But in today’s Silicon Valley, there’s little patience for what many are happy to dismiss as “hippie bullshit.” Meditation here isn’t an opportunity to reflect upon the impermanence of existence but a tool to better oneself and improve productivity. That’s how Bill Duane, a pompadoured onetime engineer with a tattoo of a bikini-clad woman on his forearm, frames Neural Self-Hacking, an introductory meditation class he designed for Google. “Out in the world, a lot of this stuff is pitched to people in yoga pants,” he says. “But I wanted to speak to my people. I wanted to speak to me. I wanted to speak to the grumpy engineer who may be an atheist, who may be a rationalist.” [...]

It also raises the uncomfortable possibility that these ancient teachings are being used to reinforce some of modern society’s uglier inequalities. Becoming successful, powerful, and influential can be as much about what you do outside the office as what you do at work. There was a time when that might have meant joining a country club or a Waspy church. Today it might mean showing up at TED. Looking around Wisdom 2.0, meditation starts to seem a lot like another secret handshake to join the club. “There is some legitimate interest among businesspeople in contemplative practice,” Kenneth Folk says. “But Wisdom 2.0? That’s a networking opportunity with a light dressing of Buddhism.” [...]

Steve Jobs spent lots of time in a lotus position; he still paid slave wages to his contract laborers, berated subordinates, and parked his car in handicapped stalls.

Full Story: Wired: Meditation Isn't Just About Inner Peace—in the Valley It's About Getting Ahead

See also:

Technoccult Interview: Open Source Buddhism with Al Jigong Billings

Mindful Cyborgs: Sensor Hacking For Mindfulness with Nancy Dougherty on the new Mindful Cyborgs

Atossa Abrahamian on the Ephemerisle, the seasteading festival originally founded by PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s Seasteading Institute:

In addition to seeing government as just another problem that technology can overcome, Seasteaders try to “hack” every aspect of their existence down to their self-care regimens. Many participate in health and fitness regimes like the Paleo Diet and Crossfit—lifestyles that dovetail nicely with more mainstream libertarian retro-futurism, which argues humans ought to live more like they did before their “freedom” was impinged upon by large state governments, all while enjoying the enhancements of technological innovation forged in the free market. It wasn’t just Charlie from the boat cruise who proselytized the health benefits of butter: the unofficial beverage of Ephemerisle was “Bulletproof Coffee”—black coffee with half a stick of butter mixed in—which advocates claim increases their mental acuity and helps them stay trim. The inventor of the concoction claims to have increased his IQ by twenty points and lost 100 pounds as a result of his experiments “hacking” his biology. He was at Ephemerisle, too and later, in an email, told me he’d had a great time.

This tendency toward engineering everything spills into the social sphere. To supplement real or perceived romantic shortcomings, some Seasteaders dabble in pickup artistry, a method of seducing women that’s been likened to an algorithm and self-legitimized by handpicked data and bunk theories about evolution. The male vanity coursing under all this life-hacking may explain why so few women participate in projects like these. While there’s little overt sexism in the gay-friendly, drug-happy Seasteading community, there’s nothing preventing a hypothetical start-up country from regressing into a patriarchal, Paleo-Futuristic state. If anything, the movement’s reverence for caveman essentialism suggests the latter—that real goal is to remake civilization, starting from a primal, “natural” condition that they can revive in the modern world thanks to new technologies.

Full Story: N+1: Seasteading

See also: The Cult of Bayes’ Theorem

What all this means, I think, is that vodou became a fault line running through the very heart of Haitian society after 1804. For most citizens, and especially for the rural blacks who had borne the brunt both of slavery and the struggle for independence, it became a potent symbol of old dignities and new freedoms: a religion that, as Dubois notes, helped “carve out a place where the enslaved could temporarily escape the order that saw them only as chattel property” during colonial times, and went on to “create communities of trust that stretched between the different plantations and into the towns.” For the local elite, who tended to be of mixed race and were often French-educated, though, vodou was holding Haiti back. It was alien and frightening to those who did not understand it; it was associated with slave rebellion; and (after Soulouque’s rise), it was also the faith of the most brutal and backward of the country’s rulers.

These considerations combined to help make Haiti a pariah state throughout the 19th century. Dessalines and his successor, Henry Christophe—who had every reason to fear that the United States, France, Britain and Spain would overthrow their revolution and re-enslave the population, given the chance—tried to isolate the country, but even after economic necessity forced them to reopen the trade in sugar and coffee, the self-governing black republic of Haiti remained a dangerous abomination in the eyes of every white state involved in the slave trade. Like Soviet Russia in the 1920s, it was feared to be almost literally “infectious”: liable to inflame other blacks with the desire for liberty. Geffrard was not the only Haitian leader to look for ways to prove that his was a nation much like the great powers—Christian, and governed by the rule of law.

Full Story: The Trial That Gave Vodou A Bad Name

Corporate mergers and takeovers meant global headquarters got concentrated in fewer places. Crime declined, making cities less scary. And so great cities grew richer. Fancy architects put up lovely buildings. House prices rose.

