Humpjones

Posted Jan 14, 2012

Big thanks to the good people at Boing Boing for doing Robert Anton Wilson Week, which comes as I’ve been re-re-re-reading Quantum Psychology. Synchronicity accelerates. I found this gem in a lost interview that’s packed full of brilliant ideas and one-liners, as per. (For example: “Doubt lasts longer than faith and provokes thought rather than discouraging it.”)

I wanted to share this passage, though, where RAW details a book idea he never got around to…

Pope Bob’s Unfinished Guide to Human Sexuality

“I have a lot of ideas for books. One of them is The Truth About Sex. I probably will never do this one; that’s why I talk about it so much. I’d like somebody to rip the idea off, so I don’t have to do it. There was a book that was a bestseller, ten or 15 years ago, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But You Were Afraid To Ask Your Doctor, and it was in question and answer form. I thought the author was one of the stupidest people I’d ever read. I decided to do the book correctly. It’d be in question and answer form, but instead of one answer to each question there would be four or five, or maybe even a dozen, all from leading authorities, and all contradicting one another. The idea of the book was to show that the authorities don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. It’s an area full of prejudice.

There’s no real science of sexology yet; it’s all various people expressing their personal prejudices and disguising it as psychology or sociology. So I thought, take a question like, “What causes homosexuality?” and give twelve different answers just to show how much the scientific community really knows; they can’t even agree about a simple thing like that. “What causes heterosexuality,” for that matter? “What is the difference between vaginal and clitoral orgasm?” I’d get about 24 different opinions on that, in the literature.

The reason I’ll probably never do that book is getting the permissions from all these authors is a Herculean task, which publishers always dump on the writer. And once they found out what they had agreed to, the experts would all be furious because they’d all look like idiots, because they’re all overly dogmatic. They’d be very furious and god knows what they’d do about it. So I hope somebody else does that book and I don’t have to do it.”

#WHALAM

Thanks to the wonders of Teh Internets, this would be pretty easy to accomplish. Rather than being released as a book, it could simply be a website operating under basic “Fair Use” laws to spotlight the monumental ignorance of our species.

Of course, Human Sexuality for Filthy Apes has more than a few similarities to the concept that RAW outlines above, but the big difference is that I’m actively participating in the stupidity. Rather than point fingers and laugh, I am developing my own vast and contradictory Theory of Everything. I aim to demonstrate that science is far too much fun to be left to actual scientists, and furthermore, since we’re all engaged in the creation of fictional belief structures, we should aim considerably higher than mere “plausibility.”

As Klintron explained to me in a dream last night: “What you’re really doing is taking Salvador Dali’s concept of Critical Paranoia and applying it to the whole of modern science.”

Amen.

Filed in: Sex Science

Posted Dec 26, 2011

Filed in: Zeitgeist

Posted Nov 30, 2011

When my friend told me that the sperm bank rejected him because he was a redhead, I’ll admit it, I laughed at him. Of course, that’s when I still thought he was kidding...once I realized he was serious, I nearly had a cardiac event because I was howling so hard.

The business in question was Cryos International, one of the largest Spooge Repositories in the privatized world. Their founder and media man, who has the curious name Ole Schou, claims that they’re currently sitting on a stock of redhead donors and the only demand for that product comes from Ireland. “There are too many redheads in relation to demand,” says Schou—a quote heard round the world.

Like any catchy story, once you examine the details it all falls apart. Debunking is cheap, though, and my interests lie elsewhere, as always. So let’s get the objectivity out of the way quick: like most news stories in 2011, The Great Ginger Sperm Scandal is 100% bullshit. Despite being picked up by every major news service, there’s basically nothing to it. Everything we read and talk about is cheap lies from dumb publicists, though...hopefully that’s not news to you.

As it turns out Cryos International does want redheads, especially in their United States division—Schou was merely talking about his native Denmark. Naturally, he was quoted out of context by a lazy writer and the claim was sensationalized into catchy headline by a lazy editor, and the fabricated story was repeated, thousands of times over, by lazy websites and newspapers. As Cryos New York spokesmammal Ty Kaliski enthuses: “We want diversity. I want redheads, I want Asians, Hispanics, African Americans, Caucasians...” You can almost hear Kaliski trailing off and half-heartedly adding the afterthought of “Caucasians” even though he knew nobody would believe him.

From the global empire of Cryos to the darkly hilarious scam known as Sperm Direct Limited, one thing that nobody in the sperm business wants at this point is more Caucasian juice. There’s a universal shortage of black and asian donors, and although Uncle Hump is far too wise to stoop to trying to analyze that, feel free to take that little factoid and go hog wild, kids. I present it simply as business advice: whoever figures out how to change that is gonna get rich.

