review in Salon, focuses on the failed socio-political progress: “Race, gay rights, drugs, socioeconomic equality, religion—on just about every front, things either are not nearly as advanced as we’d have once expected or have actually gone into reverse. Forget the goddamn jetpack: It’s the sociocultural version of the “amazing future that never arrived” that really warrants our anguish.” Listen to our interview with Daniel about his first book, How to Survive a Robot Uprising.
Jonathan Haidt, author of the recent book The Happiness Hypothesis about which we interviewed him, argues in Science that morality and political ideology are rooted in evolutionary psychology. Liberals apparently are driven by two of the five innate moral sensibilities, sensitivities to harm and fairness. Conservatives are partly driven by these, but also reflect three additional innate sensitivities, to in-group boundaries, authority and spiritual purity. Since the Enlightenment values that are the root of the technoprogressive point of view reject the moral legitimacy of in-group boundaries (racism, nationalism, nepotism), authority and spiritual purity, while they affirm sensitivity to harm (fraternite, beneficence, solidarity) and fairness (egalite, justice), this makes a lot of sense. Recognizing these innate influences on our moral and political thinking can in turn help us make truly rational and ethical judgments, free from yuck factor biases.
Radical theorist Erik Olin Wright has an article titled “Guidelines for Envisioning Real Utopias” in the April 2007 issue of the journal Soundings:
Abstract: This essay explores five general guidelines for discussions of democratic egalitarian alternatives to existing institutions in contemporary capitalist societies: (1) Evaluate alternatives in terms of three criteria: desirability, viability, achievability. (2) Do not let the problem of achievability dictate the discussion of viability. (3) Clarify the problem of winners and losers in structural transformation. (4) Identify normative trade-offs in institutional designs and the transition costs in their creation. (5) Analyze alternatives in terms of waystations and intermediary forms as well as destinations. Pay particular attention to the potential of waystations to open up virtuous cycles of transformation.
Ever wondered what Marxism would be like if the vanguard party had the sensibilities of the Church of the Subgenius, and was into pop culture, magick and altered states? Wonder no longer:
Chaos Marxist Manifesto
Chaos Marxism is an anticapitalist memetic-combat current…
Global corporate rule is a reality on the material and on all ideological planes. You can only defeat an enemy by becoming symmetrical-but-opposite to it. The symmetrical opponent to global corporates will be a global organisation of the industrial and service-industry workers, whose psychic energy and surplus value is the nourishment of the corporate entities which determine our current consensus reality...We seek the coming to full consciousness of the majority of the world’s population. This will take the form of the transformation of the worldwide proletariat into a “class for itself” - or to put it another way, the manifestation of a collective world thoughtform which can kick the corporate egregore where it really hurts…
We are the bastard children of Aleister Crowley and Rosa Luxemburg. Trotsky built our hotrod and Robert Anton Wilson souped it up.
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