First, the working classes and bohemians were priced out. Nowadays the only ribald proletarian banter you hear inside Paris is from the market sellers, who don’t live there anymore.

That was gentrification. Now comes plutocratisation: the middle classes and small companies are falling victim to class-cleansing. Global cities are becoming patrician ghettos. In 2009, says Sassen, the top 1 per cent of New York City’s earners got 44 per cent of the compensation paid to its workers. The “super-prime housing market” keeps rising even when the national economy collapses. After Manhattan, New York’s upper-middle classes are being priced out of Brooklyn. Sassen diagnoses “gradual destruction”.

Full Story: Financial Times: Priced out of Paris

San Francisco is well on its way in this regard as well.

See also: Mocking hipsters in the service of capital

Whenever discussion starts about how to hide from the tracking code that follows users around the Web to serve them targeted ads, recommendations soon pile up for a browser add-on called Ghostery. It blocks tracking code, noticeably speeds up how quickly pages load as a result, and has roughly 19 million users. Yet few of those who advocate Ghostery as a way to escape the clutches of the online ad industry realize that the company behind it, Evidon, is in fact part of that selfsame industry.

Evidon helps companies that want to improve their use of tracking code by selling them data collected from the eight million Ghostery users that have enabled a data-sharing feature in the tool.

Full Story: MIT Technology Review: A Popular Ad Blocker Also Helps the Ad Industry

(via Paleofuture)

This week on Mindful Cyborgs Chris Dancy and I discussed the relationship between mindfulness and quantified self with biosensor engineer Nancy Dougherty. Nancy talks about how she came to the practice of mindfulness through some of her “happy pills experiment,” her light-based mood tracking system and why a portable fMRI might be a little over kill for self-tracking.

You can download the episode from Soundcloud, iTunes or directly.

You can follow Mindful Cyborgs on Twitter, Google+ or Facebook.

You can also read more notes and the full transcript inside.

TOP STORIES: 

•  One Trillion Sensors Embedded in Humans and Machines by 2020 - -http://www.industrytap.com/the-hybird-age/3651
• The Quantified Brain of a Self-Tracking Neuroscientist -http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514886/the-quantified-brain-of-a-self-tracking-neuroscientist/

WORD OF THE WEEK:

Electromyography- is a technique for evaluating and recording the electrical activity produced by skeletal muscles.

EVENTS:

• BDigital Global Congress, June 12-14, 2013 Barcelona http://www.bdigitalglobalcongress.com/ (Big Data)
• Cyborg Camp May 11, 2013 Vancouver - http://bc.cyborgcamp.com/ (Cyborg)
• Gf2045 June 15-16 NYC http://gf2045.com/about/ (Futurism)
• Buddhist geeks August 16-19 Boulderhttp://www.buddhistgeeks.com/conference/ (Mindfulness)

TRANSCRPITION:

CD:      Welcome to Mindful Cyborgs, Episode number four. Four is a magical number. Hi, Klint. How are you?

KF:       Hi, I’m good.

CD:      Good, good. A lot of feedback from the Nathan Jurgenson show. I don’t think we could top that, but I think we’re going to. What do you think?

KF:       I think so. I mean, we’re just getting started.

CD:      I think we’re just getting warmed up. So Klint, for me, this journey, with mindfulness and technology and everything, really started with Amber Case a few years ago when I saw her. But I’d have to say there was one moment, if I could say there was a catalyzing moment in my journey in studying all of these things, present shock and quantified domain, it was really when I was at the Quantified Self Conference last year, in Palo Alto at Stanford.

And there was a keynote by a young lady with the name of Nancy Dougherty. She got up on stage and she started presenting, talking about mindfulness and technology, and she was covered in lights and these lights would literally change colors as she spoke.

At that point, I realized that she was augmented in such a way that I could see her emote. I didn’t have to worry about mis-perceiving, or “did she say that?” or “did I eat something and now I’m kind of over-analyzing stuff?” I thought, wow, this is really interesting – she’s representing herself in such a unique way. It was a dream of mine to someday actually meet her, but there were so many people mobbing her I couldn’t do. But, today, we are joined by Nancy Dougherty, who is a sensor designer for mindfulness. Hi, Nancy.

ND:      Hello! Thank you so much for having me.

CD:      Thank you. Nancy, can you tell us a little bit about maybe the Quantified Self Conference last year that I saw you at, and your presentation and what made you pick that topic and share with us a little bit from that?

ND:      Sure. I am a hardware designer by training so I’ve always been really interested in electronics and technology and, particularly, sensors. I really like building things to tell us new things about ourselves and our environment. But, I guess, what really created my quantified self presentation last year is my interest in mindfulness on top of that, and the way it had gotten to that was I kind of started to feel, I guess, almost victimized with my lack of understanding about myself. I’m having a lot of trouble understanding and controlling emotions, hormones, really figuring out discrepancies between what I wanted in life and what I wanted to be, and then the actions of what I was doing.