You see, “Fertility Industry” is one of the last Wild West autonomous zones in American capitalism and it has been evolving with terrifying speed. The sheer free market momentum of it all is about to carry us from consumer wonderland straight into sci-fi dystopia territory. In all likelihood, we are already there.

Infinitely Weird

Let’s start with one of the most interesting numbers, the foundational fact that keeps all this money changing hands: 15% of all couples under 50 are infertile. Almost 50 years after the publication of Silent Spring, it’s no secret that this is thanks to processed foods, industrial pollution and environmental toxins. (Feel free to argue otherwise in the comments section.) When you look at world population through this lens, you might realize that we’re actually quite lucky that our current numbers are hovering at only seven billion. There is a certain terrible beauty to the self-regulating nature of Nature, even when the blade is aimed directly at you and me.

Why dwell on the past, though? Given the accelerating pace and density of our technological suicide, a 15% infertility rate will be the Good Old Days in a single generation’s time. This is a growth market in the worst possible sense, but make no mistake, the Fertility Industry is strictly catering to the high-end customers. Technically speaking, this shit is expensive. The problem of poverty will be solved by the problem of infertility...call me a heretic or a quack, but them’s the facts, Pilgrims. Better yet, there’s not a single fucking thing you can do about it.

So, on to the Capitalism part. You may not be able to have kids without birth defects, but you can certainly make money in the meantime. The Fertility Industry is wide open...just don’t dwell on that visual too long. As per Naomi Cahn and Wendy Kramer:

“The United States has almost no rules when it comes to buying or selling sperm. In fact, no one keeps records on how much sperm is bought or sold, so we don’t even know how big the sperm market really is, or how many babies are born each year through donor sperm.”

Cryos International, the Denmark company who can’t get their policy on redheads straight, claims to have been responsible for 18,878 pregnancies since opening their doors back in 1991. Disturbingly, despite have a strict testing and screening process and almost bizarrely high standards, Cryos doesn’t bowl a perfect game. They report a running “Malformation Rate” of 4%, and I hope you’re not visualizing what that euphemism means right now, because that would be gross.

Not nearly as gross as this, though: accidental incest. No, that does not involve tripping and falling...it’s far worse. As headlines go, this one is miracle of story-telling and brevity: One Sperm Donor, 150 Offspring. Yup. Naturally, professional commentators were simply shocked but this is about as inevitable as McDonalds offering salads or S&M porn going mainstream.

Most Americans know absolutely nothing about...well, anything, really...but in particular, the Sperm Business. Men don’t just go in, make a deposit and walk out with a check. They get screened and commit to a long-term program, usually weekly deposits for a full year. Only a dipshit could act shocked that a business is monetizing their existing inventory: it’s what they do. So it’s only natural that in California, which has always been ahead of the American curve, children of donor sperm are starting to connect on the internet. That’s kind of heartwarming, but it gets disturbing when they keep connecting and connecting and connecting and you realize you have over 50 half-brothers and half-sisters living in the same state as you. The biggest single group was the source of the headline: exactly 150 actual human beings from a single storage unit of manjuice. Which brings us back to two words that should stay far away from each other: “Accidental Incest.”

As one anonymous Mom put it: “My daughter knows her donor’s number for this very reason. She’s been in school with numerous kids who were born through donors. She’s had crushes on boys who are donor children. It’s become part of sex education.”

The Genghis Khan Effect.

Maybe you don’t see it yet. This should help: in 2011, 0.5% of the world’s entire population can be traced directly back to the loins of Genghis Khan. That’s a little over 35 million people, most of them in China.

This is for horrible reasons, of course. There was not a lot of consensual sex behind the Khan dynasty. Regardless of circumstances, though, reproduction is genetic warfare...the messy reality behind the “fitness landscape” the biologists love to wax poetic about. Having 150 offspring is such a massive tactical advantage it’s hard to wrap your head around it, but that anonymous donor has done more to shape the future of California than any Governor or Billionaire fascist in the past century.

And that’s just a glimmer of the insanity that’s on our horizon now. 150 will be small potatoes very shortly. What happens when celebrities start getting in on this action? Imagine the kind of prices that a Brazilian soccer god like Ronaldinho could get for his, uh, product. Imagine the demand/price curve for someone like Ryan Reynolds or Jude Law and you’re starting to see it.

Now, the notion of sexual competition is nothing new. We’re all trying to make ourselves more wealthy and attractive and blah blah blah, but what’s new here is the scale and the technology available. It’s certainly not like human beings are any smarter. Women shop for attractive and physically fit sperm donors, but it’s not like their kids are automatically going to have chiseled abs or some shit: that comes from working out. There’s also the gender crapshoot factor—sure, sperm comes out of a guy, but it produces both sons and daughters. That fact is sadly lost on a lot of people. Then again, their ignorance is your potential profit center. Nothing cuts into your bottom line quite like informed consumers, right?

