Sea Urchins

I don't really remember where this blog was supposed to go. I didn't get farther than the title during my first try, but now that I'm here, I think I'll keep it.

Politics. Culture. Dogs.

We define ourselves, and yet we are also defined by the people around us. We are judged by and compared to those we choose to surround ourselves with.

And we are brought to a dividing line. Undefined. Where do we cross this amorphous representation of society? Perhaps, grey goo (I do not mean Grace) is a better way to describe it.

Ribofunk brings an interesting angle to the discussion, because it introduces a world where nanotechnology has enabled us to change and create our bodies to whatever we want. Imagine stores where you can custom order a fin or a tail or a carapace.

Thus then, our identities, our sense of self and how we portray that to the world is greatly enhanced. The kind of information you put on your Facebook/MySpace/etc. profiles can be shown literally on your profile, much like we often use fashion to represent our beliefs.

And further then, I think Ribofunk pushes us to look at this. Look at this definition of self and of identity and then look at what it means to be human.

How human is human? One part in ten? More than half? The splices, DeFilippo introduces, what rights do they have? At what point do we draw the line? More amorphous ambiguity: That gray area between the extremes.

And if they are not human, what are they? As neither one nor the other, they in effect are something else, something new. As far as I've seen, they defy expectations by exactly living up to them. They are designed, the ultimate accessory, not so much tailored and groomed as they are created for the express purpose of whatever they were designed to do.

So to take this back to the culture/politics debate, aren't we debating this right now in our society? What is humanity? What is a family? What rights do we accord certain peoples who are different than we are?

And the cultural aspect, what we each individually believe has increasingly become a political issue as we are forcing our elected leaders to agree or disagree and essentially choose a side in so many social issues. We now base many of our political decisions on what we believe socially.

As these worlds collide, we approach another kind of singularity. Not the one of technological expansion, but the one of convergence. Our lives are becoming more and more interrelated too each other and to ourselves.