What created the device I added to that presentation was an idea that I wanted to be able to interact in a more engaging way with people to create more positive emotions in my interactions. I thought it would really help me pay more attention to the present and how I was feeling. So I built a little EMG sensor, electromyography and put it up by my jaw muscles. What that does is it basically monitors the activation of the muscles in my face and it would trigger an alert whenever I smile which would make the lights shine up in different patterns. It was a little bit whimsical and fun, but it would also track my smiles so I could see how happy I was and at what times. It would engage other people with my emotions that kind of drew attention to them in a way that I couldn’t ignore because other people thought too.

That was my presentation was about last year, trying to kind of amplify my own emotions and present them in a clear way to other people, to help me understand myself and engage with other people in a more meaningful way.

KF:       Were you also logging the smiles? Like, did you keep a log of how many times you smiled per day, or was this just something that happened in real time?

ND:      There was a log of duration of smiles in through day, so basically how much in a day I spent smiling. While I was wearing this, there was a very, very high amount – it inspired a lot of smiles.

KF:       Are you still wearing it?

ND:      I haven’t been wearing it recently. It was a short-term project mostly because the form factor was not ideal. At some point I’m going to redesign it for dry electrodes instead of sticky electrodes, and then maybe a more subtle or wearable display. But it was kind of a short-term thing just to experiment with how other people would respond to something like this and how it would impact my own emotions.

KF:       You mentioned in the talk that you didn’t start out as someone who thought herself as being into mindfulness and you came at it from the QS perspective, the quantified self perspective, and that you ended up becoming interested in mindfulness and seeing a connection between those two fields. Could you talk a little bit about how you got interested in mindfulness?

ND:      Sure, absolutely. It did start with kind of the technological side, the crazy technical problems of QS, like how you can monitor things or what you can monitor. So I started a couple of years ago doing lots of monitoring. I was using a Withings scale, FitBit. After a while I used the FuelBand, BodyMedia – all sorts of these different trackers – and basically trying to create a map of my activities. I guess that’s the idea of QS that doesn’t always have a clear path to this idea that we’ll track these things and then we’ll be better people, and there’s this question mark in the middle that I kind of hoped I would figure out along the way. I did a lot of tracking. I also worked with a company that was doing biometric monitoring as well, so I had access to some other sensors that I was experimenting with.

The more I would track things like steps, activities, and sleeping, the more I found that it wasn’t really doing anything for me. Like, I got some interesting information and I could run some short-term experiments, but none of it was really changing how I behave or who I was, or effecting my overall happiness. So what led mindfulness is trying to figure out how to make technology actually change us, because it doesn’t really do it on its own.

I started with the fact that when I was tracking I was more on top of things, I was able to be a little bit healthier, a little bit more active, but those are things I needed to work on since I was already pretty active. I got into to this idea of tracking things that I really wanted to change and make better. I started mood tracking for a while and that I did through a little experiment when I was working at Proteus Digital Health at the time and we made tiny microchips that you can embed on medications. When you take them they send out a little signal and timestamp when you took the medication.

When I did track my emotions I was able to take little pills with antidotes to negative emotions, like willpower, focus and happiness. Whenever I felt a negative emotion, I would take one of these pills, to timestamp and track it, but also to kind of have a little ritual that this is what I do when I’m feeling bad to make myself feel better.

CD:      Jack Daniels should do that with their booze, just put something in certain styles of Jack Daniels. So Jack Daniels 41 is for happy and literally just track the entire mood of a bar.

ND:      *laughts* There’s definitely a lot of happy juice in bars.

CD:      Definetly. I really enjoyed your research around it because I saw that presentation around the happy pills, and I read about you and the happy pills.

When it comes to mindfulness, can you tell us a little bit about… did that lead you to be more mindful? Did the act of taking the pill allow you to reset yourself for just a moment to understand, okay, it’s the worried pill or it’s the happy pill? Or, at some point, when you stopped taking the pills, were you cognizant “Oh, it would be time to take the pill right now.” I mean, how did the two end up leading together?

ND:      I think it kind of nice to have the action of pill taking at first because what it really gave me was sense of not only mindfulness, not just thinking about this is what I’m feeling right now, but also a sense of empowerment, kind of ritualistic reminder that I’m not a victim of this emotion. It’s something that I can control. It’s something that I can fix. Taking the pill is the universal human symbol of “this is going to be fixed.” And it was that sense of empowerment that actually really led me deeper into mindfulness, and not just for emotions, not just for body tracking, but all through life it’s the sense of empowerment over things that really lets us change things to become better. And when we slip is when we feel victimized, when we don’t have control.

Starting this mood tracking experiment kind of led me down that path of what we really need to do to change ourselves is create more of a sense of transparency and understanding so that we can have that sense of control. Again, I did this for a couple of weeks and then after that I still felt like I didn’t need to take the pill at that point to remember that feeling of this is something that I’m in control of, it’s not something that I can’t understand, it’s not something that I can’t fix. These emotions, the way I feel, is something that it’s happening in the moment of something that I can change. So that was my little shortcut into mindfulness through technology.

KF:       When did you start thinking about what you were doing as a mindfulness practice? Did you have some friends that were interested in mindfulness? I mean, when did you kind of say, “Aha, this is actually connected to this other idea?”