See, your average Adonis with a genius IQ and clean bill of health can generate a solid load of merchandise every single day. If he makes it out of Harvard by 22, that’s a potential career of 15 to 20 years. Bear that in mind as you read this outstanding Atlantic article, ”All the Single Ladies,” which documents how the economic devastation of the United States has completely changed the sexual politics of both marriage and conception. These trends will converge into something unprecedented: the most dramatic change in human reproduction since our species first emerged from Africa. This shift is going to be far more profound than birth control, because it will involve more children being born by vastly fewer men, a narrowing down of the gene pool that will hit our DNA like a mass extinction, despite the fact we’re slouching towards the 10 billion mark, population-wise.

Keep thinking I’m wrong, by all means. I have no illusions about convincing you. There’s no solace in truth, especially if you’re older than 21 and worth less than a million dollars. Just keep it in the back of your mind, eat more veggies & fish oil and work out a little bit harder. And oh yeah...stay away from wi-fi signals, too.

Filed in: Sex Science

Posted Nov 25, 2011

As I slowly finish off my epic manuscript Human Sexuality for Filthy Apes, I have been given a newfound appreciation for how fundamentally science has failed our species. While most writing on the human brain touts our wetware as a miracle machine, that’s just breathless ad copy for highbrow suckers...a cheap emotional high. Did you know you have more connections in your brain then there are stars in the Universe? Nevermind the fact there’s no way to quantify “stars in the Universe,” the real question is: how many of those connections are you going to use in a few hours when you’re masturbating to some Hentai while instant messaging your friends about the TV show that’s on in the background? At least a couple thousand, right?

The reality, of course, is too grim to be stated plainly. Your brain is a barely functional piece of shit, a lump of cellular improv and genetic duct tape. As a navigational tool, it creates a remarkably adequate simulation of external reality—at least good enough to keep you alive until you can reproduce with someone you shouldn’t. That much is undeniably impressive, but it’s all downhill from there. As a sense organ, it mostly tunes out every single piece of data your billions of sensory cells try to send you.  Worst of all, as a “mind” it behaves like a deranged parasite, alternating between self-deception and self-destruction and leaving even the best of us baffled by our own actions, daily.

So there’s that. Entire books have been written on the “neuroscience” of sex, and they are front to back fiction. There’s great demand for “popular science” books about the amazing brain but that’s because there’s a great deal of stupid people. Fortunately, I don’t write for them...I write for you, the spooky brilliant and dangerously sexy future mutants of tomorrow.

DEATH TO NEURO-REALISM

To be clear, don’t think I’m hating on science. No, homey, never that. I have footnotes and studies backing up every single page of my forthcoming book, believe me, I love science. My beef is all these poodles using it wrong. Let me recap for the slowfaces who may lurk among us: The purpose of Science is to belittle the human ego, confound easy understanding and obliterate every hypothesis that it touches. There is no solace in science...if there is, you are most assuredly Doing It Wrong.

This is especially true when chimp “journalists” turn their anemic attention towards the human brain. I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that literally everything that’s been published in the past decade on that subject is pure horseshit. Again, I’m not talking about the precise experimental language of the actual studies getting published in Nature—although plenty of those are horseshit, too. I’m talking about a modern mythology based on such fragile data that it essentially amounts to a secular religious belief. Today there is a pervasive myth that the human brain has hardwired areas for specific purposes, which is built on the larger myth that we understand fuck all about our brains in the first place. I will unpack that sentence in detail, starting immediately.

There’s a lot of data about the human brain. Neurology is advancing by leaps and bounds, don’t misconstrue me. Scientists speak precisely because once you generalize results, you lose any value that your findings have. Today, the most that can be said about current neuroscience is scientists have observed correlations between a specific stimulus and specific measurements of human brain activity. This is not “Semantics.” This is discernment. There are fundamental problems with this shallow puddle of a worldview, and they’re clear enough to become obvious to Non-Nerd types once you lay them out.

Irrational Faith. Despite advances in neuroscience testing and measurement technology, we still have no proof that our instrumentation is actually showing us something important. To abuse a metaphor, pop sci neurojournalism is about how the human computer system works but the assumption is that we have access to what’s really going on. Even if we did, we don’t know how to confirm that. Brain readings are new and visually compelling but they’re not answers. An fMRI scan doesn’t mean we can fathom the operating system of consciousness. For all we know, we’re measuring the exhaust system of the computer.

Retroactive Mechanics. Stimulus, Response...it’s only simple in theory. Despite all their own breathless poetry about how complex the human brain is, curiously, most theories of consciousness still boil down to ”When we do this, a light goes on over here.” Thus, Broca’s area becomes “the language center of the brain,” despite dozens of cases where patients without that area could speak and read just fine in their native tongues. The conceit here, stated clinically, is that the specific stimulus in our experiment was the source of the EM activity being measured. Again, this sounds like nit-picking but it’s critically important to honest science. Correlation does not imply causality. Nearly all written work about the neuroscience not only reverses that, but takes it one step further: correlation, they glibly assert, is proof unto itself.

Neuro-Fundamentalism. The biggest unspoken assumption, of course, is that the human brain is us—that you, me and everybody we know is driven and dominated by that single organ. If only it was that simple.

GETTING USED TO NO ANSWERS

Journalists latch on to narratives, not actual findings, which are too subtle for headlines and too complex for their readership. Subsequently, scientists use these popular narratives to explain their work and seek more funding, and thus do lazy mistakes become institutionalized problems. I’m sure many of you reading this have noticed the tonal similarities between coverage of neuroscence and genetics—just like every Time headline in the 90’s was about how “Who You Are” is determined mechanically by Gene X, Y and Z, the past decade of neurofads have been about the brain controlling us mechanically thanks to area X, Y and Z. We have a lot more similar mistakes in our future, assuming we survive another two generations of over seven billion hungry omnivore killing machines.

There is no working model of the human brain. That’s what real scientists mean when they talk about Neurology being in a “pre-paradigm state.” Until that gets fixed, the science will have nothing to offer us but surprising results and bad metaphors.

More on the way...meanwhile, be good to each other.

Filed in: Sex Science

Posted Nov 23, 2011

thanks to f. stokes for the nudge

I’m not going to complain—that’s too easy. No need for a laundry list of details or worse, some disgruntled manifesto: underground hip hop is broken as fuck, I know it, you know it, no further explanation needed. This is not about what’s wrong, this is about dreaming something better.

But First: When you’re a part of the problem, you rationalize what you’re doing as necessary, practical, “just business.” It’s dumb business. Failing business. Getting opening acts to sell tickets, printing up flyers that look like promo for porno flicks...people pretend this is all necessary but it’s not. That corpse you’re milking yields less and less blood every week, and eventually it’s going to run dry. Meanwhile...

If You Can’t Find It, Found It

Bars are, for the most part, terrible places to be. Obnoxiously crowded and stupid expensive. The sound system has never been set up right and it’s always too loud. So why do artists keep presenting their blood and guts in these fast food environments? I’ve played shows in beauty salons, backyards and basements and had a great time doing it—there’s not a “tour circuit” for this yet, but there will be soon.

How many shows can you play for a room full of dudes before it’s time to kill yourself in a hotel room? Why don’t more women come to rap shows? That one is easy: because they don’t want to be there. They don’t enjoy themselves, they don’t feel safe and they don’t have fun.

We need more than “Alternative Hip Hop,” and definitely more than another coffee shop for spoken word navel-gazing. We need an alternate Universe, a great & secret show, a Truth & Beauty circuit full of fresh fruit, fine foods and exotic tea from fictional continents. We need daytime shows, midnight gigs on anonymous rooftops, costume concerts and a nationwide revival of Acid Tests from coast to burning coast. We need all four alleged “Elements of Hip Hop” in the same building again—most of all, we need parties worth going to, parties worth putting down your fucking phones for and actually living.

We’re taking all the wrong concepts for granted. Are battles really helping anyone aside from battle promoters? If hip hop is about communication, why do so many sets seem like some guy practicing his rhymes in his room? Why are we still doing “A&R Showcases” in 2011 when everyone knows that labels stopped doing artist development in the 1980s? If you pause to introduce “a song for the ladies” what are you saying about the rest of your catalog?

Rather than even pretending to deal with the perceived problems in rap - the pervasive and contagious mental illness of homophobia, misogyny & causal violence - maybe the trick is simply designing performance spaces that render all that impossible. It’s easy to talk about shooting faggots in a bar, but in a public park, surrounded by art and nature, that same emcee is reduced to his true form: a scared child having a small tantrum. Zoning laws prohibit letting animals loose in public spaces, but as the poet Richard Bruce Cheney famously observed, laws are made to be broken.

Ideas are made to be stolen, too. Can we take toga parties back from fraternities if we let them keep the Ritalin snorting and shitty beer? Can we make speed dating into something inspirational and good? Can we create a Speakeasy system for stoners and perform hip hop for hashish heads on comfortable couches? Does rap sound better in venues with a strict No Shoes policy? Can we convert mere stages into Sacred Space?

There is a huge audience for what I’m babbling about here. I’m not saying hip hop needs more Art, but I am saying Art needs more hip hop. I’m also saying our lives are starved for surrealism. The human soul, no matter how numbed up and weighed down, craves magic. It’s not hip hop’s job to provide that...but it could be. The power of language is infinite and there’s a whole generation of emcees with open minds ready to reclaim that ocean. It’s always been yours and you’ve always been free.

And oh yeah: stop cuffing the mic.

Tell me how right/wrong/awesome I am:

Filed in: Zeitgeist