ND:      It was actually during that experiment. They ran another experiment ran kind of explicitly around mindfulness. But instead of using technology, they gave people little Tictacs that were labeled willpower and had people take them in the morning depending on how much willpower they thought they would need throughout the day. That was kind of designed around the mindful thing – in the morning, sitting down, thinking about what’s going on, taking a moment to collect your thoughts. And that was kind of where the word got attached to it and where I started to get really interested in that path.

CD:      How many years would you say you’ve been practicing mindfulness now?

ND:      Probably about a year, a year and a half, and I practice them to be somewhat sporadic and non-traditional. I still haven’t really mastered the sitting down and meditating thing.

CD:      Someone said to me last year you should meditate one hour a day and I said, “I do, I just do it over 24 hours.” For me, mindfulness, Klint, someone said to me after the Nathan show, “You guys actually should talk about mindfulness on your show.” And for me, it really became as simple as “I’m okay being here right now with you guys and I have an inner dialogue going on and that’s okay.” At night, when I lay my head down to sleep and I’ve got a million thoughts running through my head, because I’m okay with them and I’m there with them, I forward to sleep. Whereas I used to struggle with falling asleep or struggle with paying attention or a lot of other rather simple things. And what I find is, the more I just allow myself to be, this is going to sound kind of hokey kind to my thoughts, the more I just instantly fall into mindful states.

ND:      I totally agree with that. It’s about self-understanding and self-acceptance, not letting things grow into something bigger than what they are.

CD:      I like that. Klint, for you, you’ve had some interests in mindfulness – sometimes you and I talk privately – what types of things do you find are important to you around the concepts in mindfulness, or in your own life?

KF:       I actually do seated meditation. I try to every day, but I obviously don’t make it every single day. But I don’t think that’s necessarily what everyone needs to do in order to meditate. I mean, there are lots of different types of meditation, but I do find that that helps me a lot. If I can do it early in the day, it helps me stay focused the rest of the day. But, I mean, just in a broader sense what it’s about is just, as both have said, paying attention and trying to understand… Actually, really, even trying to understand is almost going overboard because you can’t really understand yourself. There are lots of things you can never truly understand, so I think there’s actually an element of just letting go.

CD:      Exactly.

KF:       And just accepting, and observing.

CD:      It’s so funny because on the show I guess there’s a certain amount of transparency, but I’d like to just share something with you both and I guess with anybody who listens to the show. One of the things I found in my three-year journey, because I’m really new into this, is that I – because I’m aware of myself – sometimes feel really lonely because I’ll be with other people who I feel in some ways have checked out of life. And I think Nathan Jurgenson would be an interesting person to ask about this. But I need a lot of people who I’m completely present with, who either don’t ask me to repeat myself or it’s just obvious they’re in another world.

I don’t want to say technology has made this worse or better, but I do struggle with a lot of loneliness which kind of pushes me further into the mindfulness, which becomes these paradoxical situations, like I can’t or I don’t have to be more kind to myself then I become more lonely. Nancy – or Klint – do you guys ever feel that you’re dealing with people who might have left the building years ago?

KF:       I don’t know. I think I’m kind of one of those people… I have a lot of trouble staying present that’s why I do this job. But, I mean, yes, definitely the reason I brought up people spending too much time on their phones in physical proximity of each other but not actually present was that I experienced that a lot. Either I catch myself doing it or people I’m with are doing it. There are things that Nathan said last week that I don’t necessarily agree with.

I guess, I would agree that when you’re doing that sort of thing you’re being an asshole, but you’re not. That doesn’t necessarily make somebody an asshole. It doesn’t mean that you were that person like each other any less. It just means you’ve lost a lot of discipline. I don’t know how much that has to do with technology. Like I mentioned, when we talked about Paul Miller and his experience of his internet fast, these are problems that have been around since ancient times.

CD:      I find that it’s almost like being connected online. I don’t follow a lot of people or I don’t friend a lot of people, I’m very private. But, the people I do friend, they’ve got my attention and it’s like that’s the only resource I have that I can offer to people. I can offer you my full attention and possibly a little bit of trust. But after that all bets are off and I think that, for me, I find that to be the biggest struggle of my life.

ND:      I just find the opposite. I feel that having a technological way to relate and communicate with people helps me to kind of enrich our relationships more. It might be because I’m a person who gets a little bit nervous around people, I have trouble reading faces and interacting with people really seamlessly. But having, I guess, another plane on which to share information, to be able to have an asynchronous stream of communication through texting or email, or posts. Perhaps it does atrophy some sort of in-person communication abilities but it also adds a different enriching layer of communication. So it’s kind of a lot of technologies when we give over part of ourselves and that technology takes part of our responsibility in a way we might lose some skills, like being able to navigate with a physical map. But, it also creates new ways for us to get through life.

KF:       I think that email or instant messages or text messages can be great forms of communication between two people, but what concerns me is the state they call continuous partial attention,  you’re spending time not truly paying attention to any one thing for very long because you’re multitasking which is kind of misnomer to what you’re really doing. It’s just switching your attention rapidly from one thing to another.

CD:      Nancy you talked about the idea of having another plane, a technology plane, in which you and someone else inhabited. Am I paraphrasing that correctly or can you explain to me correctly this concept of another plane?

ND:      I tend to think of it in terms of communication protocols and that we have a face to face communication, but now we have other channels with different protocols on, the frequency of interaction, the investment required for an interaction, the speed. I’ve had very meaningful conversations through technology with people where I can kind of disconnect and think about things for a while, collect my thoughts and then communicate back to them rather than face to face which sometimes can be less rich because of the demands of being able to instantaneously communicate back and forth.

CD:      Yes, I’ve had a lot of people who actually told me, “Chris, this comes easy to you because you’re an extrovert.” But I think if I would actually study parts of my life, I’m very introverted. I’m extroverted because I was conditioned to survive, not because I choose to be. You could probably argue that. But I asked about that because I just got a Romo, which is a robot thing that you plug your phone into, and one of the pieces of data that it captures is its activity. So it’s running around your house, taking pictures and messing with the animals and all sorts of stuff. It’s also tracking how busy it is, literally like a FitBit.

I created this image last year of my physical activity and then my dog wears a tag tracker which shows me his physical activity. But now I have my robot’s physical activity and a picture of my robot on the same slide that I created. It’s really interesting because I kind of realized this week that my technology, my dog and I, all share a similar plane where we at least share the collection of our data in some way that you could start to draw some parallels, so I wasn’t sure you’re also going down a metaphysical road with plane or actually talking about communication protocols. But either way is interesting. Should we do some news?

KF:       Sure.

CD:      Nancy, as a sensor designer for mindfulness, I read a story in IndustryTrap this week that the headline was “One trillion sensors embedded in humans and in machines by 2020.” Is that a FUD line or is that realistic and what are the implications of one trillion sensors in human to machines by 2020?

ND:      I think it’s fantastic and definitely happening. I mean, there are types of sensors all over the place and the technological landscapes of things are cheap, low-cost, continuously communicating sensors for presence, temperature, air quality, biometrics, everything you could want to track. I’ve always found that really interesting, like what we will do when things that we’ve always needed to pay attention to will be monitored by something else.

There was actually an article saying the act of paying attention to things, like the act of recording things, environment or biometrics is actually what creates the mindfulness. And when we start automating all of these collection processes we might lose the benefits of it. And it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about because, for me, passive tracking is the goal. I’m curious to see what comes out of it.

CD:      Klint, got any stories for me or comment on what a world with a trillion sensors looks like?

KF:       I’ll wait and see what happens. For stories this week, the MIT Tech Review ran a story about a doctor who’s doing some pretty extreme quantification in that he’s using some of the usual stuff he didn’t specify which tools or mood tracking, activity tracking, calorie counting – all of that stuff. But he’s also getting his brain scanned twice a week and getting a blood drawn once a week. He has access to this equipment, but he still has to pay for it out of pocket so he’s doing MRI twice a week, sticking his head in a giant machine or whatever, and getting all this data.

What he’s trying to do is get some information about how much our brain networks actually change over the course of a week, as well as some hormone level type of stuff in the blood. I thought that was interesting to compare with what Nancy is doing because they both involve getting some more, I guess, biologically objective information about what’s going on and correlating that to mood and some of those more subjective pieces of information.

CD:      Nancy, as a sensor designer, based on that story that Klint just talked about, what is the viability in my lifetime or let’s just say the next 20 years that we would have a device as accurate or more accurate as a functional MRI that we could wear full time?

ND:      Those are fairly complicated, and a lot of people have made plays for consumerized versions of brain scanning, usually around EEGs. There are a couple out there doing that like Neurosky and Emotiv. I think it really comes down to, well all of engineering the way I see it is “what is the easiest way to get a metric for a proxy for what you are looking for?” So, having a portable fMRI sounds very, very difficult but other things like monitoring other aspects of biometrics that might give you good proxies for your brain activity is doing, what your body is doing, what your hormone levels are, all of that I think is likely to be happening a lot. In fact we’re getting surface biometric sensors to get a little bit of information, but a lot of people are working on things that go deeper to give you more relevant information. And, yes, that’s what we’ll be seeing a lot more in the next probably two to five years.

CD:      I thought the idea of Google Glass that used that bone conductivity in some way to replicate something, I appreciate you saying that functional MRI might be too much, but I enjoy the idea of it and all the videos and all those things that are brought about functional MRIs … To me, just like staring at a mirror at yourself or looking how many Facebook likes you have, if I had access to see my brain in a functional MRI state, I wouldn’t leave the house.

ND:      It would be really cool, wouldn’t it? If we could have those hand held, I would definitely get one.

CD:      I don’t think we’ve got to worry about Facebook distracting us. We need to worry about functional MRI app because you wouldn’t get out of bed, you would just lay there and watch yourself dream. That’s kind of crazy.

Nancy, any place we can find you over the next few months? Are you speaking anywhere? Have you got any conferences? How can people find you? How can they reach out to you? All that kind of good stuff.

ND:      I’m at an early stage startup right now actually working on a new type of sensor so I’m pretty heads down on that right now. But I’m in San Francisco. My website is NancyHD.com. You can find me on Twitter. Feel free to send me email. I’ll be mostly in the Bay Area for a while, I’m always happy to talk to people and hear about anything.

CD:      Fantastic. And you’re @NancyHD on Twitter. Klint, you’re heading out, we’ve got some events coming up. Actually today and tomorrow we’ve got the National Day of Civic Hacking, which is Hack for Change! It will be over by the time this show comes out, but there’s a Twitter archive of that for taking civic data stats and allowing people to hack them. And then you’re at BDigital Global Congress and where is that?

KF:       That’s in Barcelona, I don’t know if we’ll have the podcast up by then either but I’m speaking on June 12 there about quantified work.

CD:      Yes, the podcast will be live by the time you’re there. And then, of course, I’m coming back to New York. I don’t know if you guys have heard about this Russian billionaire who wants to build avatars, but it’s called Global Future 2045. It’s in New York City at the Lincoln Center, June 15 and 16. Of course, we’ve got Buddhist Geeks in Boulder, August 16 and 19. And then, I think we could see Nathan at the American Psychological Society in August, he said. Nancy, thank you so much for being with us today. It was such a pleasure.

ND:      Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a lot of fun.

CD:      Klint, as always, it’s so great to have you to help me out with this because I don’t think it would be possible without someone like you.

KF:       Always a pleasure.

CD:      Big shoutout to our media mixing, which BrownHoundMedia, Ross Nelson, and the Mindful Cyborg’s art. Nancy, have you seen our art?

ND:      Is it the icon for the show?

CD:      Yes, yes.

ND:      Oh, it’s fantastic.

CD:      Thank you. Big shoutout to Aaron Jasinski for designing that. Thanks everybody and we’ll see you at Episode 5 hopefully (drumroll) with Ernesto Ramirez, the founder of Quantified Self. So, talk to everybody in two weeks. Thanks so much.

KF:       Bye, everybody.

Bernardo Loyola and Laura Woldenberg write:

On January 5 in El Potrero, a small town in the Mexican state of Guerrero, a man named Eusebio García Alvarado was kidnapped by a local criminal syndicate. Kidnappings are fairly common in Guerrero—the state, just south of Mexico City, is one of the poorest in the country and the site of some of the worst violence in the ongoing battle between the drug cartels and Mexican authorities. Guerrero’s largest city, Acapulco, is known to Americans as a tourist hot spot. It’s also currently the second most dangerous city in the world, according to a study released by a Mexican think tank in February.

Eusebio’s kidnapping, though, was exceptional. He served as the town commissioner of Rancho Nuevo and was a member of the community activist organization Union of Towns and Organizations of the State of Guerrero (UPOEG), and the brazenness the criminals showed in snatching him up pissed off his neighbors so much that they took matters into their own hands.

The day after Eusebio was abducted, hundreds of people from the nearby towns of Ayutla de los Libres and Tecoanapa decided that they could do a better job policing their communities than the local authorities. They grabbed whatever weapons they had—mostly hunting rifles and shotguns—set up checkpoints at entrances to their villages, and patrolled the roads in pickup trucks, often hiding their faces with ski masks and bandanas. Overnight, UPOEG transformed from an organization of advocates for better roads and infrastructure into a group of armed vigilantes operating without the endorsement of any branch of the government. The kidnappers released Eusebio that day, but UPOEG’s checkpoints and patrols didn’t disappear with his return. In fact, there was a groundswell of support. Five municipalities in the surrounding Costa Chica region followed suit and established their own militias. Soon, armed and masked citizens ensured that travelers and strangers weren’t allowed to enter any of their towns uninvited.

These militias captured 54 people whom they alleged to be involved in organized crime (including two minors and four women), imprisoning them inside a house that became an improvised jail. On January 31, the communities gathered on an outdoor basketball court in the village of El Meson to publicly try their detainees. The charges ran the gamut from kidnapping, extortion, drug trafficking, and homicide to smoking weed. More than 500 people attended, and the trial was covered by media outlets all over the world.

Full Story: Vice: The Warrior State: The People Of Guerrero, Mexico, Have Taken Justice Into Their Own Hands

(Thanks Trevor)

Weird Shift Con is upon us! The gallery opens tomorrow tonight (June 7th) and there will be an opening party. The event is at galleryHOMELAND, which is in the lobby of the Ford Building, at 2505 SE 11th Ave, Portland, OR 97202.

But the “real” conference starts on the 14th. I’m hoping to make it to the party tomorrow night and to the final day, June 17th.

Here’s the tentative schedule:

FRIDAY, JUNE 14

19:00 Todd Dickerson’s Soup Purse performance.

20:30 Zack Denfeld’s Nanoshare: Never Enough Eyeballs

21:00 Adam Flynn hosts Secret Twitter Film Club at our opening weird-reception.

SATURDAY, JUNE 15

11:00 Coffee, and an informal tour of the gallery.

12:00 First group of open sign-up Nanoshares.

12:45 Michael Reinsch performs on the subject of anthropology and human evolution.

13:30 Todd Dickerson talks about his Soup Purse performance from the previous evening.

14:15 Break

14:45 Second group of open sign-up Nanoshares.

15:30 LE Long talks about “Critical Fight Studies”.

16:15 Jeff Harris and group share their Twitter Targeting System.

17:00 Break

17:30 Third group of open sign-up Nanoshares

18:00 Suzanne Fischer does a walk and talk about powers of the mind and PEAR lab.

20:00 Center for Genomic Gastronomy hosts dinner.

22:00 Evening socializing at local watering holes.

SUNDAY, JUNE 16

12:00 Fourth group of open sign-up Nanoshares

12:45 Another presentation: TBA.

13:30 Break

14:00 Laura Allcorn leads the We’ll See Walking Company’s special “Weird Shift” tour

14:00 Other simultaneous field trip to Kelley Butte (possibly).

16:00 Fifth group of open sign-up Nanoshares

16:45 Kyle Drake explains how “We are all already cyberpunks”

17:30 Stephanie Simek performance (pending confirmation).

18:00 A performance by Weird Fiction.

After a while, most serialized webcomics start to look the same. Just about every series seems to strike a similar balance of influences from anime and western animation. But not Light Years Away, which draws inspiration from European sci-fi comics by artists like Moebius and Tanino Liberatore.

LYA is set in a world where many — perhaps most — people have cybernetic implants. But there’s a growing, violent anti-implant movement called the Puritans. The first story arc, Escape from Prison Planet, tells the story of Milo, a repeat offender doing time on an off-planet penal colony, where he ends up in the middle of a prison gang war between the Puritans and the implantees. Soon, however, he finds out there’s something bigger going on.

I talked with writer Ethan Ede and artist Adam Rosenlund — the Boise, Idaho based duo behind the series — about webcomics, the future of the series and other projects they have in the hopper.

Left: Ethan Ede Right: Adam Rosenlund

Klint Finley: First, I’m curious why you guys self-published online. Did you shop it around to publishers first?

Ethan: We self-published this story because we wanted to do it our way. Having control over our product is very important to us, that’s one of the reasons there are no ads on the site, because that is content we can’t control. At the time when we started Light Years Away we were shopping several products around to publishers and we wanted to put something out in the meantime. We actually picked LYA because it is the least like the stories we normally tell.

Adam: As well as the story being built for the format. We were kind of frustrated at the pitch process when we decided on LYA. We just wanted to get some stories out there and read, and at the time, no one was buying science fiction. The market was in contraction, and publishers were reticent to take a chance on what we were selling.

Do you think you’ll ever go to a publisher or will you continue to self-publish?

Ethan: LYA will always be self published on the web, we wouldn’t turn away a publisher that wanted to collect the stories for print though.

Adam: We have a few projects that are built specifically for print as well. We have one that we are currently working on for Dark Horse, but it doesn’t change how we approach LYA.

Anything more you can tell us about the Dark Horse project?

Adam: The story we’re doing for Dark Horse will be in Dark Horse presents. It’s not on the schedule just yet since we’re still putting it together, but probably should be out sometime later this year.

Congrats, that’s a good foot in the door. Have you had any other professional work published?

Ethan: We did a story for an anthology called CTRL.ALT.SHIFT back in 2009 but mostly we have just been working on developing our own stories. We have been offered other gigs which we turned down because they weren’t ours. Creative control is very important to us, we don’t want to do a corporate owned story. We want to make our books our way, and that takes a little more work, than showing off sample pages and getting work on a license.

Adam: I’ve done my fair share of sample pages and inventory stories, but it’s hard to get excited about those, you know? The creation is the thing for us. Breathing life into the things that spring from our imaginations so that we can share them with other people. It’s a harder road than cutting your teeth on a large profile book, but it’s more fulfilling.

I also saw Adam’s name attached to, I think, the original announcement of MonkeyBrain Comics, but I haven’t seen a specific book…

Adam: Yeah, I was originally working on a Monkeybrain story with Brandon Seifert, but both of us got a bit underwater with our respective projects and commitments, so we haven’t created our book yet.

Stepping back a bit, how did Light Years Away come about? I know you guys have also collaborated on Fat Baby — was that before or after you started LYA?

Ethan: Adam and I have been collaborating since late 2004. When we first met it was pretty clear that we basically shared one brain, and we instantly wanted to work together. We started making pitches and approaching publishers blind. Adam’s art was always strong but we didn’t have a name for ourselves and we didn’t have a full book to show off what we could do. So we decided to self publish a story. LYA was one of many scripts I had written and the one we felt best lent itself to the format. We just wanted to make comics, and with the web a publisher wasn’t a gate we necessarily had to get through anymore.

Adam: Fat Baby came about right around the same time as LYA, if I remember correctly. The thing started as an elaborate joke to make ourselves laugh. If you have an hour, we can give you the full rundown of the creation of that project. It’s a real doozy. It’s one big metagag on the comics industry, from international printing rights to creator egoes to the 4-panel gag strip format itself.

In the intro to Escape from Prison Planet, you mention European sci-fi comics being an influence. I think I can see the Tanino Liberatore influence in there. What else influenced the two of you?

Ethan: Moebius Moebius Moebius.

Adam: As a kid, I was gung ho for Jim Lee X-Men. Then when I hit pimples and pubes phase of life, I discovered Jean Giraud and Bilal and fell in love. Intercut that with a healthy love of Katsuhiro Otomo.

The thing I love most about Moebius and Otomo is the sense of place they give their scenes. Everywhere feels lived in. There’s dirt. There’s graffiti. There’s flies and old water and plugged storm drains. Even in natural surroundings, the Earth feels weathered and the surface earned through years of erosion. These elements I really took hold of and try to apply to my work, as well as a sense of motion and momentum to character movement. That I think I learned from overdosing on animation and cartoons at a formative age.

Ethan: Mezieres and Christin’s Valerian series was also a huge inspiration for me in terms of how I want the story to move. Smaller albums that told a larger tale.

The back of the print book you sell at conventions says “Futurism.” Do you do a lot of research on the technology and theory behind implants, or is this mostly imaginative?

Ethan: Most of what Adam and I do together is Hard Science fiction. That is our passion. LYA happens to be one story where we decided to play fast and loose with science and physics. But nearly every other story we have in the workings is Hard SF. We spend a lot of time world building behind the panels, figuring out things work, looking at how technology can be used and misused. Doing a lot of research.

Adam: Yeah, LYA has warp gates and sentient alien life and all kinds of fantastical stuff in it, but even then, our hard science fiction background causes us to think waaaaaaaay too long about how even the most ridiculous piece of tech in Light Years Away functions on a basic level.

Do you have a background in science or are you self-taught?

Ethan: Neither of us have formal backgrounds in science. we are both autodidacts, we both read a lot and read a lot about emerging technology and science. we are both futurists.

It’s been a while since the site has updated — when can we expect new material?

Ethan: At the moment we are working very hard on this project for DHP but after that is wrapped we plan on a website redesign and the launch of book two of LYA. It makes us bad webcomicers, but Adam and I care less about an update schedule and more about the archives, we want the total book to be quality and that sometimes means we are slower and don’t keep as regular a schedule.

Adam: That’s the big bummer of where we’re at. It’s just the two of us. I only have one brain and two arms, and one of the arms is functionally useless in creating art. It’s basically there to hold the t-square steady. So updates are light when we have more pressing projects to work on unfortunately. But going forward, we really don’t want to sacrifice quality for the sake of a steady update. Book 2 is going to be GORGEOUS. Some of the pages in book one make me shake my head and wish I could re do it, so I promised myself that going forward, LYA will be as well drawn as any project we do for a publisher.

Outside of comics, what sort of creative projects are you two involved with? I know Ethan has a band, for example.

Ethan: Yeah we both play music, I’ve been playing in bands since I was 15. I also make auto-bio comics. We have made short films, and Adam does a lot of design work for bands. I’ve also designed T-shirts and things for a few local bands here in Boise. Basically we try to always keep our hands moving.

Adam: Yeah, I wear a lot of hats. I do Illustration work on the side in addition to my day job as a senior graphic designer for a large web company. I’ve done work for Playboy and various papers and magazines around the world.

In To Views interviewed Meredith Yayanos, the editor/founder of the late great Coilhouse magazine and one-half of the chamber music duo The Parlour Trick:

What do you see as the main strengths and weaknesses of the medium you work in?

The allure of wordplay, yum yum. There’s that delicious brainmeat frission that happens when you read or craft just the right turn of phrase. But the medium has its weaknesses, too, in that words… well, they fail. A lot. Words fail me every day. All the time. Because they put me at a remove from more atavistic sensations, connections, communications. Which is why I love music so much– the ribcage-expanding, gut-and-capillary level reaction it can trigger. Music is my magick. Also, the visual resonance of art and design: when I lean both my body and my brain into a piece of music… I see landscapes and I feel textures. And then that’s when the most unfailing words come– stories that have steeped in sounds and images.

How has technology impacted upon the work you do?

Immensely. In too many ways to count. Coilhouse Magazine couldn’t have existed without the global network we all built together online, and the kinship that sprang up from it. More generally, I’d say that many of the most wonderful collaborators I’ve worked with, across multiple mediums, are thanks to BBSs and chat rooms, and later on, social networking sites like Livejournal, Twitter, Tumblr. Every day, no matter where I am in the world, I can interface with authors, fashion photographers, editors, musicians, and filmmakers… all thousands of miles away. With a good pair of headphones and an Apogee One, I can (and have) recorded full-length film scores on my laptop in the midst of traveling internationally. I’m about to email this interview to you while I’m at ten-thousand feet in an airplane. I have cherished loved ones that I’ve never met face to face, and it’s a non-issue, because we’ve found ways to share our art. This world, and my subsequent work, is largely post-geographical, and I find that miraculous.

Full Story: In To Views: Meredith Yayanos

I hadn’t realized it, but the new Parlour Trick album is available on Bandcamp.